Question

Let’s say I’ve got an app where I’ve stored users’ Facebook ID numbers after they’ve approved the app (so that they can access their own personal app page). Now I want to store users’ birthdays in my app, so that they can get a birthday notification on their personal app page. Assume that users have already given my app permission to access their birthdays.

Is there any way for my app to automatically query Facebook using a user’s ID#, get the user’s birthday, and then update our app database with the user’s birthday WITHOUT requiring them to manually log in and update the app? Again, the user has given the app permission to access birthdays, so I’m not asking for any new permissions. I just would prefer to avoid having to go back and ask all the app users to do something (particularly when they’ve already given our app permission to access that info).

I’m just not seeing any way to authenticate the app to get extended information on the user without having the user log in again and manually update the app. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Thankfully, an application can not decide to take permissions from a user without asking. A user will always have to grant an application permissions.

An alternative would be on initial authentication, to request the email and user_birthday permissions, store that data in your database and once a day (possible initiated by a cron job) send emails programatically to the users on the day of their birth.

Don’t forget to send them some cake too 😉

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