So, as with many other things in life, banging my head against the problem helped a bit. I found out that I can create test users for my app - upto 500 of them. The documentation is at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/. I was able to create test users for my app, login to facebook with those test users and verify that my actions did not show up on public pages. Phew, now i need to deface these public property no more. :-) When doing this, you need to use the app access token not the regular user accesss token. To get that, follow this link: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/applications/. The last gotcha I faced was that the second link above states that you should have a parameter named grant_type=client_credentials in your graph request. I kept looking for types of client credentials that i could substitute what i thought was a place holder named "client_credentials". That term needs to go in verbatim. (GOTCHA). Also, twice when I tried to create a user, facebook responded with an error json saying that an "unknown error has occured". I was almost ready to give up... but like i said before, banging head against the problem helps. Facebook responded with a json like so after the third request:
{
"id":"*******1832",
"access_token":"*****",
"login_url":"https://www.facebook.com/platform/test_account_login.php?user_id=*****&n=*****",
"email":"****",
"password":"*****"
}
Hope this helps someone else who might also be looking for this info.