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Title

Instapaper demands permissions

Description

<img attachment="instapaper-logo.png" align="left">I use Instapaper quite heavily for managing the content I read. After I've read something, I usually archive it so that I can search it later and I "like" it if I found it interesting. You can see my <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/archive/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes" source="" author="">archive</a> and <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes" source="" author="">likes</a> as RSS feeds, but I was looking for something a little pushier. I have a <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo" source="" author="">Twitter account</a> that I don't use very much. It currently tweets blog posts from <a href="http://earthli.com/news" source="" author="">earthli News</a> almost exclusively. I figured it it might be kind of useful if I could have Instapaper automatically post articles that I've liked to Twitter. Instapaper has a connector that you can use, so I checked that out. It requires the following permissions, <img src="{att_link}screen_shot_2014-03-09_at_19.58.32.png" align="none" caption="Instapaper's required permissions for Twitter"> Let's take a closer look at those, shall we?<fn> My comments are <hl>highlighted</hl>. <ul> Read Tweets from your timeline. <hl>O-K … pretty much anyone can</hl> See who you follow, and follow new people. <hl>Follow new people? Are you crazy?</hl> Update your profile. <hl>Why would I let you do that? Why would you want to? WTF?</hl> Post Tweets for you. <hl>This is actually the one I <i>want</i>; why is it combined with all of the others?</hl> </ul> Luckily I remembered that I'd already authorized another application to update Twitter for me. It's called <a href="http://twitterfeed.com" source="" author="">Twitterfeed</a> and can update Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn...but not Google+<fn>. This is the tool that I use to cross-post content from my <a href="http://dev.earthli.com/news/view_user_rss.php?name=marco&format=rss&content=full_html" source="" author="">earthli News feed</a> to Twitter. I'm a little afraid to see which permissions I granted to this thing over a year ago...but it's already got them, so adding another feed can't make it worse. Instead of granting Instapaper permission to follow new people and update my profile for me, I added the feed to my likes to TwitterFeed instead. It seems to be working. <hr> <ft>The answer to this question is always "yes". You should always know which permissions your application have when you give them the ability to log in as you and use other applications.</ft> <ft>The last time I checked, it was because Google+ doesn't offer a straightforward API for inserting content on behalf of another user.</ft>