The best things going for Bang with Friends, the app that lets you find folks that are down to bone, is that it's populated solely by people you know on Facebook (less risk than a sketchy rando) and that it promises anonymity (no risk that you're the one who looks sketchy). Well, almost no risk.
The Daily Dot unearthed a neat little link that shows you which of your Facebook friends have installed the app. Just log in, click, and oh god him? Him? But I thought he was . . . Wait til his lady finds outtttt. Buzzfeed then took the information for a whirl with Facebook Graph Search, the social network's ultimate stalking tool. (Married people who use Bang with Friends OFFICIAL, etc.)
One of the app's three anonymous male cofounders told Gawker the inadvertent exposure was likely due to people who signed up for the app when it first launched in January. At the time, Bang with Friends was installed with whatever privacy setting the user set as default for all apps, which could mean "Public" or "Friends." Later that month, they switched the default to "Only Me."
Our estimates are that it's only a few thousand people out of the 900,000+ users. Some of them may not care if others can see they use Bang With Friends, but we want everyone to know that just like any other Facebook app, they control who sees it.
Back in January, Bang with Friends was claiming a user base of about 30,000 and adding five users per minute. Through Facebook and Twitter, the company has tried alerting early users that its promise of anonymity comes with a Zuckerbergian asterisk.
We started this quickly (in a few hours) and it took off unexpectedly. Once it was getting big, Facebook Graph Search started opening up and we noticed that the default setting that Facebook has for apps is whatever the user has set for the default for all of their apps. Mine personally was set to "Friends". We immediately changed the default for our app to "Only Me" so that our users are protected and private.
Welcome to the velocity with which seamy info can become public.
All we found when we checked the link were a bunch of bloggers and editors, who could defensibly claim "research" purposes. But you, no doubt powerful reader, will probably find much more scintillating results. Let us know in the comments and remember, Kinja never met a screenschot she didn't like.
To reach the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.