Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Getting the Defaults with Publicly Accessible Information

Every Web site or application has access to a default set of information about every user. If you visit any profile on Facebook (see Figure 8-1), you'll notice that the information there is pretty much the same information that you can find in the user interface for Facebook as well. This information is what Facebook, regardless of the privacy preference, always reveals about each user.

The default pieces of public information about each user, according to Facebook, are called “Publicly Accessible Information” (PAI). This is the information that, as a developer, you see about each user.

Here is what everyone has access to by default:

• Name
• Profile picture URL
• Gender
• Any networks the user belongs to
• User ID
• Locale
• Friends, and the same information for your friends
• Any information that the user sets to “Everyone” access in his or her privacy settings

The best way to know what you have access to without any login by the user is to just make a query to https://graph.facebook.com/username (go to https://graph.facebook.com/jessestay for mine) with no oauth_token parameter added. Here is what Mark Zuckerberg's Graph API data looks like:

{
   "id": "4",
   "name": "Mark Zuckerberg",
   "first_name": "Mark",
   "last_name": "Zuckerberg",
   "link": "http://www.facebook.com/zuck",
   "gender": "male",
   "locale": "en_US"
}

Figure 8-1: A default profile as visible to other users who haven't logged in to Facebook and are not friends with the user.