Facebook's making the distinction between allowing a device to offer Facebook-like services (which require Facebook functionality) and third-party apps that suc

Facebook's making the distinction between allowing a device to offer Facebook-like services (which require Facebook functionality) and third-party apps that suck up all your friend data. On the one hand, Facebook's got a point, that if you want to be able to use Facebook on a device without going through the Facebook app or the website the device needs to be able to authenticate onto some sort of API. On the other hand, the NYT article makes the claim that the makers of the devices got access to the Facebook data, writing "Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users’ data — including friends’ data — on their own servers". However, Facebook never followed up on that in their article, just pointing out that if you are logged into Facebook on a BlackBerry that the BlackBerry can make the same requests you could if you were logged into Facebook through the web browser. The question that matters which neither side addresses well is how much of that data makes it to device maker servers (for a while, the NYT homepage was claiming 'dozens' but they removed that and it doesn't appear to be substantiated in the article). There are related worries with the device having access to the Facebook data itself, but at that point you need to start worrying about malicious activity by device makers in general. E.g. will my phone start sending my web history back to its maker as well? my bank account numbers?