Facebook removes BK's friend-culling app

Burger King recently launched a hugely popular Facebook application encouraging users to ditch the mates they didn't like.

Ditch ten of them and you were awarded a free Whopper. As PR stunts go it was genius. TechRadar's US guys immediately started culling friends the second they heard about it, in anticipation of BK's heavenly flame-grilled cheap meat patties.

An impressive 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week as a result of BK's ditch yer' mates campaign.

Facebook not happy

Facebook doesn't seem to be too happy about the friend-culling though, having now shut BK's Facebook friend-culling app down, citing privacy issues:

"After extensive discussions with the developer, we've made some changes to the application's behavior to assure that users' expectations of privacy are maintained," a Facebook rep told the Insider Facebook blog.

"We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users' expectations of privacy.

This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions."

Should BK's friend-culling app return, we'll let you know. Then we'll delete you from our friends list.