The Facebook Blog

Blocked Content and Facebook Security

by Ryan McGeehan Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 4:18pm

We've often written about our commitment to keeping Facebook a safe place for you to interact and share information with your friends. We work hard to keep the site free of abuse, spam, and harassment. A recent place where we've been fighting the spam battle has been through sites that ask for a user's login information to use a contact importer, and then spam all of their friends. Our response seems to have confused some people as to why certain content can't be sent through our systems. For example, if you try to send a message that contains a link to a website with an importer, you might get a message like this:

This response is our way of trying to protect everyone's privacy. Right now, the sites that are asking for this information, and that we are blocking as a result, gain complete access and control over your account when you enter your login info—your photos, your private messages, and your friends. In order to protect sensitive data, we make it hard for spam to spread through Facebook.

We know that there are legitimate places where it would be useful to have your Facebook Friend List with you, which is why we've been working so hard on Facebook Connect. Our goal there is to allow you to bring any information you want over to any service you want, while still maintaining all of our privacy standards across the web. That way, you will have control over your information—not anyone else.

Ryan works on the site security team and continues to be a dodge ball ninja.