SchoolFeed: The Facebook app everyone needs to avoid

Late one evening about a month ago, I received a notification on Facebook saying that one of my friends had invited me to join SchoolFeed, a Classmates.com-like social network that connects users with old high school buddies. The service uses a Facebook Canvas app to scrape a wide breadth of user data, and automatically build user profiles on Facebook and its stand-alone site. Mindlessly, I approved the SchoolFeed app -- which is the only way to join SchoolFeed -- and promptly forgot all about it.

The next day, I noticed a surprising number of notifications from SchoolFeed in my inbox saying that others had added me to their network. Intrigued that so many were using the service -- I clicked on SchoolFeed, and quickly realized that I would likely never use it. I've already connected with most of my classmates on Facebook, after all. Why do I need an entirely separate service to do the same? Bored and put-off, I promptly removed the app from my Facebook account, and decided to forget the whole thing all over again -- or so I thought.

Frustration builds

Since deleting the SchoolFeed app on Facebook, I have received more than a dozen notifications saying that "so-and-so has added [me] as a friend on SchoolFeed." Odd, I thought, considering I'd removed the app weeks ago. I checked my list of apps on Facebook and, sure enough, SchoolFeed was nowhere to be found. I asked some of my friends on Facebook if they'd had a similar experience. They had.

"I've told it I don't know how many times to block the [SchoolFeed] app, but it doesn't do anything," says Alan Hughes, a friend and fellow Facebook user. "I just told a post from the app on my Timeline two times to 'Remove All Actions by SchoolFeed,' and then marked it as spam, and each time the post stays exactly where it is, nothing has changed. and it has never even been listed in my apps list."

A number of other Facebook friends told similar stories. Those I spoke with also said they didn't know that they were signing up for an entirely different service, outside the confines of Facebook, when they approved the SchoolFeed app. With my suspicions confirmed, I decided to look deeper into why SchoolFeed maintains user accounts even though those users have revoked approval for the Facebook app. So far, I've been met only with silence.

What is SchoolFeed, anyway?

Before I go on, some background: Founded by Lance Tokuda, co-founder and former CEO of social game-maker RockYou, SchoolFeed is a free "classmate network." SchoolFeed allows users to not only find people who attended the same high school, but also people in the same graduating year -- a granular search option that Facebook lacks. Unlike its competitor Classmates.com, SchoolFeed is free to use. SchoolFeed users can earn virtual currency on the site by posting content, adding friends, or other activities. As TechCrunch reports, the virtual currency can then be used to play Bingo, or access real-life yearbooks, which users can upload to the site. And just this month, SchoolFeed debuted a new service that allows users pay $40 to have SchoolFeed upload their entire yearbook for them.

Launched last summer, SchoolFeed currently boasts around 10 million users, and has so far raised about $1.75 million in funding from First Round Capital, CrossLink Capital, Interwest Partners, and SK Telecom.

Questions, questions, questions

The SchoolFeed app pulls nearly all your personal and network information from your Facebook account -- a detail I foolishly overlooked before approving the app. This includes all your basic information (name, gender, list of friends, etc), profile information (likes, dislikes, movies, books, music, etc), and all your photos. It also allows SchoolFeed to send you emails at the address associated with your Facebook login, and to post updates and game scores on your behalf. While this might be a bit much for some users, access of this kind is not out of the norm. Naively, I assumed that access to this information would be revoked as soon as I disallowed the app. Not so.

After I realized that removing the SchoolFeed app did nothing, I visited the SchoolFeed website to see how to actually delete my profile. I immediately hit a brick wall: In order to delete your SchoolFeed account, you must re-approve the Facebook app, once again allowing the service access to all your information. At that point, I started to get angry. So I did what any perturbed tech journalist does in such a scenario: I started asking questions.

My first email went out to Facebook. Here are the questions I sent:

1. If a Facebook user approves SchoolFeed, but later removes the app, is SchoolFeed violating any terms of service by keeping a user's Facebook data, even though the user has revoked the app's approval?

2. If yes, do any other apps do this, and can you provide any examples?

3. Have a significant number of users reported SchoolFeed for being spam?

4. Has Facebook received any other complaints about SchoolFeed?

- Facebook ads are going mobile

- University of LOLz: Digging for the roots of college memes

- TechCrunch Disrupt winner Shaker: What exactly is this disrupting?

- Microsoft's So.cl learns a lesson from Facebook and puts college students first

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends