Question

Is there a way to get public information of a user without requesting for his/her permission? In facebook I know that we can get the basic informations of the user such as id, name, picture, gender, and his locale (but not his other public information) without requesting for his permission. Look at this link: http://zesty.ca/facebook/
I examine the source code and found out that he gets the access token. How does this link do that. How did he get the access token and get the public information of the user?

Answer 1

You can query the public data with just the app token that your Facebook app has after initialization to access contents like :-

• id
• name
• first_name
• middle_name
• last_name
• gender
• locale
• Others listed here with either no access token or app access token

To do so, after initializing your Facebook application like

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
   'appId'  => 'APP-ID',
   'secret' => 'APP-SECRET',
));

You can query Graph api simply as

$user_public_profile = $facebook->api('/user','GET');

And retrieve the data.