I know this is a relatively open-ended question, but since facebook doesn't have any specific developer support forums themselves, I'm wondering if anyone has any advice here --
I'm building an app that uses a pre-authenticated proxy server to pull public page/page-event data from a predefined set of pages. Since there will be no need for a user login (or there will be just a single personal account's auth token tied to the proxy), I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to go about writing a privacy policy (requirement now for apps).
I know I need Page Public Content Access but the legal-speak required for a privacy policy about how to handle users' data and so on is tripping me up, since I won't be collecting any. It's actually an important part of the app that no login is required.
My question specifically being: a request for resources that can aid me in writing a privacy policy that will be approved, for a scenario that users' data is not actually ever supposed to be a part of the app.
Help, please, thank you!
Related
Facebook provides an OAuth authentication system for third-party apps but they appear to not provide any fine-grained user management capabilities.
This seems like a security problem. I need to be able to:
Disable delete unused accounts
Disable or delete abusive users
White list users for early access to a new app.
But AFAICT FB provides no tool to do this.
I can probably hook of of the OAuth ID and put an entry in my database for the first two requirements, but I can't figure out how to white list Facebook users.
Google is unhelpful because all the results are about let users manage applications their user account is attached to, and nothing about allowing apps to manage what user accounts they are attached to...
Usually is a bad idea to delete or disable unused accounts, because maybe user was inactive for a long time, this doesn't mean the user deleted or disabled his account.
On the other hand, you can't avoid malicious users join your app via facebook authentication. What you can do is to detect suspicious activities with your own implementation (after Facebook accept them to join your app), and suspend, block or disable those accounts on the server (blacklisting them), after the user has joined client-side and sent the required access-token (optionally request the ID) trying to be accepted by the server.
Whitelisting users may depend on the requirements of your application, you can check profiles data and reject those that doesn't provide the requirements that your app needs (remember to ask the user for the fields that your app requires, like public profile, pictures, etc; these must be accepted by the user before signing in).
Here's how you white list users for an app on Facebook:
Keep the app in Development mode
Add users from your friend network in the Testers role
When you are comfortable, open your application to the world.
AFAICT you cannot white list when your app is published, but that's the point of publishing. Also the whitelist is not a request-grant method, it's invite only.
The other requirement to delete or disable users you must handle yourself in your database. You would tie the user's status to the FB's unique ID.
Update: It appears that when there's no API or token, software seems to simply ask the user for their account credentials, and probably has to store this information. I guess it can't be a huge security risk, since people are willing to share this information with apps like Mint:
So, my conclusion is that it is OK to ask users for credentials to other services if they can be secured safely and the user desires the service provided.
Many, many apps use others apps such as Facebook in order to get data from it, usually to verify the user is real and to get relevant profile data (e.g. a dating app would want age, gender, etc.).
When using such an app, I do not have to enter in my Facebook credentials. The app simply opens up my Facebook/asks for permission to access it, and voila it's done.
There seems to be a lot of documentation for well known companies like Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal on how to do this.
But how is it done for an arbitrary website that requires a user/profile, e.g. this website: http://ae.com/web/index.jsp
Unsurprisingly, if I google for FaceBook, there's a heap of resources, and even it's own dedicated tag (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens).
However, if I start googling for American Eagle, e.g. "https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=american+eagle+access+token&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8", I get nothing relevant at all.
If I understand your question right, that you want to enable facebook login for your website,
you still need to create a facebook app. then use the access tokens in your website. so when user clicks on login with facebook, the app will be asking for permissions and finally you will get the access token and you can use that in your site to log in.
Whenever a permission error occurs on facebook, developers are forced to 1. identify that this is actually happening, 2. ask the user to re-login.
This is a terrible user experience, and I'm surprised that Facebook even allows it to exist.
Is there any way to easily add a permission to a session? If not, are there any ways to make this easier?
So let's put it this way:
I authorized your app with only basic access (no permissions, perms or scope).
You automatically added the email permission without my permission
I started receiving emails (spamming?) from you which is the worst scenario OR
You have simply gained access to my email!
Facebook respects user privacy (actually it's a primary goal) and while they are trying to provide developers with the best technologies, methods and APIs to maintain the best experience there are things they can't avoid.
Each action your application want to make to the user OR on his behalf must be approved by the user and it should be clearly stated when the user approves it.
I've chosen the email permission for a purpose here, because the user may choose NOT to share his personal email with you directly (in which case Facebook will give you a proxied email). This is how far Facebook is thinking and trying to keep the user trust on them (before you!)
Just a small note, handling (any) API provider errors and adopting it's behavior is part of your job. And trust me, Facebook users have been installing millions of apps for years now and they are used to this behavior.
So try making your application as engaging as possible, make use of the Graph API, Social Plugins and Channels. And you'll perform just fine.
I've been trying to figure out a way to have my iframe Facebook app (built in PHP) work without requiring separate authentication methods. I am already logged into Facebook, but for some reason I still see all these Oauth notices from the example in the PHP SDK.
