Apple's app sandboxing and privacy protection means that 'Facebook for iPad' will not be able to mine as much user data as Facebook would like.
I suspect that this was the main reason why Facebook wanted users to use the browser instead of a native app (and why the app is being launched more than 18 months after the iPad was first launched)
However, the proliferation of native 3rd party apps meant that users weren't using the browser to get to Facebook and that may have led Facebook to finally decide to release the app.
[edit1: To the downvoters - I didn't say that sandboxing provides 100% privacy protection. However, it does prevent Facebook from knowing which other sites you've visited, it prevents them from telling search engines who you are etc.]
[edit2: To Xuzz and others: login to facebook on your iPad browser, log into a website that collaborates with Facebook, you'll see that Facebook is aware your visit to the website. This won't happen when you're logged into the app (instead of being logged in on Safari)
Regardless of the downvotes, this is a matter of fact.(in fact, it was recently discovered that Facebook can track some of your web-browsing even if you had logged out)
Btw I made no assertions about "attacks" and I have no interest in debating emotional outburts such as "Please stop assuming everything Facebook does is out to personally attack you or your data".
> However, the proliferation of native 3rd party apps meant that users weren't using the browser to get to Facebook and that may have led Facebook to finally decide to release the app.
or it could just be that the Safari on the iPad doesn't let you upload photos to the largest photo sharing website out there (Facebook).
I suspect the reason it took 18 months is because Facebook was waiting to figure out where the iPad fits into the ecosystem.
The "main reason...the app is being launched more than 18 months after the iPad was first launched" is because we have a lot of things to do and few engineers to do them.
We've got about one engineer per million Facebook users, and as Hacker News demonstrates time and again, those users have a lot of items on their wishlist. For instance, the bugginess and instability of our iPhone app has been a top user complaint for a long time. Turns out the set of skills required to improve an iPhone app is the same as required to build an iPad app. Something's gotta give.
As for the "main reason why Facebook wanted users to use the browser instead of a native app," I've never heard that preference expressed at Facebook. Like the rest of you, we use iPads. And like the rest of you, we'd prefer a fast, sexy, native, custom-made experience to a website designed for your desktop monitor.
Occam's razor, pure and simple. For a community that prides itself on rational debate, I'm consistently surprised at the level of discourse on certain issues here.
I completely agree. I have been saying for a year that FB would never release an iPad app unless they had a deal with Apple to have the native app be able to set cookies in Safari.
The good news is that I was wrong.
I downloaded the app and promptly logged out of FB on Safari.
You make good points, but won't the vast majority of iPad users be logged into Facebook both on the app and in Safari? I know on my iPhone (where I primarily use the FB app), I'm also logged in Safari (for FB connect, when sent FB links, using features not on app, etc).
That makes no sense, the browser is sandboxed significantly more than any native app. Please stop assuming everything Facebook does is out to personally attack you or your data. It's demonstrably not the case.
Seems to me that you're making a blanket statement, here, that is contradicted by most of the available facts. How about some support?
Personally, I'd say you'd have to be an idiot to NOT assume that a large number of Facebook's actions are not intended to get more access to more kinds of user data. We've got about a half-decade of proof of this.
They just added very easy to understand privacy controls, for one. They're good enough that I'm considering merging my two "identities" into one Facebook account rather than my current two: I can now easily keep them separate.
The other point is that it's impossible to prove the negative. Any action can find an interpretation that it's an assault on privacy — if that's the interperetation that helps make your point — but it's difficult if not impossible to prove there was no malicious intent by anyone related to Facebook.
At least I, for one, find it hard to believe that Facebook really cares that much. But if you want to believe they are out to get you, I'm sure you can find and twist whatever you want to suit that opinion.
> Apple's app sandboxing and privacy protection means that 'Facebook for iPad' will not be able to mine as much user data as Facebook would like.
Sandboxing does prevent developers from accessing files that don't belong to their apps but developers still have unfettered access to users' calendars and address book. Facebook has already been known to grab users' address books from the iPhone version of the app.
