I went to CMU and am a software engineer at Facebook.

Out of curiosity, why do you think that having an Ivy League degree is necessary? Is there anything we did to convey that impression, or anything we can do to combat it preemptively?

CMU is one of the best schools for CS so...

Well, I just have noticed that many people have gone to Stanford or Harvard, you know big name schools. I don't have hard data, but thanks for the comment :)

Just as a quick note, Stanford isn't an Ivy. The ivies are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Penn, and Yale.

Thrift isn't used on the mobile apps, it is meant (and used for) communication between different services in their backend.

You can always remove Z later, but for the initial authentication I think you do have to grant all the permissions it asks for.

If you don't want to share anything, then don't use the app. Nothing is automatically sharing unless you tell it to. Nothing can magically share the fact that you read a Techcrunch article unless you install a "Techcrunch Reader" app or something, in which case it would have to ask your permission to share that information. If you didn't like it, you can remove that permission. For example, here's the relevant permission from the Washington post app:

Add app activity to your timeline Washington Post Social Reader may publish your app activity to your timeline.

If you don't want the app to automatically publish something, then just x out that permission.

The amount of stuff that is starting to require Facebook Connect or access to Facebook is what worries me. Most of them ask for every single permission under the world and only ask me once.

For example, Spotify, it is practically neutered unless you connect it to Facebook, but as soon as it is connected to Facebook it can send data to Facebook as me.

There was an app not too long ago that required Facebook to login, it too asked for those permissions. Now it can without my permission start sharing content based upon actions in the webapp. I am not okay with that.

First of all, when I go to spotify and "log in with facebook". The site sends me to a facebook page asking me to "log in to spotify" with my facebook. On this page, it specifically says "This app will not add activity to your Timeline." In other words, the basic spotify login with facebook isn't social. If you "Connect" your spotify account to facebook, it pops up a permission dialog asking you for various types of access. This is the social portion. Don't do this if you are concerned.

The second part of the application is the social part. Again, if you don't trust an application you can always go to your app settings page on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications), select the application you are worried about and deny specific items that you don't want the app to have access to.

If you "x" out too many things, you might cripple the application, but that's the way it works.

I don't want to first opt-in to something and LATER have to deny it those permissions. I want to deny it those permissions and only give it some permissions to start with.

How much damage would it be possible to do in the 3 - 4 minutes it will take me to go back to Facebook, go to my account settings, look at my app settings, find the app in the huge list, and then start removing permissions I don't want to grant it?

After that I have to go through the effort to find the post content in my timeline, one by one delete the items and hope that my friends have not yet seen the content (and it being posted to the ticker makes that unlikely...)

My point was that most pages hopefully will have two levels (like spotify). One to log in and do basic things, and the second level a social one.

So, if you don't do the second part, you should be fine?

Also, I personally would be careful in installing apps. This goes for any application (not just facebook). If you trust an app, go ahead, if not, just avoid it. This is going to be different for different people.

Edit: Ok, I think I see your point. You don't want an app to ask for too many permissions right off the bat and then you having to go back and remove them.

Again, I think this is going to be developer and users driven. The more people ask for apps to start off with minimal permissions the developers will have to comply. Does that make sense?

Why should this be developer and user driven? Facebook on their permission page when I first visit it should be more than capable in allowing me to change what permissions are given.

If they can retroactively remove them, they should be able to do so before I even grant any permissions.

Give me two columns, one "Allow" and one "Disallow" and I can drag the permissions to the columns as I see fit. Can an app give me a template or ask for certain permissions by default, yes, absolutely, but let me change them.

This is an excellent point, let me pass that on to the platform permissions people.

If I remember correctly,they sort of had that earlier, then it was removed to make apps powerful and sign ups easier!

I think it has to re-ask you for new permissions, it doesn't get any permissions 'grandfathered' in. But yeah, the fact that many apps ask for too-many permissions is a pain :/ Means I always have to go back and remove the permissions I don't want, and hope I don't forget.

How is Spotify "neutered" without Facebook? I've never connected it to Facebook and everything works fine for me, including sharing playlists with other users.

Reportedly the Washington Post reader gleefully designs around the Facebook opt-outs.

If you have your privacy setting in Facebook on "only me," then what you read within the app will not go to Timeline or be seen by friends outside of the app. However, _inside the app_ friends who have also downloaded Social Reader _will_ be able to see what you’ve read http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/09/23/relax-f...

If that isn't a violation of the spirit of Facebook's privacy settings, I don't know what is.

Of course it's been possible to build newsreaders that spy on people's browsing habits and share them with Facebook friends (or anyone else) since the early days of the Facebook API, but this particular app is promoted by Facebook themselves as a flagship for the way new passive sharing apps should be.

I rarely use my FB account and never install apps or post anything on it, just use it to follow a couple of friends/family. I've got all privacy settings (that I can find) set to the most restrictive settings.

I checked the list of "authorized" apps from the post upstream (https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications) and there were 4 things in the list (Bing, Pandora, Yelp and one other that I'm forgetting) none of which I'd ever explicitly authorized for facebook access. If I ever use OAuth for anything, I use my twitter account, never facebook.

Any idea how those got in there, and what setting I can use to never let them back in?

Who the fuck is Jerry? My daddy taught me never to trust name droppers.

Also, lol, you read the 251 wiki.

Everyone at CMU knows who Jerry is.

For what I read, those were the course notes.

Those weren't the course notes. That's a wiki for (and from) students and TA's, mostly. One semester's course notes are here:https://colormygraph.ugrad.cs.cmu.edu/anupam/

The lecture that discusses finite probability distributions is at: https://colormygraph.ugrad.cs.cmu.edu/site_media/static//cou...