You probably haven't noticed tiny tweaks to Facebook's permission requests in the App Center. But they're better than ever at coaxing personal information out of you.
Source: developers.facebook.com
It's no surprise that Facebook has a lot of your personal information — it's kind of what you agree to when you sign up for Facebook. But now that Facebook has launched the App Center — where Facebook apps (Farmville, Draw Something), along the most popular iOS and Android apps that plug into Facebook, all live together — and become something more like Planet Facebook, you might be giving up personal information to more companies than just Facebook.
Facebook has always technically asked for your permission to do things, but every time it changes its design, things get a bit more unclear as to what actually happens when you do things like play a game or read an article. Facebook still "asks" for access to personal information for things in the App Center, but it's not really asking so much anymore because of the way it's framing the questions. And how you frame things changes everything.
Framing effects were first theorized by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the early 1980s, whose research showed that even the smallest changes in phrasing could drastically alter people's decisions. In a question about saving people from a hypothetical disease, participants in one group were given two options:
Option A saves 200 people's lives
Option B has a 33% chance of saving all 600 people and a 66% possibility of saving no one
