Big Facebook privacy void: Controls on Connect

From CNET News.com: Privacy on Facebook has been front and center this month as the company has rolled out the controversial revamp of its user privacy settings. One thing that's thankfully stayed intact has been the ability to restrict the third-party applications on your profile to specific "lists" of friends--so that you can, for example, block your Mafia Wars activity from everyone who's not on your "People Who Know About My Mafia Wars Addiction" list.

But for stuff on [my] profile that was published through Facebook Connect rather than an app "built" on the platform, this is not the case. For some reason, information published to Facebook through Facebook Connect does not have any privacy controls attached to it, so it's either available to everybody or nobody.

To backtrack a little bit, Facebook first rolled out developer-created applications in the summer of 2007, and then a year later introduced Facebook Connect, which lets users log into third-party sites (and iPhone apps) from their Facebook profiles and publish content back to Facebook.

Facebook Connect apps that publish content back to Facebook profiles (which have additional permissions from those that simply let you log in with your Facebook ID) are grouped alongside the original variety of platform apps in Facebook's "Application Settings" privacy controls section. But the Connect apps don't have a "Profile" tab in their settings, because there isn't an embedded "box" for the app--just what shows up in your News Feed.

"We are evaluating adding post-level privacy settings for stories created through external developers, but for the time being, there is currently no difference between the settings for applications and Facebook Connect activities," Facebook representative Malorie Lucich told CNET via e-mail. "So, while you can control who sees the applications living in your profile boxes and application tabs, you currently cannot granularly control who sees your application activity in your feed."

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