I am building an in-house application which would accumulate the information from several social networks at once. Possibly, the URL of the application will not be known or it will not be allowed anywhere outside localhost.
One of the information pieces I will be accumulating is FQL insights table information: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/insights/ . As you may notice, this information is private, so I just cannot fetch it anonymously.
The application itself is written in a "configure once and use forever" fashion, and possibly the person using the application will not be allowed to the Facebook login credentials at all.
My problem is the Facebook login. As I understand the login with "forever access" is now deprecated and Facebook does not allow API access the same way as Twitter does (creating the forever lasting key and forgetting about it). Question is:
Is there any way to overcome the fact that I need to ask the person for permissions every time I would like to fetch them? What can be the longest period between asking?
My current thoughts about it are:
Creating a dummy user for the 'manager' and giving him read-only
access to FB pages, therefore enabling him to log in to the account.
Then asking him for the permissions every (n) hours when I need them.
Automatic log in to the FB account given that we have the
login/password for the account and obtaining the API key myself.
Which is doable? Did anyone have any experience in doing this kind of things?
What can be the longest period between asking?
You can use Long-lived user access_token which is valid for 60 days.Use below FB call to get extended access token:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id=APP_ID&client_secret=APP_SECRET&grant_type=fb_exchange_token&fb_exchange_token=EXISTING_ACCESS_TOKEN
You can check more details here:
https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal/
One more point which is worth to note here:
When a user change his password, deauthorizes an app their OAuth token get expired.
Hope this help !
Related
I'm developing a login page for my Django application and am using Google login for users to gain access. My question is if they sign on successfully, do I need some way to change the state of their sign on for security purposes?
Might be a silly question but I honestly have no idea and want to be sure.
No, not a silly question but a thoughtful one.
Using Google or other OAuth2 providers for your login is Ok, you request a set of scopes and when your user login and accepts to continue, you can make requests within those scopes. The flow is outlined here for Google https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2.
Generally, you won't have far-reaching access to manipulate users' accounts and for some scopes, your app needs to be verified. For web applications, remember your users will see the scopes you are requesting and can always decline. Because of this, it's generally a good pattern to request the scopes when you need them.
If your public application uses scopes that permit access to certain user data, it must complete a verification process. If you see unverified app on the screen when testing your application, you must submit a verification request to remove it. Find out more about unverified apps and get answers to frequently asked questions about app verification in the Help Center.
https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/googlescopes
That's Google trying to keep users safe.
By the way, users can always revoke the access they have given your app at any time and for any reason.
I'm struggling with a the new OAuth verification process that Google has introduced. Earlier, my OAuth app was using sensitive scopes, and I made changes to ensure that the sensitive scopes are no longer required, and removed them from the OAuth consent screen configuration.
However, my OAuth consent screen is still being forced to go through the verification process (which is a black box and never seems to complete!)
I noticed the following user-cap being breached. Could the forced verification be because of this? How do I check which users are connected to my app, and also manually disconnect them? I have never bothered about this user-cap in the past, so it is quite possible that a number of these are internal/test users when the app was under active development and was being tested in production. Btw, if app simply deletes a user's refreshToken from the DB, and the user is forced to re-connect, will that count as +2 or +1 while calculating users against this cap?
Possibly related to How can I confirm the user limit of my google cloud/API? -- but that doesn't answer this question in detail.
I noticed the following user-cap being breached. Could the forced verification be because of this?
probably but only google can really anwser that
How do I check which users are connected to my app, and also manually disconnect them?
You cant there is no way for you to know what users where connected to your app and disconnect them unless you have saved a refresh token for these users if you have then you could remove them using the revoke command.
However this is no guarantee that the number google is displaying is going to change as it could be just a running total of users who have consented to your application in the past and not the ones who have currently consented. There is no way of know ing this as google hasnt told use.
if app simply deletes a user's refreshToken from the DB, and the user is forced to re-connect, will that count as +2 or +1 while calculating users against this cap
This may be true but that doesn't mean that the user has revoked your access to their application though their account. The only way to remove access is for the user to remove it in their account or for you to use the revoke endpoint to revoke them by force. Your application not having a refresh token doesn't mean that the user hasn't granted your application access.
Long story short your going to have to go though the verification process and wait for google to remove it when they see that you are no longer using the scopes that would require it.
Update: I have pinged someone on the team to see if this is working as intended or if it could be a bug. I will update this when i know more.
We have an app which could login via Facebook or Instagram. And we will pull some basic information of the user's from the site if you do so. We want to update all those basic informations at a certain period of time by the backend. It's not necessary for us to update informations while the user is using the app. I think update the basic information is just a test. The company might want to give some useful recommendations to the client for some commercial reasons. Any way, I checked that Facebook access token will live for 60 days,Instagram access token will not expire for now. May I refresh access token at backend without user involved?
There is no way to refresh the User Token automatically (on the server), it needs user interaction. Else, it would be pointless to implement a 60 days limit.
I've been scouring the net for ages with this one, and I'm not sure if there is a solution at all, but thought I'd post and see if there's a response... thanks in advance!
Several of our customers (who we build websites for) have their Facebook feeds brought into their website (and their Twitter feeds). Before the removal of the offline_access permission, this was no problem. We'd set our app up, authenticate the account, get the access token and then we could bring in the live feed into their websites forever. However, now with the new system, there doesn't seem to be a way of doing this without human intervention.
Essentially, we have these websites bringing in the feeds from the relevant Facebook accounts, with the long access_token (60 day token). However, when this limit is reached, there is no "user" to re-authenticate the app, as its just the server that makes these requests. Is it a case of having to set reminders for all these accounts, and then every two months we (as the web agency) have to log in to all the accounts and get new access tokens to provide to the scripts so they can carry on working? Or is there an alternative which I am just not seeing?
Thanks again!
Neil.
There is no alternative that I know of. Once the token expires after 60 days, the user must re-authenticate.
No alternative way, user must login to provide you the new access token
https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal/
I've been digging through all docs I can find, but I cannot seem to verify this..
When I'm doing app authorization I'm asking for publish_stream from my visitor.
From to FB docs (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/permissions/):
Enables your app to post content, comments, and likes to a user's stream and to the streams of the user's friends. With this permission, you can publish content to a user's feed at any time, without requiring offline_access. However, please note that Facebook recommends a user- initiated sharing model.
It very explicitly states that I'm able to post at ANY time. But, a regular user access token expires after a certain time. So that won't be usable to post.
However, an APPLICATION access token can be retrieved at any time, without any user interaction. And when I've tested, I can successfully publish to a users feed (yes on their feed, not my applications feed) using the app access token.
I haven't waited 2+ hours for the initially obtained User token to expire though, but even if the user session was logged out, I was still able to post using the app token.
So, this is what I want, right? Yes!
But this is not documented anywhere, so my question is:
Is this an allowed/recommended approach? Will I run into any problems around this?
Thank you
this is the right way to do it, so you'll not run into any problems etc.
Just use the App access_token to publish on you app users walls.
Greetings,
Fredyy