Beware! Facebook Apps can now Access Your Phone and Address Details

 Facebook has the knack to piss off users, specially those privacy freaks. We have previously warned you about keeping an eye on what permissions you are giving to the Facebook apps you are installing. Now, you have even more reasons to get paranoid, as Facebook has announced that it now lets developers access your phone number and home address, if they choose, when you use their apps.

To be fair on Facebook, it is only making this data available to the apps if you, the user, specifically approve it. Moreover all those apps you have already installed won’t have automatic access to these information. So, next time you install a Facebook app, look out for the “Access my contact information: Current Address and Mobile Phone Number” permission request

Facebook’s obnoxiously huge valuation is because of the data – the personal data of millions of users, all fed manually by the users themselves. And there is a huge demand for this data out in the market. If some app developer is greedy enough, he might sell your contact information to unwanted marketing mailing lists. Of-course Facebook mandates app developers to only request data they need to operate their apps, not to sell data on to third parties and to display a clear privacy policy. But how often and effectively they control is not well known.
In a nutshell, it has become more important than ever to read the fine print before permitting an app to access your Facebook data. If it is looking for your contact information, think and re-think if it is a genuine app and worthy enough to be fed with personal info such as contact address and phone number.{via:techpp}