> "Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information."
All 425 of my friends? And how, pray tell, did you expect people do go about doing this?
Simply putting up a simple click-through disclaimer is poor moral defense.
That message is incredibly disingenuous, and I do not believe whoever launched it believed for one fraction of a second that users will actually go out and seek their friends' permissions to activate the feature. Facebook expected people to just tap merrily through, and well, people did.
Of course, that warning is from the Facebook app. The above comment is correct that there is no fine-grained security in iOS for user data (except location info). If Apple approves an app and you install it, you are trusting it will much of the data on your phone.
I do not work at Facebook or even know a single person who does. I've never even talked to someone — including on the Internet — who works for Facebook.
Your personal attack was incredibly uncalled for. Just because I do not feel Facebook is evil does not mean that they are paying me to say so.
(As to your actual point: yes, it actually does. The claim I was refuting is that Facebook "steals" contact information on your device. Well, in fact, it doesn't. It makes you confirm that you are okay with sharing this information with Facebook.
What else could they do? The only other thing I could think of is Facebook not offering this feature. They are doing quite a good job here making it clear what happens to your information if you share it with them and you have to explicitly give your okay.)
> "What else could they do? The only other thing I could think of is Facebook not offering this feature."
"Your friend [Bob Smith] wants to use Facebook Mobile Sync on his phone. This would allow Facebook to see any information he has in his address book relating to you. You can [learn more about Facebook Mobile Sync here]."
> "They are doing quite a good job here making it clear what happens to your information if you share it with them and you have to explicitly give your okay."
There are two issues with this:
- There is a social contract (at least, in Western countries, I cannot speak for this as a universal rule) where your contact information is private. This is why people ask "is it ok if I give Bob your number?". Facebook violates this fundamental assumption by allowing Bob to unilaterally upload all this private data with a simple button push, without clearing it with anyone.
- The fact that we had viral outrage when people's private numbers started showing up on accounts seems to suggest that they have not explained the use of this information sufficiently. If people are quite clear about what happens to this information, there would have been little cause for outrage.
That prompt doesn't really make clear what information Facebook will roll into its databases, nor does it make clear in what way it is exposed. The only thing users are clear about when they click through that prompt is that it means their Facebook friends' numbers will show up in their contact list.
You do realize, on iOS, that most contact info on the device is synced with either Google, or (in iOS 5) iCloud? Facebook is not making this information public, neither are those services.
And how can they ask every person in your contacts if they approve: even incorrectly assuming all of them have an account on Facebook, you would still need to upload that information for those accounts to be linked and the request messages to be sent. And that's invading the privacy of the user's address book: they are now sharing that someone is in their address book, even if they didn't want that person to know.
Finally, it does say exactly what is uploaded (which is much better, even, than iCloud or Google's sync: seriously, how can you argue that Facebook's contact sync is so awful and ignore Apple and Google's services?): emails, phone numbers, and names (I may be forgetting some here).
> "And how can they ask every person in your contacts if they approve"
By prompting the user the next time they sign into Facebook. This really isn't that hard. You can even make this a blanket permission: "I allow all of my contacts to store my contact info with Facebook". It's still miles better than what's there right now.
> "And that's invading the privacy of the user's address book: they are now sharing that someone is in their address book, even if they didn't want that person to know."
That's not the only choice. Facebook can just as easily say "Hey, we have [X] information about you that [Bob Smith] uploaded. You may [opt out] and we will delete this data."
There are many, many, many ways to mitigate the privacy concerns of this. Facebook right now is doing none of it.
Again, let me ask: you have all these concerns about Facebook optionally letting you upload some data stored on your device to be shared with nobody. Exactly what Google's Contacts, Apple's iCloud, and Microsoft's Live let you do. Why is this any different? All of those companies have competing social networks, why do they get a free pass from you? Why don't you block them in your hosts files and not let them track you on the web with their +1 buttons or Bing results?
