Facebook Application Dashboard Privacy Fail

Give me a second to scoop Facebook on their own announcement for their newest updateprivacy mistake: the application and game dashboards.

These two dashboards are part of the new redesign that Facebook is rolling out right now. If nothing has changed yet and you don’t see these links in your normal interface you soon will. In any case, you can still see the preview links above.

Anything stand out to you? Like the fact that your application activity is now available to all of your friends by default? Let me paint a scene for you: taking a glance at the dashboard and finding that Joe Married is using an application called “One Night Stand” … oops. Or your boss notices that you’ve been playing one of those awful games all day at work. These are intentionally extreme examples, but are still well within the realm of occurrence.

The problem isn’t that this feature exists, the problem is that this feature is opt-out. I would recommend you go on and do that by setting the “Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards” setting to “Only Me.” NOTE: this option only seems to appear once you’ve been migrated to the new design.

You would think that Facebook would have learned not to do this with Beacon.