Why is Stencil asking for so many permissions when connecting my Facebook account?

We understand that many websites and apps ask for permissions to use your Facebook account. We want to use this area to describe how Stencil works with Facebook.

Firstly, and most importantly, we will never post anything to your Facebook account unless you specifically press a button while using Stencil allowing us to do so. In that case, it will be very clear that Stencil is posting to your Facebook Profile or a Facebook Page you manage.

However, due to how Facebook works, we need to ask for a number of permissions in order to do something so simple. Here's a breakdown of the permissions we ask for, and why we ask for them:

• Publish Action permission: This is the main permission required for Stencil to be allowed to "publish" a photo that you create on Stencil to your profile. This is only done when you press a button on Stencil explicitly allowing us to do so.
• User Photos permission: We request this permission, not because we want to access your photos ourselves, but so that when you do post to your Facebook profile from Stencil, more people see it. By default, when posting to Facebook from a platform like Stencil, Facebook limits how photos show up. By allowing us the User Photos permission, we're able to post photos to your Timeline Photo Album, which by doing so, increases how many people will see it.
• User Posts permission: This permission is requested so that we can alert you when certain posts achieve milestones. For example, let's say you post a photo and it receives 1,000 likes. We want to alert you that the post is doing well, but in order to do so, we need to request the User Posts permission.
• Manage Pages permission: This permission is requested so that we can get a list of the Facebook Pages you manage. We won't know which pages you've liked; rather, just which ones you have permission to post to (for example, if you are an owner or an admin of a page).
• Publish Pages permission: This permission is requested so that we can let you post directly from Stencil to a Facebook Page you manage.
• Read Insights permission: Finally, the Read Insights permission is very similar to the User Photos permission. It allows us to alert you when photos posted via Stencil reach certain milestones (by checking how many comments, views or likes they have).

We understand that a lot of services, apps and websites may ask you to connect via Facebook. We want you to feel confident that we will never post to your Facebook Profile or a Page you manage without you explicitly choosing to do so.

You can disconnect your Facebook accounts at any time (from either your Stencil Settings page, or your Facebook Settings page). Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this.