Finding out which friends of yours use Bang With Friends is painfully easy

Hey, you, my innocent-looking Facebook friend. You’re using Bang With Friends, aren’t you. No? Well, thanks to an oversight found by The Daily Dot, I have proof.

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There was a two week period in 2012 where everybody was talking about Bang With Friends, the Facebook app that connects you to friends you’re “emotionally” interested in if they’ve also expressed an interest in you. It was intended to be completely anonymous, in that no one would know you signed up for the app, your identity being revealed only when you’re matched up with another person.

But if you play around with Facebook’s URL a little bit, you can see all your friends who have installed the app.

All you have to do is go to this link: https://www.facebook.com/browse/friends_using_app/?app_id=178205172320915

Facebook uses “friends_using_app” to tell the server to pull data about your friends in particular and then uses the “app_id” to define which app you’re talking about. This ID happens to be for Bang With Friends.

It’s pretty simple, and it seems you can do the same thing with any app on Facebook, as long as you can find the app ID number. For example, I found out that five of my friends use Match.com by going to the company’s Fan page. From there I clicked on “Go to app” and saw in the address bar a number that looked very similar to the app id shown in the Bang with Friends example. In this case, the number came after “client id=” in the address bar. I plugged it in and it worked.

However, it was difficult to find other fan pages that linked to their apps in the same way. Simply going to the app store and clicking on an app doesn’t produce the same results either. But if you know the app’s ID number, it’s simply a matter of plug and play.

Girls gossiping image via Shutterstock