Why We Disagree with The New York Times

> The Blackberry used by the Times got data about the friends of the journalist even if those friends didn't consent to that.

They did consent to that - by becoming your friends! Are you saying that every time you open your friends' Facebook pages, a notification should be sent to those friends requiring consent?

I think perhaps you meant something else - the Blackberry got data about the friends even though the user did not consent to that:

> The Hub also requested — and received — data that Facebook’s policy appears to prohibit. Since 2015, Facebook has said that apps can request only the names of friends using the same app. But the BlackBerry app had access to all of the reporter’s Facebook friends and, for most of them, returned information such as user ID, birthday, work and education history and whether they were currently online.

This is also questionable. Would you say that Chrome requests and receives prohibited data, when you use it to browse your friends list? We are talking about the distinction between client(full access) and third-party app(limited access). The cases described in the NYT article seem to be clients.

Further on your point:

> This is different from email and email clients. First, the expectations are different: if I send you an email I expect that you can forward it to your friends or anybody else unless I explicitly ask you not to.

You seem to be making an argument against your claim here. The parallel would be, if I accept your friend request, I expect that you can see my data and use it(i.e. by browsing your friends list on the Facebook site, or the Blackberry client).

> Second, local clients don't send mail to their authors, same for address books.

Perhaps, but doesn't that hinge on the definition of "local clients"? For example, my Outlook definitely shares information with a cloud server. Was "The Hub" an unknown/unexpected feature of the Blackberry client?

> Third, we know that Google and others can see most of our mails anyway, because most people use only webmail and messages are stored on the servers of those companies.

Are device manufacturers not included in those "others"?

The email client parallel with Google is even more in Facebook's favour. For example, is Mozilla stealing data about my friends when I use Thunderbird to access my gmail account? What if I explicitly ask it to store my emails in a "hub" of sorts, so I could sync them between PCs?

> Finally, FB didn't tell us about this API and what it can do.

I think this is the strongest point, but it's important to note that we are judging Facebook's old decisions by our new increased focus on privacy and user-focused control. As one user gave an example, we used to give our passwords to sites back in the day, so they could integrate with other services(actually, this still happens in some apps..)

> My suggestion for a social network of the future is to have a single API, used also by the official client. The servers must not trust any client, which is the usual thing we do in web development, and give all them the same level of access. It's up to the user to decide if they want to use the official client or one of any third party.

But isn't this literally what is happening here? The "secret" API does not have access to any data the "official" one(used by the site) doesn't(at least, the NYT does not present any evidence to that effect). You also seem to access it by giving your credentials to the "third party client", i.e. no "special access".

And even if I like something seeing it repeatedly online just annoys me more than it inspires me to buy their stuff. I think they'd get more bang for their buck by having social media personalities that align with their target market push their product (think: Nike).

If people are likely to be consumers of those things then they'll probably digest media related to those things or other media in the same demographic. This is classic marketing and it doesn't require the level of privacy abuse that Facebook has been trying to justify.

The "day FB was announced" it was exclusive to Harvard students and was just a cleaner version of MySpace and Friendster. It's unlikely you would have had strong opinions about Facebook, in particular, that you didn't also extend to those two, as well as AOL and sites like Digg.

And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then.

I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook.

DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.