Facebook seems to revel in making the things you want to do as difficult as possible, either by hiding the things you’re interested in at remote and undiscoverable locations, or by moving them around and changing them regularly.
I just caught a message from a friend who couldn’t work out how to remove a “rogue” app she’d managed to pick up. Since I’m certainly expecting to see more and more (and more!) “rogue” apps in the future, I thought it’s be good to lay out how to manage your Facebook apps, since it seems that a lot of people are actually unaware.
Pull down the “Account” menu in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. Choose “Privacy Settings”.
At the bottom of the “Privacy Settings” screen, toward the left, there’s an “Apps and Websites” heading, with a link to “edit your settings”. Click on that.
Next, you’ll be taken to the page where you can remove and configure apps.
To remove apps, or configure the information they can get at, click the “Remove unwanted or spammy apps”. This will take you to a page where you can remove apps (by clicking on the “X” to the right of the app’s name) or configure them (by clicking on the “edit settings” link).
If you click on “Edit settings” for a particular app—I’ve used Posterous here—you’ll see the information that it can get to, and—for apps which can be configured, anyway—be able to turn on and off specific kinds of access. In the case of Posterous, all the accesses are required by the app, so if there’s anything in there that makes you uncomfortable, you have no choice but to remove it.
I’d strongly consider removing any app, except those which you knew were from trustworthy sources and which you really needed to use.
Did you know how to do this already? Did this help you?
