There has been a great deal of discussion across the Web pertaining to the Facebook security issues. Yet, this week Facebook has taken another measurement whereby app developers are required to verify their accounts before they can create new app.

According to the developer’s forum thread, the account verification is done either through mobile phone confirmation or adding a credit card to the developer account. Also, the reason behind this security step is to preserve the “integrity of the Facebook platform.”

Now, a question is being asked, “Do you think that the cyber criminals are likely to be deterred simply by having to provide a valid cell phone number or credit card?”

Well. This reminds me a lot of the security solution launched in July 2009 whereby Facebook asked the victims of compromised accounts to regaining access to the accounts simply by walking through a 5-step quick verification process. Furthermore, this verification process also applied to the Facebook new users if they want to obtain their personal usernames.

In fact, there is still an issue for some users whose country is not U.S. and they are having problems in receiving the sms confirmation code. On a side note, typing “facebook mobile confirmation code” on Google search engine, its search assistant will help you to complete the following sentence, i.e. not receiving facebook mobile confirmation code.

Ironically, a genuine Facebook user is afraid to verify his / her own account whereas cyber criminals are not since they are the one who send out the fake account verification emails. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that as the genuine group of users, we hate waiting for the confirmation code or being hooked by “phishing” scam. We came across the following messages before:

“We suspect an unauthorized transaction on your account. To ensure that your account is not compromised, please click the link below and confirm your identity.”

“During our regular verification of accounts, we couldn’t verify your information. Please click here to update and verify your information.”

And thus, we shouldn’t be asked to “update,” “validate,” “verify,” or “confirm” account information anymore.

Starting from March 1st this year, Facebook will no longer deliver application notifications and will discontinue support for notifications.send, according to its official Facebook developers blog.

In other words, Facebook is set to become a much quiet place, despite the fact that they have more than 400 million users up to-date. Clearly, the loss of this communication channel mean that now the app developers must find new way such as to ask users for their email addresses, or rely more on Counters or News (in the dashboards) in order to drive up the apps’ traffic as well as getting new users for their apps.

In fact, discontinue support for notifications.send is not the first change that Facebook made on its communication channels, we’ve gathered up a list of app notification changes over the years as below.

December 2007 – Facebook has increased its mechanism of notification email feature from (1) email to a user per day to (5) emails to a user per day.

February 2008 – Facebook launched feedback-based allocations for notifications. Also, applications will no longer have a static upper limit of 40 notifications per user per day.

May 2009 – Facebook launched immediate notifications pop-up alerts.

August 2009 – Facebook released new Notifications API that allows developers to retrieve users’ notifications within their applications.

Early 2010 – Facebook removed Requests (with invite parameter set as “false”) in its communication channels.

January 2010 – Facebook is allowing developers to directly communicate with their users via emails.

Some said this year 2010 is the year of spam, as the networking gurus at Cisco predicted that worldwide spam volumes will increase by 30 or 40 percent over 2009 levels; see the PDF report here.

Apart from simply reading the report or get ready to the spamming challenges, Facebook has announced that they have fixed one of the bugs spotted, although it was not the most notorious spam attacks like Koobface. This bug namely as “Unnamed App” and the past days many Facebook users have even posted their status updates to make other users aware about it.

A latest update, Facebook officials told CNN that the bug wasn’t harmful and is fixed. Facebook spokesperson Malorie Lucich said that the bug was fixed by January 27 afternoon.

“Due to a small bug, an application listed as “Unnamed App” appeared in some users’ Applications Settings. No user accounts or data were lost or damaged,” according to Lucich.

Most Facebook users don’t really care about the potential risks of Facebook quizzes that can collect and store the answers they give when they’re taking the quizzes; they also cannot stop these kinds of quizzes from collecting the information in their profiles – and even information from their friends’ profiles.

In order to prove the above risks come not as a total surprise, the ACLU of Northern California has developed a Facebook quiz of its own to illustrate how quizzes that may seem “perfectly harmless” can access to a wide array of your personal information, though in the first place, you’re wondering the Facebook policies has always in place to reassure the protection of user data.

The Facebook app, i.e. a quiz entitled, “What Do Facebook Quizzes Know About You?” delivers its answer by showing you how much do the quizzes you take really learn about you on Facebook.

According to ACLU, more than 8,000 participants have taken this quiz since it was quietly released a few days ago. In addition, the group hopes to prompt Facebook to upgrade its privacy default settings for its users, now amounting more than 250 million.

Chris Conley, a technology fellow with the ACLU, finds a probable reason for developing this Facebook quiz, said “We wanted to use Facebook itself to show how all these quiz creators have access to personal information. It is difficult to know how third-party app developers use the data, which can be collected and sold for marketing and advertising campaigns. Private investigators and political entities are known to create dossiers using technologies that automatically scour the Web. An individual bombarded by spam, for example, may have been targeted because of an affiliation posted on Facebook. There is no way to know.”

However, ACLU acknowledged the irony of its approach: “We know it’s a little weird to warn you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz – but at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we’re committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?”

To know more about the generic quiz results and what are the comments of ACLU toward it, there is an explanation page posted by ACLU.

I just came across an article that entitled, “Pizza Hut To Spam Facebook Users.” To me, this article is quite interesting, especially it talked about when a user installs the Pizza Hut Facebook application called Pizza Hut Interface, whenever she ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut through this application in Facebook, her friends would get to know which pizza she ordered through a tiny notification appeared on their Facebook profiles.

Is this an act of Facebook application spam? How about the notification itself offers nothing about your own interest, for example, XXX accepted your friend request, or XXX wrote on your Wall, but something that do with Pizza Hut products, a food that it might not suit your taste in the first place.

At the time of my writing, there are over 600 monthly active users for this application. If you do not want your Facebook friends to know which type of pizza you’ve ordered, you simply can order it over the phone, don’t install this application.