I can understand that you don't agree with the developer's choice to use Facebook connect. But this sort of response isn't productive to the conversation.

Is it really that black & white? I'd imagine there are tradeoffs between product usefulness and the imposing nature of Facebook connect. Shouldn't we talk about how to prioritize these tradeoffs?

> Please, f* off.

Please support productive discourse on HN and avoid comments like this in the future.

However, in your haste to patronizingly chastise me you're making multiple faulty assumptions.

a) I'm not new to HN. Just this account is.

b)"Please, f... off" was descriptive reflection of the way I would respond to the fictional analogous request which you have so conveniently omitted from this quote.

It was in no way intended to address the developer, but rather as a way to illustrate how I feel developers who use access to my personal information as the entry fee to their product treat me.

I think most people here got that.

Why are you assuming, or at least implying, that people who wish you wouldn't exert such an aggressive attitude, really just don't understand you and are stupid?

I think it's a great idea to use Facebook to connect with other people. So this developer can see my interests and friends and posts....so what? So can all of my friends, and a lot of other people.

Privacy, since when have we had that? Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?

Since we've had costs to stalk people. Walls, for example, add a reasonably high cost to see and ear what we're doing. We can be reasonably confident that people in general won't care enough to pay the costs of violating our privacy if they're reasonably high.

Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?

Because the costs are reasonably high and the "profit" is reasonably low. Most of my neighbors can't afford to stay all day looking at the door to see who comes in or out, nor do they profit financially from doing so, unlike these online services.

> Is it really that black & white? ...

It is a bit troublesome if the only way to try out a new service is to give you access to Facebook data (which likely includes a whole lot of data that is unnecessary for your service); it is asking for a whole lot of trust and my threshold for trying out services that require it is a lot higher than normal.

Of course it may be that many startups actively do not want people unwilling to provide FB data to try out/use their services. In that case we are in total agreement ;)

Right on! Using FB to login to various sites (mainly, commenting for in house or third party systems) has become de facto standard. Though some people will right away see the obvious problem with this approach, majority do not care, and will happily post with their FB profile.

It's a low hanging fruit, and with more than enough willing to give up their privacy, it's good enough for the echo system.

I am happily seating out of it though.

So how to do this with some horizon? Maybe it needs to be an open API that many social network sites implement/agree on. [ but one that allows me to share or not share my social graph orthogonally to using a sign-in user handle ]

Either it's private to you, in which case this service is very likely not going to provide you a great deal of value, which puts you outside their market, or it isn't private, in which case you're in their market.

>Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?

This is real life. I don't like the implication that "it's an internet service" means "it isn't real life." This is a service that's trying to land you with real people, doing real things, in a personal way.

The attitude here is "you're looking to be social, so sign up with your social network." If you don't like that, then I'd warrant that you aren't the type of person this is aimed at.

It'd be nice to have alternatives -- others here have suggested a survey, for example -- but let's be honest: Facebook collates a lot of really useful information that is directly helpful to a service such as this. It's a no-brainer from their point of view.

Why does this service's value depend on Facebook? I use Facebook to communicate with a few friends and family. I don't list my interests on Facebook.

> which puts you outside their market

Then they're unnecessarily making their market smaller. Unless they don't have the time or skill to implement an interest questionnaire, this doesn't seem like a good decision.

Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?

I don't think you can classify this as "using it wrong".

It seems obvious that if I or a user like me were to use this service it wouldn't work very well, and would potentially devalue the service for other users (through poor matches).

The developer of the service is artificially limiting their market by only allowing Facebook Connect and they may have problems getting the necessary critical mass for the service to be useful as a result. I don't think it's trolling to make this observation.

When you create a product like this, every decision you make "artificially limits" your market. But often these decisions open up other parts of the market that would be inaccessible otherwise. For example, the time they would have spent on building alternative login options for people like you would probably be better spent adding features for the people who have no problem using Facebook connect, and who list their interests on Facebook.

Facebook was sold to users as a way to connect and communicate with my friends and family. This is how I use it. I don't use it as a tool to pass my personal information in bulk to marketers.

In any case, Facebook has many features. Listing interests is just one of those features (and a peripheral one at that, which many of my friends don't bother with either). If people don't use every feature of a product, they're using it wrong? According to who?

Judging from the comments, there are many others who also feel that forcing users to login via Facebook is undesirable. For those people, it creates unnecessary friction. For me, it was enough that I'm not going to bother spending more time with their product.

> ... then don't get mad when their solution doesn't work for you. Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?

I'm certainly not mad. The truth is, they're here pitching their service to me, not the other way around. I took a look, offered a suggestion, and that's that.

A growing number of social networking services promote OAuth logins to the dominant social networks (Facebook, Twitter etc.) as the primary authentication method, over "traditional" email confirmation type processes. Users of such practices include Klout, Kred, Foursquare, and others. The permissions granted typically permit the authorized application to download the entire social data stream belonging to the user, which is stored for data-mining purposes by the application provider. By facilitating such use, OAuth is acting as a component in a social engineering type scam where users of the application probably do not realize the extent of the data they are sharing.

Complaining about "Facebook connect" doesn't make any sense. What makes sense is complaining when app developers ask for permission to access data they don't need, or they ask for access and abuse it in ways they didn't disclose to the user.