Getting Facebook friendlist data

[mahtai]

So I'm looking at the Facebook Graph API but I'm seeming to find that in order to get any data on your friends you need permissions from your friends. That makes sense, but I'm a little confused on how to get those permissions to the app or whoever is making the requests; at the moment I, with no permissions from my Facebook friends, can find out how many friends I have and no data about any of them individually, and I have to put in an auth token to even let the API know I am allowed to see that much about myself. Anyone have a better idea how it works?