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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

#111

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…

> Facebook ... might be the only social media some of our immediate family have

It's funny how prevalent this meme is. But I'm not expected to have an AOL account just because it's the only social media grandpa has. Or MySpace just for Aunt Lolita's sake. No, they are both supposed to get Facebook accounts because that's what cousin Ralph has. And I'm supposed to move for the same reason. Well, if Ralph wants me to know what he ate for dinner, he can find me at my local bbs.

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

#112
post #90

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 t…

It would be reasonable to consider setting up such a paid plan, but that's not what Meta did here, and what they did was totally unreasonable.

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

#113
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#114

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…

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

Do you also support games using client-side anti-cheat in your OS kernel?

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

#115
post #62
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I fail to see how this is different from augmenting a website with Adblock and userscript. If you don’t want to leak info then don’t expose it on the API, private or not.

It’s different because they didn’t make the information/source code available on GitHub and say “go at it”, allowing each user to choose to violate the TOS. They actively facilitated the behavior and received funding to do so.

Also sites block users with AdBlock enabled all the time, how is this any different?

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Should phone companies get to force you to use phones you rent from them, instead of having the freedom to bring your own?

If that's their business model and they want to, sure. I'd guess that most wouldn't because it's not as profitable (they'd lose too many customers).

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

#117

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.

While I mostly agree with you, banning the personal accounts from their *team* is a bit much. Specially considering how that also includes access to Instagram, and WhatsApp, WhatsApp being the biggest issue here since in many countries that is considered a way of conducting business.

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

#118

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.

Why are first parties serving unauthorized API requests? If the API request is unauthorized, surely the proper response is "401 Unauthorized" and not "all the data you asked for, but then I'll find the people who helped you and get mad at them"?

The problem here is that Meta wants to plug things into the internet and then control who gets to ask for those things. This is not how the internet works, at all. If you don't want third parties accessing your APIs, lock them down.

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

#119
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If I send you something, you should be able to copy and distribute it as you see fit, no matter what I wish you would and wouldn't do with it, and my recourse should be limited to not sending you more things in the future.

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

#120
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> so I built my own machine that consumes your resources They designed the machine. It's the users that are making instances and running it, right?

If the users were building the source code and deploying it to their devices, sure. That’s not what’s happening here though.

This isn’t DeCSS, this is a company trying to build and sell a DVD duplicator that advertises that it rips copyrighted content and also removes the previews.

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