The Facebook privacy subterfuge

Facebook made a number of announcements this last week at its f8 event, some of which are fairly misleading and have given many in the media the false impression that Facebook is serious about your privacy. One new feature is particularly misleading: Anonymous Login. This is how Facebook describes Anonymous Login:

Anonymous Login lets people log in to apps so they don’t have to remember usernames and passwords, but it doesn’t share personal information from Facebook. People can decide later if they want to share any additional information, once they understand more about the app.

On the one hand, this could be a useful feature for Facebook users who are interested in using their Facebook profile to login to apps but this is a fairly clever piece of misdirection and it relies on a number of assumptions. The first assumption is that users are inclined to use their Facebook profiles to login to apps they are using and wouldn’t use, say, another social profile or complete separate username and password.

Its not clear whether this feature limits how your experience of the app is customised based on your Facebook profile data. My guess is that the anonymity Facebook promises is fairly limited to not disclosing your name and contact details. Of course, Facebook knows exactly who you are and will still have the benefit of insight into your activities using these apps even though the apps themselves have limited information about you. It’s not particularly clear just how much of your profile data remains hidden but what is clear is a big push to have developers adopt Facebook logins as a key identity platform.

Why would developers do this? For one thing, characterising the login as “anonymous” and all about privacy, integrating Facebook logins with the Anonymous Login feature suggests that developers are deeply concerned about users’ privacy. Users may believe that this feature somehow anonymises them where it counts and it doesn’t. Users tend not to be concerned that Facebook’s login is leaky and somehow passes more of their information to 3rd party providers. Rather, users are generally concerned that Facebook knows so much about them and may use this data in ways they hadn’t anticipated.

The Anonymous Login feature may give developers a relatively guilt-free Facebook integration option to streamline Facebook users’ adoption of their apps but it ultimately gives Facebook even more insight into what users are doing with apps Facebook previously wouldn’t have known much about. If Facebook users were concerned about their privacy before Anonymous Login, they would be more concerned now.