Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook requires access to your Facebook profile’s public profile information and friends list. None of this information other than your Facebook User ID is stored.

Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook stores information on Heroku’s servers, which run on Amazon’s servers. We assume that Heroku and Amazon therefore has access to any information you supply to Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook, in addition to the application maintainer (me).

TL:DR; It’s your data. Unlike the so-called “privacy” policies of anti-privacy corporations like Facebook, this isn’t even a “policy” so much as a statement asserting that the free, open source code for Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook doesn’t do anything nefarious. But you should read the PGPs-FB code, obviously, because promises< are bad premises for privacy. When will Facebook let you audit its code, eh?

Why this page exists

Why a new page?

In February, 2014, Facebook updated its options for gender to include a pre-defined set of terms. Shortly after that, the developer of Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook (yours truly) was quoted in a Washington Post article critical of Facebook’s implementation. Shortly after that, despite not doing this for the near year Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook had been live and in-use before, Facebook began sending me developer alerts for Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook, citing noncompliance with their platform policies. No attempts to provide Facebook’s reviewers with a compliant “policy” have been accepted.

On March 10, 2014, Facebook disabled Preferred Gender Pronouns for Facebook (making it unavailable to all users, including the people who already use it), again citing noncompliance.

So I thought maybe if I could point Facebook to a specific page, rather than to a section of a page, it would appease their fascistic ways.

Let’s find out.