But, anyway, how would they ask the person that doesn't have a Facebook account. What if they get the match wrong, if you have two friends named "John Smith"? This is a non-trivial solution for an issue fabricated against Facebook when identical (or even worse, see Google's use of contact data with Buzz: Facebook has never made this info public or even shared the uploaded information with anyone but you) situations have occurred since the first online contact management solution? Why is this the only case where every person should have to agree to let someone else use the service to store information about you?
This is why people let Google Contacts and iCloud "have a free pass". Neither Google Contacts nor iCloud does anything with my data - it's on their servers for backup and sync purposes. Could they be doing anything nefarious in the background with my private information? Sure, but neither company have a strong history of this.
With Facebook this trust simply does not exist, and when coupled with a poorly explained, poorly documented feature that seemed to have very few privacy controls around it (many Facebook features with less privacy impact have more privacy visibility), people flip out. Rightly so.
We cannot trust Facebook not to mine the shit out of the information uploaded from our phonebooks (and in fact, Facebook has never ruled this out), and eventually expose it to other people, even indirectly. When your company has a long track record of taking a cavalier (if not outright dismissive) attitude towards user privacy, the onus is on you to show you're above-board. The phone sync feature hasn't done this due diligence.
The fact that the phonebook data I'd be uploading isn't exposed directly to my other friends is very, very small comfort.
[edit] I've seen this exchange way more times than I'd like to. It's just a total failure of communication on Facebook's part:
http://m.facebook.com got a nice update today too. Adding that to the home screen will probably solve most of your complaints. With the caveat that you won't be able to upload pictures.
Facebook has a nice strategy for their iPhone app. It mainly displays web views, so they can have the flexibility of a web site without having to go through an Apple review every time they update their features. And as a side-effect other mobile browsers benefit from the same work.
Edit: And now after playing with the new iPhone version, they replaced even more of the app with web views. At this point, it's essentially the same as m.facebook.com but with custom handlers for the Status / Photo / Check In buttons that allow for location awareness and photo uploading.
It's really not possible to launch something like this well: the app is progressively launching across the globe as the update propagates through the iTunes servers. There's no specific moment where it's available everywhere, it's a roll-out process that that Apple warns you can take up to a day.
I read that Apple and Facebook were planning on announcing the app and possibly other things at the iPhone event last week but that Apple "went dark" after learning of Steve Job's health over the weekend.
If that's the case a soft, muted launch would be more understandable especially considering direct competitor Samsung/Google postponed their launch indefinitely.
Would this be the "safest" way to use Facebook? Lets say that my iPad had no Facebook cookies and I installed this app, signed in, switches to a browser and started browsing. Is faceebook still tracking my every move?
I have no sympathy for that guy. Seems like he had a disconnect between the importance of his work and the greater strategy of the company, having a whinge over people putting his work on the back burner is very immature.
Company strategy or not, putting your all into something that never ships is a frustrating experience. Jeff presumably never expected his personal venting to be covered by TechCrunch.
Indeed it is, its a very common thread in my life and I'd say for a lot of readers here. It something you get used to and you learn to deal with, its called maturing, hence why I said it was an immature thing to do.
I don't go around bad mouthing the people paying my bills over my own ego.
In comparison to Friendly, it is a bit less convenient for shared iPads. You have to enter your password every time you use a different account, and it always shows Facebook in the system language, not the user's language.
It's not a huge deal, but I find it really interesting to observe multi-user support on the iPad. Mostly because I think there is a huge disconnect between what "pundit" bloggers say about it and how every iPad I know is being used.
I really like the design of this landing page a lot. Very clean. It's a subtle touch, but the reflection on the iPad is more muted than you typically see for this sort of display (including what you'll see from Apple at http://www.apple.com/ipad/ .)
I don't understand why there is no feature parity between the different platforms? I rely on the "lists" feature (both the AI generated and my own generated ones) for filtering the wall.
