Getting Facebook user's privacy settings via Facebook API

Question

I'm writing a javascript application to get Facebook user's privacy settings. Can I get them from privacy-setting table and is there any fql reference on the topic?

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure that what you want to do is impossible with FQL. The only privacy-related FQL tables (namely http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/privacy/ and http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/privacy_setting/) respectively contain information about the visibility settings of objects (like photos or posts) and the privacy settings a user has chosen with regards to the querying app. Meanwhile the users table (see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/user/) contains nothing privacy-related.

The Graph API similarly does not provide any means to access the information you want. The user object (see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/) allows you to access all the same privacy-related information as FQL, but does not let you access the user's privacy settings.

Are you sure you really need to get the user's privacy settings? I'm not entirely familiar with this stuff, but I'm pretty sure that:

• If you are concerned about whether posts your app makes on the user's timeline will be public, that is covered entirely by the information you can pull out of the privacy_setting table.
• If you're going to be using extended permissions to post on the user's behalf via the graph API, then you get to explicitly specify the privacy settings of the objects you create anyway.

Perhaps I just lack imagination, but I can't think of any scenario in which knowing a user's privacy settings would be useful, given that for basically any object you post as a user you can specify to whom it will be visible and thereby override your privacy settings. What is your use case?

If you don't need to be 100% certain, you could always just pull the privacy settings of objects they've posted previously and see what the most common setting is, and then guess from that what their defaults are.