I suppose I may have “connected” HuffPo to FB at one time but why does that persist when HuffPo claims I am not logged in? Facebook is making my friends list available to a website that I have not logged in to and is also sharing with me about those friends actions on HuffPo (that they joined). Now this may be more HuffPo’s fault than FB’s but it remains distressing!

I would think that anyone experienced in development or security with Facebook applications would understand the nature of the “Recently Used” list and immediately recognize what was going on. Despite the bug, there was never actually reason to think applications were being “added” to people’s profiles. If you visit the description page of a Facebook application, it will also appear as “Recently Used,” even if you never click through to the application.

But rather than taking the opportunity to tell users “don’t panic, here’s how apps work and it doesn’t look like these sites are getting data, but we’re double-checking Facebook to make sure,” Macworld published a story based on speculation and misunderstanding that led with a stretched comparison to malware and a scary headline that simply wasn’t true.

The issue of footprints you leave while surfing sites that pull content from Facebook is an entirely separate one that may bother many users and may be worthy of further investigation and reporting. But for a major tech news outlet to go from those footprints to “Facebook is secretly adding apps” or “Facebook is installing malware” (which is how the EFF understood Macworld’s piece) without a technical basis for such claims is, in my mind, both wrong and sensationalist.

When I read the Macworld article tonight, I went into my FB account, under application settings, and both Gawker and Fleshbot were listed as recently installed. They weren’t there last weekend, when I last visited the applications page on FB.

I was horrified, to say the least. I’d not clicked on a damn thing anywhere on either Gawker or Fleshbot, or visited their pages on FB, or clicked “Like” anywhere…all I’d done was to visit those sites while still logged into my FB account.

Sensationalism?