The iPhone app implements it in a spotty fashion (half the time custom lists show, and half the time they don't), but the iPad app doesn't have support for them?
I get the desire for agility and keeping a startup vibe internally, even as the company gets very large, but some quality control would be excellent.
To be clear: I think FB is showing a huge turnaround in this aspect with the new oGraph verbs and timeline, but this app just... doesn't smell test well.
The one reason I still use the iPhone version was when I wanted to upload my photos , browser don't allows you to do this. The Facebook app UI is so antique, after seeing the super UI you see on iPad apps and also on 2x the fonts looked so awkward
After getting the iPad camera kit, it was feeling even more horrible, thank god the new iPad app is getting launched, will have one less reason to c
Installed on a UK account. Still listed under iphone apps in the store, although with the 'dual use' symbol, but is now v4.0 according to the app config settings.
Crashed every time after startup just after showing a fullscreen facebook logo. Deleting and reinstalling the app got it working. Probably some cache problems from having the iphone version previously installed...
I had to completely remove and reinstall the Facebook app from scratch on both my Verizon iPhone 4 (4.2.7) and my wifi-only iPad 1 (iOS 5 GM) to get it to work. The iPhone just sat and "pinwheeled" for 4-5 minutes, and the iPad would dump back to Springboard on launch.
So, with more and more users using some mobile device as an access point to their computing experiences, how does it help FB to have ad-free, FB credits free apps? I mean, I would rather have ad free experiences and I don't care for FB apps much. Just wondering..
Just a heads-up. If you had the iPhone version already installed on an iPad and do an update you'll get the new universal version. That one is pretty crashy right at the startup screen.
Deleting and reinstalling it from scratch seems to solve the problem. Nice looking app.
The screenshots clearly show an iPad-friendly UI. Sounds like you got the old iPhone-only app - likely the app hasn't propagated to all of the App Store yet.
Same thing happened to me, I did however just read on another blog post that its apparently cached and propagating through Apples servers. So I guess try again in a few hours.
EDIT: I downloaded via iTunes and it worked, downloading via my iPad seemed to download the wrong version. So I guess its proportion, some servers probably haven't been updated yet.
There's nothing here that's orientated around doing what's best for the user (C'mon Zuck, I thought that was your mantra) -
* we know from Jeff Verkoeyen that this app has been V1 ready for some time
* the delay was so Apple and Facebook could do some biz-dev shenanigans - that ultimately broke down
* now this has been 'launched' in some slap-dash, careless manner.
Facebook for iPad may be the most anticipated/demanded app for iPad but if that means Facebook feels it can get complacent and use it as some (failed) bargaining chip with Apple then I refuse to want to be the pawns in the middle of all this.
Not downloading, not using, chalking this up as another reason to be done with Facebook and it's Empire.
Coderdude (I like HackerThings, btw). I'm not anti Facebook. I'm just tired of the complacency the company is showing towards it's users (and FB app developers) at the moment.
More than happy to trade karma to express my view, neg vote away...
I suspect that this was the main reason why Facebook wanted users to use the browser instead of a native app (and why the app is being launched more than 18 months after the iPad was first launched)
However, the proliferation of native 3rd party apps meant that users weren't using the browser to get to Facebook and that may have led Facebook to finally decide to release the app.
[edit1: To the downvoters - I didn't say that sandboxing provides 100% privacy protection. However, it does prevent Facebook from knowing which other sites you've visited, it prevents them from telling search engines who you are etc.]
[edit2: To Xuzz and others: login to facebook on your iPad browser, log into a website that collaborates with Facebook, you'll see that Facebook is aware your visit to the website. This won't happen when you're logged into the app (instead of being logged in on Safari)
Regardless of the downvotes, this is a matter of fact.(in fact, it was recently discovered that Facebook can track some of your web-browsing even if you had logged out)
Btw I made no assertions about "attacks" and I have no interest in debating emotional outburts such as "Please stop assuming everything Facebook does is out to personally attack you or your data".