Facebook is now letting its application developers collect users’ home addresses and mobile phone numbers.

Developers already had a permissions button so they could latch onto all of the information a user puts on a home page that is accessible to everyone.

Now, by clicking the same button, a user also gives developers a way to access more personal contact information.

App developers, blogging Monday on the Facebook Developers site, were thrilled to be able to get real-time information. “This is a dream come true,” said app developer Paul Simon.

“We are very much committed to this real-time updates feature,” Facebook blog administrator Wei told developers. “We are planning to keep working on it to eventually make every (sic) data available through real-time updates.”

Accessing users’ personal contact information requires the user to give permission first by clicking the “allow” button that automatically pops up.

Despite that precaution, said security website Sophos.com, “There are just too many attacks happening on a daily basis which trick users into doing precisely this.”

Rogue applications already post spam links to users’ walls, pushing users over to “survey scams that earn them commission,” said Sophos. Now, a rogue app could collect phone numbers to sell and also make users more vulnerable to identity theft.

In introducing the changes, Facebook’s Jeff Bowen explained it lets a developer’s application “cache data and receive updates, rather than polling Facebook’s servers,” which in turn can “improve the reliability of your application and decrease its load times.”

App developers can’t grab all information about Facebook’s 500 million users, yet. Facebook points out that certain connections (home, tagged, posts, likes, photos, albums, videos, groups, likes, notes, events, inbox, outbox, updates) “can’t be subscribed to yet,” but they hope to add those “in the coming days.”

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