My Buddies App On Facebook: Privacy Extortion?

UPDATE (Dec. 14, 2008): A user has created a Facebook Group against My Buddies. Meanwhile, as Beth says below, My Buddies has mutated into My Friends...

I recently received a series of notifications on Facebook alerting me that friends of mine had answered various personal questions about me. One notification claimed that a high school friend had just answered a specific yes/no question about my sexual orientation. Clicking on the link labeled “What did she say?”, I was invited to join My Buddies – a new Facebook application with an icon identical to the default running man on AIM, implying a connection to AOL that I doubt exists.

The landing page states, as is sadly typical, that the application demands access to my account, and that “[a]llowing My Buddies access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work.” This page did not elaborate on what content the application requires to run.

I would not ordinarily have accepted these terms, even to find out what my friend had opined about my sexual orientation. I knew I intended to blog about it, however, so I went to the next phase. I found that My Buddies requires that you invite five of your friends to join the application before it will reveal any answers. I had seen enough; this is where I hopped off the train.

The My Buddies application on Facebook clearly oversteps the line of propriety, amounting in my view to privacy extortion. My Buddies asks sensitive questions about an individual, reports to that individual that the questions were answered by a friend in some way, and requires the individual to invite others to sign up before hearing the answer (or even who else can see the answer). My Buddies attempts in this way to strong arm user adoption. I reported this application to Facebook. I invite you to do the same.

UPDATE (Dec. 14, 2008): A user has created a Facebook Group against My Buddies. Meanwhile, as Beth says below, My Buddies has mutated into My Friends...