How to Manage Privacy Rights for Applications in Facebook

Whatever applications you use on Facebook require access to your data to function, they need to access only a certain amount of data and not all of it. More often than not, we don’t really bother to check what permissions the app is seeking and simply grant it whatever rights it asks for. There have been several instances in the past of apps misusing the users’ data.

Fortunately, Facebook gives you an option to review the permissions you grant an app, see whether it is necessary and if not, revoke them. To revoke permissions, click on the ‘App

Centre’ link on the left hand side of your Facebook home screen. On clicking it, you will be directed to the App Store. On the left hand side of the new page you will find the ‘Your Apps’ list with all the apps you are using. Underneath every app you will find the option

‘Visit Website’ and ‘Settings’. Click on ‘Settings’, and you will see an option: ‘This app needs’. This will basically tell you the data that the app needs to access to function. There is another option—‘This app can also’—which is basically all your data that the app has access to, which it may not require. You can deny access to individual requests by clicking on the cross next to it. On the Facebook apps for Android or iOS, the same information can be accessed by double-tapping on the menu to the left and then going to ‘Privacy Settings’. Here you will find the ‘Apps’ option; you can then check what data the apps have access to.