That is not true. If you store information gathered by a facebook API call to your sites database it is breaking the terms of service. And it should not be the decision of the the site administrator. The data was collected and verified by facebook, and the data belongs to Facebook and the user, not the site admin.

You are providing no warning what so ever to the user that by clicking the facebook connect button that their personal information is being harvested discreetly. You should provide a warning to the user that you are collecting their data.

And if a site admin decides to illegally harvest data then facebook could decide to delete your application which would be a massive inconvenience to the site admin who is unaware of these rules. I would recommend that on the front end and back end you should warn the site admin and users that they are breaking the rules and their app can be deleted.

I personally feel that you are exploiting both site users and admins in order to sell your premium version of community builder where you could very easily add this functionality with out having to charge for it or without collecting data with out the users permission. Also as a side note there are other joomla components that have this functionality without violating the terms or service.

krileon wrote:

Once data has been transferred from cache to database it has become the property of the site owner (Facebook can't advance their policy onto other users domains).

Yes they can, the data was never yours in the first place. Just because you keep something for 24 hours doesn't make it yours. Further more you are totally ignoring user privacy and the "limited profile" facebook offers. For example if some random site admin decides he wants to store a users sexual preferences it does not mean the user would want that data imported or saved on their site.

I say the team here should act as a conduit and not a filter for FB Connect.

FB Connect is meant to provide "personalized experience".

see: www.facebook.com/connectnews#!/connectnews?v=app_7146470109

Yahoo's FBC implementation where they sync all the email addresses of user's contacts may be a little much imo.

Maybe some db fields should be set to expire and/or re-query if that is possible.

FB provides warnings to their users that their data is being shared. Isn't this also the case for the hundreds of applications within FB?

As far as capitalism goes, that is a philosophical question. I think the team here has been reasonable and that they offer a good, improving product and support for the money.

I don't expect them to be a "filter" for FB connect, in fact I'm not even sure what you are referring to by saying filter??

And FB Connect is great at providing a personalized experience, and it is possible to provide a personalised experience with out violating facebook's TOS. There are several better way of doning this. Not only is it not necessary to save the data to a database in or for this plugin to function, it is not the purpose of FB connect. Facebook connect is used for authentication, and authentication only. Once a user is connected you can use FBML tags like fb:name fb:profile to show personal information.

The benefits of using the proper method of accessing user data is that it can not be seen by other users if it is restricted by a limited profile.

Why did you provide a link to the facebook connect page?? What am I suposed to be looking at on this page? I'm already very familiar with what facebook connect can do. I recommend instead of looking at the features of FB connect you should look at the rules.

And no this is NOT the case for hundreds of other facebook applications. Other fb apps use the fbml or xfbml tags to display user information, or they make an API call but dont save the data to a db.



Also as a side note...

This could be very damaging to the reputation of community builder. Facebook could delete applications and ban users (site admins) who create apps that are harvesting facebook data. If the app gets deleted then your website would be ruined, if you have become dependent on facebook connect and it is then removed there will be 100s of of websites left in the lurch and would the the fault and responsibility of the CB devs who are encouraging this.

And this has nothing to do with capitalism, once again I have no idea what you are on about. It's fine selling your work, but when you are using a free service from facebook, and then violating user privacy and the TOS in order to see you work then that is questionable. There are other Joomla plugins that allow facebook connect and CB integration, why not just use the same technique as they do?