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Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

developers.facebook.com

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Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#111

Post by thinkloop »

jsjohnst wrote: post #104
thinkloop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear there is some kind of downvote bot on HN - reasonable posts are often down-voted grey within the first few minutes (like this one's parent), and then eventually climb up to a reasonable place, when, what feels like, the humans have had time to see it - has this been noticed or discussed before? I'd be curious to know if some accounts are serial downvoters, especially as soon as comments go up - does HN look f…

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. FYI, want to start off with that to help indicate the likely reason for any downvotes you got on this post. > One thing for sure is that a lot of people downvote based on disagreement rather than a comment's quality - which in my opinion is not right Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it doesn’t make it a…

> FYI, want to start off with that to help indicate the likely reason for any downvotes you got on this post.

Thanks, I did know the price, no problem.

> @Dang has said on multiple occasions that the intent wasn’t as you are assuming. Apologies I don’t have a link handy at the moment.

I would be curious to read dang's opinion on this if anyone has it, it's not in the guidelines.

> Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it doesn’t make it any more valid than other’s and doesn’t make it a fact either.

Yes, that is the definition of an opinion.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#112

Post by FireBeyond »

IBM wrote: post #100
FireBeyond wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't consider it at all possible that "because privacy" is the PR spin on it? When iAd launched, it required mid six digit buys for ads. Users complained that they only would see the same half-dozen ads. Over the course of the next two years, that was steadily reduced, low six digits, fifty thousand, and the complaints stayed the same. Before iAd shut its doors, you could get ad buys for a minimum of _fifty doll…

Those ads were priced that high for a reason, to keep garbage off the iPhone. iAd only really made sense as a way to enable developers to make money from their apps in a high quality way. All the stipulations don't make sense for a pure ad-tech business. And I don't think a former iAd exec has any reason to be doing PR for Apple when the purpose of that WSJ story and his cooperation with it was to pimp his new job/st…

> Those ads were priced that high for a reason, to keep garbage off the iPhone.

Perhaps so. And only a few companies bought ads, which pissed off their customers (the ones that Apple is "fighting to protect") because of the repetition.

So Apple lowered the barrier. A failure to realize.

Not sure how this is a dispute of what I said, or somehow proves that iAd wasn't a failure, but a planned exit.

> And I don't think a former iAd exec has any reason to be doing PR for Apple when the purpose of that WSJ story and his cooperation with it was to pimp his new job/startup.

If you think that Apple (or any company of that size) doesn't have non-disparagement agreements with any corporate officer or down to SVP level, at the _very minimum_, you're mistaken.

Even those "we screwed up" articles you see are very carefully stage managed. They're (almost exclusively, save some very isolated high profile situations) scripted as a PR effort to manage customer satisfaction.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#113

Post by grzm »

thinkloop wrote: post #111
jsjohnst wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. FYI, want to start off with that to help indicate the likely reason for any downvotes you got on this post. > One thing for sure is that a lot of people downvote based on disagreement rather than a comment's quality - which in my opinion is not right Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it doesn’t make it a…

> FYI, want to start off with that to help indicate the likely reason for any downvotes you got on this post. Thanks, I did know the price, no problem. > @Dang has said on multiple occasions that the intent wasn’t as you are assuming. Apologies I don’t have a link handy at the moment. I would be curious to read dang's opinion on this if anyone has it, it's not in the guidelines. > Everyone is entitled to their opinio…

> "I would be curious to read dang's opinion on this if anyone has it, it's not in the guidelines."

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20downvote&sort=by...

A couple of the more recent comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778#16574021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16336937

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#114

Post by cmac2992 »

humanfromearth wrote: post #2

Pausing app reviews is annoying for sure, but not allowing new users to authorize their app is really bad. Meaning that new customers can't connect with facebook anymore to access their own data using OAuth! We don't need permissions about your friends, your photos, or whatever. Just accessing their own messages and posts (which is what our customers want to see in our app and pay for). I know they are shell-shocked…

>not allowing new users to auth their app

Where does it say this? Is that in separate reporting? That would be huge.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#115

Post by anonrrudnd »

downandout wrote: post #58

The Facebook API has been useless since 2014 when most access to friend data was cutoff. Since then, if your objective was data collection, that could be easily achieved by scraping publicly available information (many friends lists are public, there are many public posts, etc. - certainly enough to use in aggregate to formulate campaign strategies etc.). I suspect that will be the next “scandal,” since in 2018, peop…

You can create custom audiences by Facebook id (or email, phone number, etc)

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/606443329504150?helpr...

