Burger King’s Facebook Gimmick Gets Eaten

A Facebook application offering free food for terminating Facebook friendships has been nixed by the social media site for privacy reasons.

Would you sacrifice 10 of your Facebook friends for a free Whopper? Apparently, thousands of people would, as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice app, which offered exactly that premise, wiped 233,906 friendships off the social networking site in a week, and has since been shut down by Facebook.

A Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook that the application’s somewhat nefarious premise wasn’t really the reason for its demise, but its violation of Facebook’s privacy rules: it posted a public feed whenever friends were deleted because of it, which the policy specifically bars.

“We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions,” he said. “In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.”

Though the original interview indicated that Facebook had modified, not removed, the application, Burger King’s official Whopper Sacrifice site says it has been removed, and searches within Facebook no longer turn it up.