Typing your Facebook account information is like breathing these days, a sort of set-it-and-forget-it mechanism for all the apps and services you use most. But some of us think twice before using our Facebook accounts to log into third-party sites. After all, it wasn't so long ago that the embarrassing articles you…er, your friends read and videos they watched online mysteriously landed on Facebook without permission.
So the social network on Thursday took steps to make Facebook Login—the official name for using your Facebook account to log in to other sites—more secure. Now apps have to separately ask you for permission to share your activity to Facebook. Some apps made sharing part of using the app—that's no longer allowed. If you don't give the app permission to post to Facebook, you can still log in.
FacebookYou'll now see a separate permissions screen in apps that use Facebook Login.
This change is huge. More than 80 percent of the 100 top-grossing iOS apps use Facebook Login, and 62 of the top 100 in Google Play use it. But Facebook users are still wary of sharing their data with other services. According to December 2012 data from social-login company Gigya, about half of users surveyed said they would skip social logins rather than risk giving their personal information to a third-party service or app.
Now that Facebook has separated the login process from sharing permissions, people might be less hesitant to adopt their Facebook account as their single sign-on of choice. According to Facebook, 80 percent of people who use the social network to log in to apps accept the sharing permissions—but making those expectations clearer goes a long way to keeping users happy.
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