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#116

Post by jnbiche »

thinkloop wrote: post #67
headsoup wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing Apples to oranges (I'm sorry) Apple doesn't have a social network. They also don't rely on advertising and 3rd party data brokering. It's easy for Apple to be the 'good guys' here when they have physical products as their profit generators. FOSS would have worked better in the Facebook case too as people and developers would know/discover a) where their data is and b) what risks it faces

I swear there is some kind of downvote bot on HN - reasonable posts are often down-voted grey within the first few minutes (like this one's parent), and then eventually climb up to a reasonable place, when, what feels like, the humans have had time to see it - has this been noticed or discussed before? I'd be curious to know if some accounts are serial downvoters, especially as soon as comments go up - does HN look f…

I'm fairly sure there are multiple downvote bots operating on HN. Frequently, certain comments to topics considered by some as "political" on HN will get an immediate 2 or 3 downvotes in the first 30 seconds, and then over the course of the next 2 or 3 hours, be upvoted back up to black.

Although it's possible that there's some confounding happening here, such as the handful of people who hit refresh on HN hundreds of times a day are also ones who can't stand certain political viewpoints. But it seems unlikely. Far more likely is that there are a handful of downvote bots in operation on a keyword basis.

It's not a huge deal to me, but it does seem kind of obvious.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#117

Post by IAmEveryone »

downandout wrote: post #75
alasdair_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook advertising cannot be targeted by user ID anymore This doesn't matter much if you can do essentially the same thing by targeting with extremely specific location and demographic data.

You can’t “essentially do the same thing” in the way you mention though. You are bringing up a second issue, that is also not allowed. You cannot, for example, use specific GPS coordinates to target a house or even a group of houses. Anything less specific than that and the effect gets watered down significantly, and the platform simply doesn’t allow anything close to that kind of “extremely specific” location target…

The idea is this:

given the complete graph and add some external data, you can identify those users you should advertise to, i. e. jane@test.com.

BUT: what is still possible, and what Cambridge Analytica was actually building, is slightly different: with a statistical sample of maybe a few ten thousand complete profiles, you can build a statistical model that targets your advertisement not to a user, but a set of criteria: "Males between the ages of 35 and 40 living in a mid-sized town in Texas who liked curling and Star Wars Episode I, but has never traveled to Australia". This is still perfectly possible.

It's likely the latter model performs at least 90% as well as the former, with an upward trajectory as methods are improved. Note that CA probably didn't get this working terribly well. But someone else definitely will.

Intuitively, I am far more uncomfortable with the first. But practically, I can't really think of a reason why.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#118

Post by downandout »

anonrrudnd wrote: post #115
downandout wrote: post #58

The Facebook API has been useless since 2014 when most access to friend data was cutoff. Since then, if your objective was data collection, that could be easily achieved by scraping publicly available information (many friends lists are public, there are many public posts, etc. - certainly enough to use in aggregate to formulate campaign strategies etc.). I suspect that will be the next “scandal,” since in 2018, peop…

You can create custom audiences by Facebook id (or email, phone number, etc) https://www.facebook.com/business/help/606443329504150?helpr...

This only applies to people that have installed your Facebook app (not to their friends). In the CA case, that means they would have been able to specifically target a few hundred thousand people, but they didn’t do that because the app had long been deleted before the 2016 election.

Facebook actually cares about this issue. The bug bounty I was awarded arose from the fact that you could build a custom audience email list using user_nickname@facebook.com without knowing their actual email address. So you could simply write a bot that visited Facebook.com/profile.php?id=4 and see that it redirected to Facebook.com/zuck, and now knowing that “zuck” is the user nickname corresponding to user ID 4, you could then put him in your custom audience list using zuck@facebook.com. That worked for all 2 billion people on the platform, because at one point Facebook gave everyone an @facebook.com email address that mapped to their account. However, that issue has been fixed and was fixed before the election.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#119

Post by mistermann »

jnbiche wrote: post #116
thinkloop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear there is some kind of downvote bot on HN - reasonable posts are often down-voted grey within the first few minutes (like this one's parent), and then eventually climb up to a reasonable place, when, what feels like, the humans have had time to see it - has this been noticed or discussed before? I'd be curious to know if some accounts are serial downvoters, especially as soon as comments go up - does HN look f…

I'm fairly sure there are multiple downvote bots operating on HN. Frequently, certain comments to topics considered by some as "political" on HN will get an immediate 2 or 3 downvotes in the first 30 seconds, and then over the course of the next 2 or 3 hours, be upvoted back up to black. Although it's possible that there's some confounding happening here, such as the handful of people who hit refresh on HN hundreds o…

I get downvoted on agreeable comments on 4 day old conversations....there's definitely bots or something going on.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#120

Post by ucaetano »

landryraccoon wrote: post #103
coliveira wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in that case, he and his family will for a long time have the political benefit of deciding how the money will be spent. And political advantages usually translate into economical advantages, so it can also be viewed as a scheme at some level.

I don't think this cynicism is warranted. No matter how much benefit you think the goodwill of others is towards you for giving away your money, is dwarfed by the benefit of having billions of dollars . If the political benefit really outweighed the costs, then every single billionaire would be doing the same thing, purely out of selfish interest. How many of them are?

> If the political benefit really outweighed the costs, then every single billionaire would be doing the same thing, purely out of selfish interest.

Well, they are doing for the selfish interest of feeling and looking good.

And I'm completely ok with that!

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