Facebook adds 'Anonymous Login' for third party apps

At a Facebook developer conference on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said you no longer need to share your personal data when logging into third-party apps. Before, when logging into any service with your Facebook credentials, you’d have to allow access to personal data, like your friends list, and accept a ton of permissions. But going forward several improvements will mean Facebook logins will now be anonymous, giving users granular control over what is and isn’t shared.

Facebook said in a Newsroom post introducing Anonymous Login:

Sometimes people want to try out apps, but they’re not ready to share any information about themselves. For this, we’re introducing a way to log in to apps anonymously. Anonymous Login lets people log in to apps so that they don’t have to remember user names and passwords, but it doesn’t share personal information from Facebook. People can decide later if they want to share any additional information, once they understand more about the app. We are testing Anonymous Login with a few developers, and we plan to open it up to more developers in the coming months.

It appears that developers will have to enable the functionality on their end first before you take advantage of Anonymous Login, as Facebook currently states, “We are testing Anonymous Login with a few developers, and we plan to open it up to more developers in the coming months.”   So while Anonymous Login sounds like a great idea to try out new apps without feeling like you’re putting all of your business out into the street, it may take a while before developers start implementing the feature (if at all).

The company is also launching more granular controls that let people determine the types of information they share with apps when they want to use their Facebook identity to log in. Previously, apps could decide what information they wanted to access on people's Facebook pages — such as people's birthday, friends list or email address. Now, people can uncheck each, or all of these things.  Analysts suspect Facebook's evolution isn't as much an epiphany about privacy as it is about Zuckerberg' realization that the company has to take steps to ensure it holds on to its users and grapples with more competition.

"If Facebook has some sense that they are going to walk away because they don't feel like they are being put first, then they have a real problem on their hands. So, they are giving users some new features that they have been looking for a long time," said Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

Facebook also took the wraps off its long-awaited mobile advertising network, called "Audience Network," a product that enables Facebook to sell ads in mobile applications besides its own. For example, Coca Cola can show ads on a mobile game that a Facebook user has downloaded on his or her phone.

You can see an overview of Anonymous Login here: