Why can my application see some user's likes and not others?

As far as permissions are concerned, I'm asking for email only (a开发者_如何转开发part from the basic info).

Now, I can use an application access token to query https://graph.facebook.com/FB-USER-ID/movies and get the list of movies the user likes, but this only works for some users and not others.

You're supposed to have to ask for the user_likes and/or friends_likes permission to be able to see this info. Because I can see it for some users, my first guess was they have that information public, and others don't. But I can't find such a setting on Facebook.

Anyone knows what's going on here?

The settings are in the gear cog on this page http://www.facebook.com/editprofile.php?sk=activities so you can set who can view what.

What you want to do is ask for your user_likes permission so that you can get that access to private profiles too.