Here's a new twist on the Facebook application development empire. Facebook is letting phones and addresses be accessible through the Facebook API.
This was put out on Friday by the development team to little fan fare, but it has a lot of implications to that "allow this app to access your data" dialog box. There is a limited amount of space in that graphic and like many of those Terms of Service agreements that no one reads, this dialog will eventually suffer similar usability issues.
That is, it's solely your responsibility to read, parse and act appropriately when a Facebook application asks for your personal data. Eventually there will be other elements that Facebook will want to share and those elements may not be so easily described. Or maybe they will be grouped and termed as "your preferences" making the language even harder to understand.
Facebook's approach is better than applications that don't give you any details such as iPhone and Android apps. But I'd say the Blackberry approach of changing permissions is the worst. There are SO many options and none of them are plain langauge.
The methods and interfaces by which data is being made available to 3rd parties is non-standard and will continue to confuse users to the point of not caring. As users click OK to make the screens go away as fast as possible to get to the good stuff, they will be losing their privacy little by little.
