This just in: I have heard from various sources that Facebook is selling your data through a service called the Facebook Development Platform.
My response: No, no they are frigging not. They are not selling anyone’s personal data. If they are, they certainly don’t need the Development Platform.
“But amg programs that aren’t faecbook are accessing my datas!” you say. Well, it’s too bad that all of those people making angry Facebook groups, thereby sticking it to the man, aren’t as good at software development as they are at parsing through the Terms of Service to take quotes out of context.
The Facebook Development Platform is an Application Programming Interface. Wikipedia says:
An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that a computer system or program library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program.
The software that provides the functionality described by an API is said to be an implementation of the API. The API itself is abstract, in that it specifies an interface and does not get involved with implementation details.
The API allows a program to make requests without having to know the details of the implementation. What does this mean? Well it means that using Facebook’s API, programs don’t need to have all of your private informations that you hold so dearly, since it can just make requests to the server and process everything without having the entire Facebook database on its machine.
I mean, hell, you need to log in for these programs to work. If Facebook is giving your information away, you have more to worry about than your silly little datas; they’re giving away passwords too! Oh noes! Security breach!
People really should actually read the API docs before accusing Facebook of criminal activity, because you all end up looking like retards to people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about.
In conclusion, Facebook users make me angry.
