With the advent of social media, Internet users are revealing more and more about themselves on the Web. All their friends know what they’ll be up to next weekend, what Disney character they most resemble, and what their favourite recipe is.

These exhibitionist tendencies suit Web professionals just fine; it’s an easy way for them (actually, for us!) to advertise and generate traffic. It doesn’t get any easier than creating a Facebook API to advertise your site via a game or a survey, for instance.

To make it easier to distribute their content on Facebook, many sites now offer the famous “Connect with Facebook” button. By entering your Facebook user information, you can open an account on the site lickety-split and post the site’s content to your Facebook wall.

Wait a second, you might say. Can’t the site owners then access our information really easily? Indeed, almost all of the details you enter become accessible to them, except your e-mail address. The whole process is fairly well governed however. The general terms of service for Facebook Connect (read the terms) are fairly strict. Almost nothing is recorded, save a couple of IDs so that you’re not forgotten. No names, addresses, or birthdates are retained.

After contacting the Facebook Connect moderators, I was surprised to learn that Facebook Connect can’t even be used as a shortcut. Let me explain: suppose my site allows users to send photos. The users have to fill out a form with, obviously, their photo, as well as a couple of mandatory fields, like their name, e-mail address, and city. With the Facebook Connect button, I can retrieve some data, like the name and city. This gets automatically entered into the corresponding fields on my form, and the users then fill in their e-mail addresses and validate the form.

According to the terms of service, I don’t have permission to record the users’ names and cities, because these details come from Facebook. That’s right, even if the users clicked the “I agree” button at the bottom of the form, it’s not as though they filled out the fields themselves.

In conclusion, Facebook Connect is good for sharing content and getting your name out there, but it’s not very useful when you’re trying to stockpile contacts.

For more information: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Category:Facebook_Connect

An example of use: http://www.somethingtoputhere.com/therunaround/