What private data you share if you use an app or game on Facebook
Whenever we connect an app or game to our Facebook profile, to log in automatically without entering our e-mail address and password, we are giving the developer of that app the opportunity to do a lot of our own things.
In fact, all apps connected to Facebook can access a fair amount of data relating to our activity on Facebook. Data that, to tell the truth, would not serve the app to work at all, but that the developer asks us to give him for a very simple reason: he monetizes them by selling them anonymously. As usual, if the product or service is free, then you are the product. However, there is a way to know how much and what data an app can read and, consequently, understand if it reads too much. And, if it does, then it’s a good idea to disconnect it from Facebook to protect our privacy. The most convenient way to control what personal data we share with each app is to access our Facebook profile via a web browser.
How to check data shared with apps on Facebook
From our Facebook profile, we can control what data each app accesses by clicking on the triangle icon, at the top right, and then clicking on Settings and privacy> Settings. Here we will have to select Apps and websites from the menu on the left. We will see the list of apps that have access to our profile and all the data they can read. Let’s check them one by one looking for something strange: a video game wants to access our photos and videos? It’s not the case. Does a photo editing app want to know where we geolocate ourselves on Facebook? And why should he know?
Active expired and removed apps
All the apps that have access to our Facebook profile are classified and grouped into three large groups by the social network: active, expired and removed. The app active are those that may require the information we have chosen to share. Expired ones are apps that we haven’t used for at least 90 days and that Facebook basically pauses: they can access the information we shared previously, but they can no longer access the most recent information. Finally, the removed apps are the history of all the apps that we have used in the past and then disconnected from Facebook. They can access the information that we have published until we have removed it.