The only data I need is publicly available even without them "adding" my app. I am looking to collect their Facebook ID (since this is a contest, we need a unique ID for tracking), their name and (optionally) their email address as well.
The problem is, I cannot use the API to fetch the public information unless I already know their Facebook username. Any ideas on how I might be able to get their logged-in username or public handle so I can then fetch the rest of the information?
For whatever reason, Oauth is driving me completely insane with Facebook today.
Sidenote:
I did manage to technically get the Javascript SDK operational, which fed some information to PHP for use. The only issue there is that once I login, I don't see the data. If I refresh...then it shows up. Unsure why the refresh is required, as I wouldn't expect a user to actually have to hit refresh in order to proceed with the app.
I guess you are a bit confused here, Facebook will NOT share the username, id, full name or email without the user explicitly authorizing/allowing your application (and in the case of the email, requesting the email permission!).
Read the official Canvas Tutorial for more information:
In order to gain access to all the user information available to your
app by default (like the user's Facebook ID), the user must authorize
your app.
I have a Facebook Connect app that I monetize using Google AdSense. I want to be sure that I am not leaking any Facebook user information such as the Facebook UserID number or the access token (which has the UserID in it).
AdSense is perfectly legit and within Facebook policy for Connect applications. I just need to be sure Google cannot see the information that identifies the user.
I was well aware of these requirements when I designed my application, and thought I had it nailed, but then I received one of the famous automated warning emails from Facebook stating:
"Our automated systems have detected that you may be inadvertently allowing authentication data to be passed to 3rd parties."
it also stated:
"In every case that we have examined, this information is passed via the HTTP Referer Header by the user's browser."
Again, I was already familiar with this leakage vector, which happens when Facebook puts the access token into the querystring when it redirects back to your app after user authentication. I already have a design in place where I handle this through server-side OAuth 2.0 redirection, obtaining a "code" and exchanging it for an access token. This method is described here, under server-side authentication: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
In my app, I do the code-for-token exchange in a separate ASP.NET MVC controller that has no views, so there is no Adsense or any 3rd party resources included. So I am certain that all of my header referer field contents and querystrings are clean and contain no user data.
Given that I received the email notice from Facebook however, and don't want my app and the AdSense money faucet turned off, I am now paranoid that there is some other place I am leaking data. Then again, the email says my app "may be" leaking information (why oh why can't they just tell me what they saw, or at least be certain it is leaking rather than it just "may be" leaking), and it says every instance was due to the referer/querystring, which again I am certain (having done Fiddler tracing) my app is clean.
I see only one possible way the info could be leaking, but I'm not sure if it is a real risk or just a lack of understanding on my part of what exactly AdSense (and Google Analytics) can see from my app's content on a page that requires the user to be authenticated.
I have a view (page) where I put the access token into a hidden form field. It is put there when the page is initially served up (after the user has been authenticated), and then subsequently updated via Javascript (using the Facebook JS SDK) so when the user posts the form back to the server, I get an updated access_token if it has changed. The access token can change because I use the Javascript SDK to prompt for additional permissions on that page, including in some cases the offline_access extended permission. Getting offline_access will generate a new access_token, one that does not expire.
This is on a page that requires the user to be authenticated to see it, so I figured AdSense cannot see the page contents. I do have the view setup to render in a generic fashion (no user info) with all of the same text if the user is not authenticated, but with the addition of a "login now" prompt, so Adsense can index the page and provide relevant contextual ads.
I am aware of the fact that Facebook just yesterday launched the new OAuth 2.0 Javascript SDK features, but can't adopt that right away as it won't work with the Facebook C# SDK I use server-side. And even with that, if I have a problem with putting the access token in the hidden form field, that problem would still be there.
In classic Facebook fashion, they give me 48 hours to fix the problem, but any inquiries via their developer support web form only result in a response that they will "do our best to respond to your specific issue within one week."
Maybe a simpler way to think of this problem is "can Google AdSense see the page contents of a page requiring user authentication?" or do they only see the header referer field from which the AdSense javascript file was loaded.
Hard too say exactly what they have detected without knowing the details of your code - but I would guess that may is actually does leak information. They would have identified a particular pattern that they know will leak, and they have spotted that pattern to exist in your app
Why don't you setup a proxy server such as squid and then point your browse to go through your squid instance for all http access. You can then look at the squid logs for all the http requests and headers for any indication of what may be leaked?
I would think you should pick an independent machine for installing squid, so an amazon micro instance may be what you need for this if you don't already have a machine available
In addition all JavaScript running on the page can see everything in the DOM and all global JavaScript variables so if you/Facebook are worried about leaking info that way you may want to store all uid inside a closure and/or run the adsense code in a iframe rather directly in the page - as a general shrift rule, you should never allow 3rd party JavaScript code to run in you page without it being wrapped in a iframe
They got back to me after a manual review of my site and said it was not actually leaking any user info. Gee thanks for the runaround Facebook automated detection systems!