Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

Give it a few.

It's only a matter of time until the Leftist tech platforms ban a critical amount of content producers and make themselves irrelevant. After all, each creator you ban represents a multiple of monetizable viewers that you just partially or totally told "don't come to my site".

Take Rumble for example. It still has a substantial amount of gristle, but a growing amount of mainstream content. It is also now a publicly listed company undergoing hockey stick growth at a time when most companies are not.

This is honestly the exact reason I haven't tried to develop a facebook app or extension... I've heard that the smallest mis-step can get your account suspended like this. Not like a 'here's a warning' but 'you read a variable you shouldn't have, now your whole account is deleted'.

This isn't usually a problem, except Facebook has a pretty unique position in our society. It might be the only social media some of our immediate family have. It's the de-facto social media presence for some smaller community organizations (like parent groups) and hobby groups. A ban from Facebook is a lot more deeply impactful than being banned from, say, gmail or something.

I could understand if they sent the developers a cease-and-desist or initiated some sort of legal action with this as a potential consequence. I could even understand blocking the app until it was resolved. But actually searching up the dev team and banning their personal Facebook accounts for something they're building on Instagram...

This makes it so much scarier because Oculus is also Meta, and the community there is still heavily reliant on developers to grow since Meta has sunk so much money into it and it still hasn't quite found its footing in the market. Do they think more people are going to develop for it if a potential consequence is their facebook account will be perma-banned as a first-resort? Would you be willing to experiment on that platform?

Anyways, I'm no gazillion-dollar monopoly, but it seems vindictive more than good business sense.

> They tweeted that they reverse-engineered the Android API, which would likely get personally you banned anywhere

The question is - how do we even allow it do be legal? Not being able to reverse engineer applications running on your own devices is some kind of bullshit dystopia, tolerated only because average citizen is not technical enough to realize how dystopian it is.

> Are you accusing these developers of violating privacy?

Yes, the app is downloading private user messages (ostensibly to show a modified messaging interface) and private photos, according to their feature list.

This isn't a simple DNS-level ad-block, its acting as a proxy where the app developers can intercept and see all data.

Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy, just a dummy link: https://www.theogapp.com/

If it was a really good app you made, why not also make your own backend and completely decouple from meta?

If you build an app using the meta platform in a way that is a clear violation of their tos, the app will obviously be killed the second it gets popular. If I was running a service and another company attempted to do this to my service (violated my TOS, built on top of my private API in a way that striped all my revenue and repackaged it under their name, etc) I would definitely ban them...