Their argument here is basically like being accused of murder and using "since murder is illegal, we did not murder someone" as a defense.
Why We Disagree with The New York Times
31–40 of 325 posts
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#32In every situation, people from Facebook would probably be better off if they didn’t talk.
This article is really just skeezy. Reads like “we were just doing all the stuff you accused us of, but it’s ok because we are huge creeps too.” It’s so cringe-worthy.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#33It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc. > These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than…
Similar to how they "prevented" apps from abusing their API through policy, while simultaneously doing nothing with their construction of the API to prevent apps from breaking the policy. Apps are prohibited from filling in content that (by policy) must come only from the user, but oh we're going to give you all the tools and capabilities required to march right on ahead and do what we agreed you wouldn't do. Then proceed to inconsistently and incompletely enforce policy only when complaints are registered.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#34The limited responses so far in this thread only reinforce many companies decisions to pull support for public apis. How many years have developers been complaining that twitter and facebook have been restricting access to apis for 3rd parties, but now all of a sudden they're evil for ever offering apis to begin with?
There's nothing wrong with offering a public API. There's everything wrong with offering a secret, non-public API where you give a third party I didn't consent to full access to all of my data.
See how that's a bit different? One of them is offering public information (say, stock quotes), publicly. One of them is offering private information (my sexual orientation and date of birth) to tons of third parties I didn't consent to having that information shared with.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#35> It’s hard to remember now but back then there were no app stores.
Bunch of nonsense. Of course there were.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#36The New York Times should be ashamed of itself. Facebook let companies like Apple integrate with their platform.
To do so, these companies sent the same sequence of bytes from your mobile phone to the Facebook server, as the Facebook app does, or as any person can do. I can write my own Facebook app today, and there is nothing that Facebook can do about it, except sue me.
THAT IS A GOOD THING. LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES AGO THE COMMUNITY WAS FIGHTING IN THE COURTS FOR PACKAGES SENT OVER THE INTERNET TO NOT BE CRIMINALIZED.
Remember the whole thing about violating the terms of services of a company which forbids scraping making you a criminal hacker?
The only thing Facebook said to Apple is: Let's make a deal, we will not sue you, you put our logo into your phone, also we promise not to break your app.
No data was given to anyone! This is literally my iPhone/Samsung/Blackberry running an app that gives ME access to MY Facebook data.
It doesn't even go to Blackberry's server! The nerve of people to pretend as if the data ON MY PHONE is someone in the hands of a third party, as if my phone really belongs to the manufacturer. Again, we used to be fighting for the idea that these devices should belong be unlocked, should be under our control. Now you guys pretend that data my phone downloads from Facebook is somehow a violation because I decided to use an app that someone else wrote.
There is no possible universe in which that is bad. Think about the ramifications of these new ethics that people suggest here.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#37The one thing I really miss since leaving fb in March, are the groups. Things like playing in local sports pickup games are easier because everyone has fb so the groups were more active. I now use my wife's account for this, but I really wish another option had some traction, then I could leave fb forever.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#38It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc. > These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than…
Sadly what FB is doing is using contracts to defer the blame in-case of legal action. Shitty but standard practice.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#39The New York Times should be ashamed of itself. Facebook let companies like Apple integrate with their platform. To do so, these companies sent the same sequence of bytes from your mobile phone to the Facebook server, as the Facebook app does, or as any person can do. I can write my own Facebook app today, and there is nothing that Facebook can do about it, except sue me. THAT IS A GOOD THING. LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES…
The NYT article says that Facebook told them that some partners stored that data on their servers. I note that this Facebook rebuttal does not refute that point in regard to the device partners. (Which could be a possible confusion or misleading quote in the NYT article, conflating all partners with the device integration partners, so I'd like it to be clarified somehow)
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#40In this FB response, they seem not to disagree with any of what the NYTimes had to say. This is called justification, not disagreement.