Facebook released Graph API (application-programming interface) v9.0 and Marketing API v9.0 this week, along with guidelines on what actions developers need to take and other things they should look out for.
Software engineer Kirk Thaker wrote in a blog post that starting Tuesday (Nov. 10), consumer and gaming app types submitting for App Review or transitioning from development mode to live mode must provide a data deletion request callback, or a URL giving users explicit instructions on requesting that their data be deleted.
Thaker said Facebook intends to fully enforce this requirement by Nov. 10, 2022, and developers with apps that have not yet complied will receive reminder notices with further instructions.
Citing recently enacted restrictions on data use by third-party apps, Thaker said certain apps that connect advertisers’ customer relationship management systems with Facebook’s API may lose the ability to retrieve and pass data from lead ads campaigns, adding that developers must complete App Review in order to continue retrieving that data.
Business apps must request advanced access for the leads_retrieval permission before upgrading, while non-business apps must switch to live mode and request leads_retrieval before upgrading.
The social network said developers that do not upgrade to Graph API v9.0 have until Feb. 9, 2021 to submit these requests and, after that date, those that fail to do so and are still using Graph API v8.0 or lower with standard access (business apps) or are still in development mode (non-business apps) will receive failed data calls when attempting to retrieve lead ads data.
As of Oct. 22, pre-recorded and looping videos are prohibited from the Facebook Live API and Facebook Live, and broadcasts cannot attempt to mislead viewers on the locations they are originating from.
Thaker explained that Facebook uses crawlers in order to ensure that URLs in third-party apps are live and accessible to users, so those URLs must be publicly available, and developers must ensure that the social network’s crawlers can access the URLs specified in apps’ settings, including those for privacy policy, connection and other product-specific tasks.
Policies on Instant Games were updated to ban the creation of user profiles using data requested via those games, and an additional policy is being added to prevent Instant Games from independently requesting personal or sensitive data from players.
Developers using automated chat experiences, such as bots, will be required to inform users that they are interacting with automated experience. Thaker wrote, “This update is particularly relevant to bots that serve the German market and German users.”
Instagram also underwent some changes, as the follower_count metric on the Instagram Insights API was updated, with Thaker cautioning that users of that API may have experienced a one-time drop in their follower counts when the change was implemented Tuesday.
He added that insights data for the follower_count metric is now available only for the past 30 days.
Several technical changes are being introduced to the Instagram Ads API to enable organic Instagram posts to be promoted as ads, and Thaker said the Instagram Graph API’s user ID will be returned on the Instagram Ads API, along with several other endpoints, to provide a more unified developer experience.
Facebook is removing access to POST /{business-id}/business_users, POST /{business-id}/system_users, and POST//access_tokens for developers that haven’t used these endpoints in the past 90 days.
Finally, Thaker shared a list of upcoming version depreciations:
- Feb. 8, 2020: Marketing API v6.0
- March 3, 2021: Marketing API v7.0
- May 4, 2021: Graph API v3.2
