There’s a question at the bottom of this, I swear.
So I play one of those obnoxious Facebook games. One of them. And I’m very careful not to let it annoy any of my friends. Don’t judge me! However, when I opened it up this morning, I found a new “feature” on the right hand side of the window. There’s now a bar there informing me that friend A played game Z, and friend B played game Y, etc, etc. It also helpfully informed me, and presumably all of my friends that open up any game window, that I have played my game six or seven times.
Now for the common Facebook question: how do I stop Facebook from sharing this bit of information about me without my consent? I can remove individual entries in the list that are about me, but that’s kind of a pain. I would just as soon not have everyone on my list know that I play this game. DON’T JUDGE ME!!
On a side note, I wonder if the time between Facebook introducing a new “feature” and people trying to figure out how to disable said feature is decreasing.
I don’t have a cite for this but I believe that may very well be the seventh circle of Facebook Hell: Applications.
They require you to give them a bunch of permissions to your account and many don’t have separate controls for what gets plastered to your “wall” or your friends “walls”. But some might so it could depend on the game if that one particular breach of privacy can be closed up. Which one is it? I used to play the Texas Holdem Poker I am not on high enough ground to judge you.
Not knowing the specifics of the game, this may not be the best answer but it is a factual one: Facebook is intended to share information about yourself with friends or the general public. Many want to be part of it while figuring out ways to prevent it from doing that. The simplest answer to safeguard privacy is don’t use it.
I finally had to block my niece’s posts, as she is addicted to the Mafia Wars game, and plays it constantly, which means thousands of meaningless postings to FB. It’s one of the worst features of FB and is intrusive. Anything that says it wants you to allow access to your account is probably a bad bet.
No, this isn’t about spammy posts going to peoples’ walls. I’ve fought bitterly for years to keep that from happening. This is a new thing, that appears only when I’m in the game itself. It just started today.
This does’t sound like an FB thing. This sounds like something the app is doing. If you’re in the app, the app has access to your friends list. If it has access to your friends list, it can tell which of your friends are also playing the game. So when you start the game, the app goes through your friends list and displays any info it has on those friends. I don’t think you can go through a FB setting to stop this behavior. This would need to be a setting in the app itself where you tell the app not to share your play info.
Go to ACCOUNT; PRIVACY SETTINGS. At the bottom of the screen, you should see APPS AND WEBSITES. Click EDIT YOUR SETTINGS. Find GAME AND APP ACTIVITY. Press EDIT SETTINGS.
It’s definitely not an app thing - it’s a Facebook thing. The bar is advertising all kinds of games made by other companies. The game I play is Mousehunt, and the ad bar is telling me about friends that have played FarmVille and a bunch of other crap I’ve never heard of. I have my privacy settings locked down as tightly as it’ll let me. At the top of the bar are icons for several other games I’ve clicked on once or twice over the last few years, then a list of announcements: Joe Blow played GoatFucker. Larry Goober played FarmWife. Etc, etc. It’s a whole advertising bar that didn’t exist before. I’d happily ignore it, except it’s telling people whenever I open up MouseHunt.
Yeah but to be fair it is only visible to people while they are playing games. So if someone says “Hey I see you play MouseHunt!” it’s only because they were gaming too.
Yeah, I did think of that. Still. I’d be happier to make it go away completely. Hey, just found an easy solution! This game has their own external website at mousehuntgame.com, which doesn’t have the bar. I don’t know if my activity will still show up, but I won’t see the bar. That’s a start.
You might want to log out of Facebook before you go to that site and play, or use a different browser. It might be able to send info to the Facebook cookie.