Wrangling your Facebook privacy settings—fine-tuning what data friends, advertisers, and apps can access—is a slog. The menus are labyrinthine, the wording obtuse. And it turns out that one of them is completely pointless. In fact, it hasn’t worked in years.

To be clear: This is not a case of Facebook sneaking one past you, at least not the way you might think. These settings no longer work because Facebook no longer allows the kind of data harvesting they control; in fact, these checks address the very data oversharing that let quiz developer Aleksander Kogan turn 270,000 installs into a menagerie of 50 million users, which he then illicitly passed along to political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

But the fact that Facebook never bothered to update that critical corner of its privacy settings, years after those changes went into effect, is downright baffling—and speaks to a general a lack of seriousness in the company’s attitude toward data transparency.

Apps With Friends

The setting in question is Apps Others Use, which you can find by signing onto Facebook, clicking the downward arrow in the upper right corner, then Settings, then Apps. (See? Labyrinth.)

Click Edit, and Facebook greets you with a list of informational categories about yourself that, a not-so-helpful description reads, your Facebook friends can “can bring with them when they use apps, games and websites.”

In truth, your friends weren’t bringing your information with them so much as developers were spring-boarding off of them to get to you. The data categories include your birthday, your activities, if you’re online, and posts on your timeline. The check-boxes number 13 in and all, with an additional three—friend list, gender, and the very broad “info you’ve made public”—that you can't opt out of.

The default settings for Apps Others Use, a privacy panel that has not actually done anything in years.

This is precisely how Facebook used to work. If you downloaded an app, you granted the developer of that app access to scads of information about all of your friends, presumably unbeknownst to either of you, unless you happened to be a close reader of buried preference menus.

It’s not, though, how Facebook has worked since 2014, when it shut off that spigot. Developers haven’t been able to raid someone’s friend list in years—unless both friends have downloaded the same app—despite what that particular setting would have you believe. After the publication of this article, Facebook did identify one edge case in which the setting would apply: If you have the "Posts on my timeline" option checked, an app could access a photo or video that a friend uploaded, but only if it appeared on your timeline, because you also allowed tagged photos of yourself to show up there. Everything else under that setting is useless. Facebook says that it will close that loophole, and get rid of the Apps Others Use setting altogether, as part of a larger privacy settings overhaul it announced Wednesday.1