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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the social media company will amp up its privacy protections — welcome news for users who have come to think of the site as nothing more than personal information mine for advertisers.
During a keynote speech at Facebook's F8 Developer Conference, Zuckerberg announced the "anonymous login," as a way for users to maintain more control over how much personal information they'd like to share, when they use their Facebook account to log into other apps and websites.
app privacy update: everyone has to choose to share their own data with an app themselves. #f8
— Selena Larson (@selenalarson) April 30, 2014
Now, instead of just logging into an app through FB, a user can log into an app anonymously. #privacy #f8
— Justin Lafferty (@jlaffertyIF) April 30, 2014
Really cool new privacy controls on FB: Anonymous app login. Line-by-line permissions, permissions for your data on friends' apps #f8
— Kenton Jacobsen (@kentonjacobsen) April 30, 2014
Zuckerberg said during the conference that "we know some people are scared of pressing [the social login button].... if you're using an app that you don't completely trust... then you don't want to give a lot of permissions."
But according to Fast Company's Mark Wilson, Anonymous Login isn't totally anonymous. (Of course.) Wilson writes:
Facebook Anonymous Login is a bit like Google's Incognito browsing they introduced inside Chrome. Except, again, it doesn't appear to be 100% anonymous because Facebook still sees the user going anonymous to check out an app. That would be a bit like Chrome keeping you logged into YouTube when you're browsing in Incognito mode.
He also explains that if, after using Anonymous Login to download an app, you decide that you like it you still do have to log in with Facebook at some point later on. So it's sort of anonymous... temporarily.