Facebook’s recent Whopper promo was moving along at an impressive pace. Just sacrifice ten of your friends and you got a free Whopper. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.
Boom – just like that, however, Facebook has shut it down…
We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.
Brilliant.
All that really happens here is that the user being removed gets a message telling them, which helps the application spread virally. Without that feature the app is far less powerful. There is no real privacy issue here, just a policy decision by Facebook that people shouldn’t be notified when you remove them as a friend.
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