Facebook: Is there a way of getting the current_lo

Question

Let's imagine I have a user ID and username. I manually open her Facebook page (namely, http://www.facebook.com/username. And there it is! The "lives in" field appears saying she lives in wherever. Nevertheless, when I try to fetch her current_location using FQL (using Python):

q = 'SELECT uid, username, current_location FROM user WHERE uid=%s' % aUser

I get None in the field current_location.

On the other hand, I can easily retrieve the current_location from my friends (I mean, for those friends who have made their location public):

SELECT current_location FROM user WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me())

I know about the permissions, but there should be a way of fetching locations. In effect, I can see the location (lives in) of user who are not even friends of my friends. How can I do it?? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There is a difference when dealing with Facebook as a normal user as opposed to an application accessing Facebook through their API.

An application doesn't have access to all the seemingly "public" information there is on the site. Their systems behave like this so that applications are not able to "mine data". Facebook doesn't want applications to be able to gather data on users that have not explicitly allowed that application to view their personal details.

It might be harmless if a person knows your general location, but if an application was to gather peoples locations all over Facebook, there would be a privacy issue.