Get Visitors Name from Logged In Social Networks

Question

I have been reading this post http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/detect-visitor-social-networks/ about detecting whether a user is signed in to a social network, and was just wondering if anyone knows if it is possible to display a users name using the social networks API?

The functionality would be for a welcome message to a website, and a fallback would create a generalised message if a first name could not be determined. I'm not even looking to log them in to the website, just grab a first name.

I have built quite a few sites where a user must confirm with facebook that they are sharing their information with my website before I can grab any data, but I'm wondering if anyone has seen any situations where you are able to just grab a first name without needing confirmation from the user?

Answer 1

Have you seen this?

How get public information of a user in facebook without requesting for his/her permission?

According to the answer, you can get public Facebook data with just an app token.

Answer 2

Short answer: this is not possible without the user signing in through the Facebook API.