My thoughts on Sophos Facebook safety Letter

 Today Sophos has put out an open letter to Facebook about safety. Now I mainly want to talk about the second point, because as you may have noticed in this blog a majority of the posts are about social scams and spam. For those of you who do not want to click on the link here is point number two:

 2) VETTED APP DEVELOPERS
It is far too easy to become a developer on Facebook. With over one million app developers already registered on the Facebook platform, it is hardly surprising that your service is riddled with rogue applications and viral scams. Only vetted and approved third-party developers should be allowed to publish apps on your platform.

 Now I agree something needs to be figured out to lower the amount of those scam/spam apps spreading around. I think what should be added is a combo of Facebook Approval and Community voting. All not yet Facebook approved apps should have a up/down voting button for users to rank the app. Apps with lower rating should not be able to tag others in photos, post messages on friends wall, and post on the users wall. The amount of power each users vote should take into account time user has been a member on Facebook, time user spent on Facebook, friends of user, tagged photos, and so on. That would prevent spammers from messing with the system by up voting their apps. In my opinion that will deeply lower the amount of scam/spam apps going through Facebook.

 Facebook approved apps would not have the ranking option for user to prevent users from trying to down vote apps they just don't like or to be bored and try to down vote all the apps.