This is a small tip for the newbies of facebook/twitter.
In the age of social networks you might at least owning your identity at facebook/twitter which are the popular social networking websites.
In the earlier time what we do if we need to register in a website? we will register a simple form and give our email address and password to create the account. It was merely tiresome if you need refill everything once again and register with the website. OpenID was one of the solutions for this problem as the single openID can be used across different websites which supports OpenID authertication. Your OpenID profile information will be used by the website for further processing. The advantage of this mechanism is that you don’t have to create any new accounts, no need to share/keep passwords with third party websites.
When the social networks boomed, the social network profiles became our social ID. Realizing the user needs and business advantages, Facebook introduced facebook connectand twitter introduced OAuth authentication to use their account to connect with different web services.
Spams are everywhere and people are fighting against it. If you’ve not used your ID carefully with websites, finally you will end up seeing lot of spam msgs in your inbox. You can connect with any website which supports facebook connect or Twitter OAuth. Once you allow access to your facebook stream or tweet on your behalf with twitter, the web applications can write anything on your behalf. Your friends or followers will be seeing it as the update from yours. For example, one of my twitter friend frequently tweets about “100 followers in a minute… follow this link… *blah* *blah*”. I wondered and asked him why you’re tweeting like this? I think we must have some genuine followers other than bots. He said, I never knew it. I’ve not posted anything to my twitter. I guess someone posting on my behalf.
The thing is he has connected to some websites using twitter authentication and he allowed them access to writer on his twitter stream. Rest you can think of.
But don’t worry, once you realize that you’re dealing with a wrong website which is not good for you and your networks, you can revoke the access at any time. I’ve explained the steps below.
Revoking Access to facebook apps/connected websites
- Go application settings.
2. Find the application to block form your list and Select the application from the list.
3. You can do following things.
- Edit application settings to restrict access to your wall and other facebook settings. You can do this by clicking on “Edit settings” link provided next to each application. The features used by the application will be listed in the popup window. e.g is given below. You can check/unchek according to your convenience. Note that by doing this, the app is still active with your facebook account.
- Remove application
Revoking Twitter Authenticated (OAuth) websites/app
- Login to your twitter.com
- Go navigate to “Settings Page”
- Go for “Connections” tab
- Click on Revoke Access link. You can also undo this if you’re wrongly revoked access!
If you’re friends says you’re sending SPAM DMs or tweets?
- Immediately change your password. That’s the best thing you can do. You might have wrongly given your username passwords to some bad/phishing websites. Just change your password that’s it and prefer OAuth/facebook connect authentication to sign in websites as you can easily revoke them if you find it unnecessary.
Hope this helps!
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