Use Facebook apps with Anonymous Login without giving your Personal Data

May 1, 2014

Facebook got a new version of its login system for the third-party apps that lets you log in anonymously so you can use facebook apps without providing your personal data. The new Anonymous login also gives you the total granular control over what data types you give to an app.

In addition, Facebook login service for the mobile apps now offer you more fine control over what you share with an app. Starting today, you can’t just decide whether app can publish to your news feed & what date it will read from it, but you will have very precise controls over what exactly get shared.

Even with an anonymous identifier, user’s experience between apps can still be synced, but the app will not get any personal information from the user. This will work because Facebook still use unique identifier for you every time user log in anonymously. Thats way, even if an app does not know your name, then it can save your content, high scores or there data and sync it across the devices.

If you do not use the anonymous login, new permission dialog allows you now to go through your permission line by line.

“I know some people scared of pressing this ‘Blue Button’. It is one of the most common feedback that we get on our platform,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “If you do not trust the apps, then you may not want to give it all these permissions. So in the last year, we seperated out the read & publish permissions. It helped in people trust the blue button and sign in to the apps.”

It is really important to understand that when Facebook says “anonymous”, what it means is that “you do not need to give third-party developers your name or data before you use Facebook’s apps”. However, Facebook will still going to gather data about what apps you are using “anonymously” that it will use to personalize your other Facebook experience or potentially targets you with the ads.

For now, Anonymous Login will give users a way to ‘Try Before You Buy” which means you can enjoy an app before you give it any personal data. The initial launch partners of Facebook are likely to be the apps that get better & even more personalize when you will use your real identity & share your Facebook. But eventually, as Facebook now opens up anonymous login, I had expect people to build “Anonymous First” apps like a Secret-clone that are designed to use with-out your Facebook data.