Should you install “fun and entertaining” Facebook apps?

We discuss Facebook apps, and why you should be wary of giving certain apps permission to install on your account.

For many users, Facebook apps are a popular part of the social networking experience. They can plug into your Facebook account, and can provide hours of entertainment, or just make your online world a lot easier. Many are created by trusted developers, such as the popular Zynga apps (Mafia Wars, Farmville) or from third party sites like YouTube, Spotify or TripAdvisor.

Others, however, are not so reputable, but they can be enticing just the same. Apps like “who’s your soulmate?“, “what celebrity do you look like?“, or “who’s your celebrity crush?”

These are but just a few apps that have been prolifically used on Facebook recently. Some simply analyse your activity on Facebook and present it to you in a “fun” way (e.g. the person you’ve interacted with the most is your “best friend on Facebook“) while others just make up stuff based on the arbitrary information you pass to them (e.g. your name means you have a “bright spark” personality.)

Most people would describe these apps as trashy, light-hearted fun and an innocent way to procrastinate on the Internet.

Who is ‘Captain Quizz’ and do you trust him with your account information?

But there can be a darker side to these apps that we need to be aware of. The reality is that just about anyone can develop a Facebook app, even scammers. Facebook do not vet developers, meaning anyone with the technical ability can create one. Don’t assume because it’s a Facebook app that its developed or endorsed by Facebook. That’s just not the case.

It is important to remember that each time you install a Facebook app, you give it access to certain information about you, as well as the ability to perform certain actions on your account. This means we’re essentially handing people we don’t know potentially valuable information about us, and we really should be asking ourselves if we trust these people to use that information responsibly.

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A big problem is that lots of “entertaining” apps provide only a few minutes entertainment as you find out who “your soulmate” is, but most users don’t remove the Facebook app from their accounts. It just stays there laying dormant, with constant access to the Facebook user’s personal information and Facebook account that it was granted when installed.

When trashy “entertaining” apps go viral, we inevitably get a lot of questions about them. And the reality is that plenty of these apps should never have been installed by anyone. We recommend asking yourself the following questions before installing the latest “entertaining” app on your account…

Is the Facebook app asking for a lot of personal information it doesn’t need?

You can see what permissions a Facebook app will be granted access to just before you hit the install button. Most of these light-hearted apps really have no need to access a great deal of personal information about you, especially ones that purport to “reveal your true nickname” or something equally as trivial, since we all understand that these apps are essentially just generating random, arbitrary information.

If the app seems to be asking for more permissions than it needs, this should be a red flag.

Do I trust the developer?

Do you know who developed the Facebook app? Do you trust them? If the app is asking for lots of permissions, it is important that we either trust the developer or we can perform our online due diligence to ensure they are trustworthy. It is important not to hand over copious amounts of personal information about us to people that we do not know since they can use our information against us or even sell it on to third party companies.

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Is the Facebook App going to give me useful or accurate information?

Whilst we don’t want to burst any bubbles here, a Facebook app can’t tell you what sort of personality you have, or how you’re going to die, or your celebrity soulmate or your future partners name. It also can’t tell you who stalks your profile or who has blocked you.

So why give the people who developed the app access to your potentially invaluable personal information? The trade-off isn’t fair.

Does the developer have a privacy policy?

Do you know what the Facebook developer plans to do with your personal information? We can never really know if a developer will stick to what they claim in their privacy policy, especially if we don’t trust them, but it is worth reading them any way.

If you cannot answer any of these questions satisfactory, then we really need to ask ourselves whether installing the app is worth the risk. After all, most of these entertaining-trashy apps simply provide arbitrary information for a few moments of light-hearted interest and then we don’t think about them again.

But in the mean time, many of these developers are accumulating an incredibly valuable treasure trove of personal information that can be used for identity theft, sold off to marketing companies or used to target you with spam. Not all of these Facebook developers are nefarious, but unless you can identify a developer as legitimate, it is best to err on the side of caution.

And if you do install an app from someone you don’t trust, remember to remove the app from your account!