In an effort to make it easy for the users to control what kind of data to be shared in order for the applications to work, Facebook has made an important change by launching the simplified data-sharing permission. Beginning from July this year, users will get a single dialog box explaining all of the data a third-party application is requesting before they install it.

“These improvements reflect two core Facebook beliefs: first, your data belongs to you; second, it should be easy to control what you share,” said Facebook CTO Bret Taylor in a blog posting. “If at any point you ask a developer to remove the data you’ve granted them access to, we require that that they delete this information.”

With this change, it represented an important step for Facebook to appease some of the critics of its privacy practices it encountered most recently. In terms of user experience, a single dialog box has no doubt made the users’ life more easier and less confusing when they installing an application. However, on the other hand, this might cause certain group of users making a thoughtlessly mistake when the “Allow” button is highlighted by default.

Could this little and simplified data-sharing control lead to a more privacy risks? Well, only time can tell.

And also, this is my next question – is Facebook going to update its term of use, specifically the clause “When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application?“

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.

In an effort to help Facebook users finding out whether or not there is a need for us to review our privacy settings, an app called “Privacy Check” has been developed by rabidgremlin.com.

To use it is very simple, just log on with your Facebook credentials, you’ll get your privacy score.

Apparently, there are three colors appeared on your score sheet. Red color is indicated that you are exposing lots of your private information, yellow is a symbol that your profile information is being locked down whereas green color shows the particular information is hidden from Web sites and the public.

Ironically, the site warns that a Facebook user can’t score a perfect 21 out of 21 points. Additionally, the best score one likely to achieve is 15/21. On a side note, the more friends you have, or you expose lot of your profile information, such as submitted the like clicks, you’ll get a low score.

So, what’s your privacy score?

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I hate when someone is looking/checking my profile and I don’t even know about this!!!

But this time, you’re not alone. Likewise, Facebook also hate it, and hence they blocked the applications that offered users a unique feature to see who is viewing their profiles. Simply not because of the emotional feelings of hate, it was believed that most of the applications that offered this feature are malicious.

According to Rik Ferguson, a Senior Security Consultant at Trend Micro, he has already identified 25 different copies of the same malicious app but using different monikers such as peeppeep-pro, profile-check-online and stalk-my-profile on Facebook.

In fact, Facebook Wall has already seen a number of these malicious apps that promise users to see who has been viewing their profiles. In one such scam samples, users are being invited to try these malicious apps by offering a photo montage of their contacts. Nevertheless, none of these apps work as they claimed except profit the creators behind these apps by earning them the advertisement revenues.

While this may be good news, Facebook was quick to block these malicious apps. In a statement, Facebook said: “Don’t believe any application that claim they can show you who’s viewing your profile or photo. They can’t.”

From now on, when you checking out the similar apps that claimed to allow users to see who is viewing their profiles. Either it has been blocked, or it is an empty page.

Examples are as follows:

1) Who is checking now

http://apps.facebook.com/who-is-checking-now/

2) Who is checking my profile?

http://apps.facebook.com/yourprofile/

However, it’s ironic that the profile stalker app is still somewhere existed on Facebook, at the time of my writing. And thus, users are advised “not to” install any app that offered the aforementioned feature in order to secure their accounts from being attacks related to this scam.

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.

According to Facebook’s official blog, Facebook has rolled out a wider variety of access levels to the users as they publish any new story to their Walls.

Different types of privacy settings has thus be available for the users when they want to post new story or content via the third-party Facebook apps. For instance, after a user is getting a result from participated to a Facebook app, if he / she want to publish the findings to the Wall including friends’ Walls, he / she can now select and apply different privacy setting on a case by case basis.

As shown in the below picture, few of the privacy controls such as share information to everyone, friends of friends or only friends and even any customization to be made are available from now on.

Basically, this little privacy change can be viewed as being about making things easier for users. While we do not know how many users have really dive in and taking time to alter the default privacy controls as found on the privacy settings page (Facebook has amounted to 400 million users up to date), these new privacy controls allow users to start customize privacy for each piece of content they share on Facebook provided that they did not go through any “Posts by Me” setting on the privacy settings page.

Additionally, these privacy controls will also be applied to external Web sites that linked to Facebook via Facebook Connect and Facebook’s mobile version. Also, be prepared that you will start to receive emails directly from the Facebook apps, although many users have no problem sharing their email addresses on Facebook or even on the Web.

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.

Keep in mind that if you develop an app that violate the Facebook Terms of Service or create a group that spread false rumors, that app/group will be blocked by Facebook.

Most recently, Facebook has blocked few groups / apps, even though the group / app is not a standard money mule scam.

1) The original group of I WONT LET FACEBOOK CHARGE ME £4.99 A MONTH FROM JULY 1ST 2010

Visiting the URL of the aforesaid Facebook group, i.e. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=387113115536&ref=nf, it will be redirected back to Facebook home page. Without any doubt, it was blocked.

However, in reality, there is no such plan to be initiated by Facebook pertaining to the monthly charge. But you wonder there are still some users who believed Facebook is going to do it. Check this new group I WONT LET FACEBOOK CHARGE ME £14.99 A MONTH FROM JULY 1ST 2010, there are more than 8,000 users that joined the group. Additionally, searching for “Facebook charges July 2010″ on search engines lead to some fake blog entries as well.

2) Defriended, an Apple’s app that tells you who have defriended you has also been blocked by Facebook, according to a tweet posted recently. Well, this app helps users to track the defrienders by scanning the Facebook friends list each time he/she opens up the Facebook account seemed to be violated the Facebook terms as well.

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.