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

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

#81

Post by amatecha »

MattDemers wrote: post #74
amatecha wrote: post #45

Oh wow, this app got pulled from everything because it's an unofficial 3rd party client for Instagram? I'll say it again, companies should be legally forbidden from blocking 3rd party clients. They don't have to explicitly support them, but taking action to explicitly thwart them (and writing ToS that forbids them) should be outlawed. There's no reason I should have to be subjected to untold tracking, snooping and ad…

Every time this kind of thing happens I just remember how much bigger Twitter got with the help of third-party clients, and then implemented terrible login token limits to prevent any from becoming as good as their own offerings once traction picked up.

Yup! As a Twitter user since 2007 I've watched as 3rd party clients were superior by far (TweetDeck was still my favorite), and have now been left in the dust as Twitter leaves them for dead by cutting off API features to them. Twitter itself has never made a client as good as TweetDeck or TweetBot, and invariably never will.

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

#82

Post by ummonk »

amatecha wrote: post #69
ummonk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s how any third party interface works. It’s a proxy that ostensibly just formats and displays the data to the user but there is no way to guarantee they don’t upload it to their own servers or something, as Cambridge Analytica did (which got Facebook in trouble)

There is in fact a way to verify whether the application sends the data elsewhere.. The most basic of network monitoring tools will immediately indicate what external hosts are being communicated with. If all the network activity is strictly with Instagram's servers, it's plainly clear that the app dev is not siphoning off user data. So, this is why I ask. It's actually really easy to find out what network hosts a pi…

Meta doesn’t have the ability to monitor its users’ computers to see if any of them end up having data sent to a server.

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

#83

Post by Matheus28 »

amatecha wrote: post #45

Oh wow, this app got pulled from everything because it's an unofficial 3rd party client for Instagram? I'll say it again, companies should be legally forbidden from blocking 3rd party clients. They don't have to explicitly support them, but taking action to explicitly thwart them (and writing ToS that forbids them) should be outlawed. There's no reason I should have to be subjected to untold tracking, snooping and ad…

Why should 3rd parties be allowed to make unauthorized api requests?

Additionally, some apps are only monetized through advertisement, and 3rd party apps don't display them. How do you expect the 1st party to stay in business?

I don't align with Meta on a lot of issues, but they should be able to control what apps interact with their platform. Don't like it, don't use it.

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

#84

Post by dangero »

amatecha wrote: post #64
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without control of the client, it gets much harder to fight abuse.

If you've ever worked on an online service, you might realize that what you ship for the client is almost irrelevant -- it can all be reverse engineered and an unofficial client can _always_ be created. This happens for all online services, even if it's just someone's data-mining app running on a local machine. The number one rule is "never trust what comes from the client", because it's trivial to create carefully-c…

You should check out Apple App Attest —- this just isn’t true any more for mobile.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/valida...

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

#85

Post by likpok »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #41
ipsum2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.theogap…

An app downloading on behalf of the user isn't a privacy issue. Are their servers acting as a proxy? Whether that's a privacy issue depends on how they configure/limit/audit their servers.

An app downloading data on behalf of the user is basically what Cambridge Analytica was doing.

The problem is that data ownership is complicated. If I know your phone number, can I share it with other people? That was CA (me downloading data about all my friends). Here the issue is private messages — is it okay for me to share the messages you sent privately to me? A lot of people will get quite upset if you do that!

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

amatecha wrote: post #81
MattDemers wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time this kind of thing happens I just remember how much bigger Twitter got with the help of third-party clients, and then implemented terrible login token limits to prevent any from becoming as good as their own offerings once traction picked up.

Yup! As a Twitter user since 2007 I've watched as 3rd party clients were superior by far (TweetDeck was still my favorite), and have now been left in the dust as Twitter leaves them for dead by cutting off API features to them. Twitter itself has never made a client as good as TweetDeck or TweetBot, and invariably never will.

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by josephcsible »

voidwtf wrote: post #38
seba_dos1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Listen, I really didn’t like the way your machine consumed your resources, so I built my own machine that consumes your resources. You should totally let me do this because it’s what your users want. Oh, and I also told your users to stop paying you because that’s anti consumer. Meta is wrong in a lot of ways, but this isn’t the right way to fix the problem. Just remove Meta from the equation entirely.

What The OG App did was the equivalent of building and distributing a third-party telephone, rather than everyone having to use one rented from Ma Bell.

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

#88

Post by dredmorbius »

defrost wrote: post #18
dredmorbius wrote: post #5

Backstory?

They developed an app that decouples Instagram from the money stream (for Meta) > Get the OG Instagram experience. > Remove ads and suggested content, create completely customized feeds, download content, turn off read receipts, and more.

Thanks.

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

#89

Post by dcdc123 »

ipsum2 wrote: post #27
Dylan16807 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you accusing these developers of violating privacy? If not, you're twisting things to the point of deception. Facebook is supposed to crack down, yes, but it's a specific thing they're supposed to crack down on, not ad-removal.

> 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.theogap…

> Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy, just a dummy link

That’s not true at all. They have a privacy policy linked at the bottom of their page. It opens in a new tab by default which is probably blocked by our adblocker.

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

#90

Post by voidwtf »

amatecha wrote: post #45

Oh wow, this app got pulled from everything because it's an unofficial 3rd party client for Instagram? I'll say it again, companies should be legally forbidden from blocking 3rd party clients. They don't have to explicitly support them, but taking action to explicitly thwart them (and writing ToS that forbids them) should be outlawed. There's no reason I should have to be subjected to untold tracking, snooping and ad…

Ok, that’s fair, but how should the platform be compensated for the resources expended by the users or developers in question?

Would you be ok with a usage plan? Something like $1 per 10,000 tweets read? I mean, the developer could save money by caching the most popular tweets and serving them from their cache, I imagine they’d have to charge for that infrastructure though and somehow they would pass the costs into the user. Maybe the could offer a monthly plan, with some kind of fixed cost that would keep most users fed with tweets while also not making uses worry about usage based billing.

Maybe Twitter/Insta/whatever could just require you to have a paid plan to use 3rd party clients?

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