Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 442 posts

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

#131

Post by seba_dos1 »

voidwtf wrote: post #115
vachina wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> how is this any different?

It's not, blocking users with ad blockers is not tolerable either. If you're unhappy with people consuming content on their own computers, find a different business model that you're happy with.

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

#133

Post by abigail95 »

ipsum2 wrote: post #4

Privacy proponents should cheer for this. Legally Meta must take down the app to comply with FTC's order (obligatory not a lawyer): https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2019/07/ftcs-5-bi... > Another way the FTC says Facebook violated the order was by failing to adequately assess and address privacy risks posed by third-party developers. Other than getting developers to click an “I agree” terms-and-conditions b…

Are Firefox/Chrome third-party developers too?

What's the difference between me creating my own web browser that renders instagram according to my own rules vs Chrome?

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

#134

Post by Matheus28 »

josephcsible wrote: post #125
Matheus28 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's exactly what phone companies used to do, and they only stopped when the government made them stop. It was more profitable for them, at our expense.

AFAIK you've always been able to bring your own phone. They just wouldn't unlock your subsidized phone after the contract ended (which I find unfair, but it's in the contract people signed, so...). Regardless, I think this line of thought is becoming too off-topic.

Why should the first party be serving content to people using third party apps that generate them no revenue? Just like websites are free to block adblock users, app apis should be free to block third party app users.

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

#135

Post by zeroonetwothree »

josephcsible wrote: post #96
zephrx1111 wrote: post #14

Personally, I feel Meta has the right to do so.

Do they have the right to do so today? Of course. Should they have the right to do so? Definitely not, and that's why we want to see laws in this space changed.

I don’t see how you can be so sure that they “definitely” shouldn’t. This is a very complex issue with strong arguments on both sides.

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

#136

Post by Matheus28 »

felipellrocha wrote: post #117
Matheus28 wrote: post #83

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.

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.

I agree, it's a bit much. But they are all violating the ToS they accepted so...

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

#137

Post by etchalon »

Taywee wrote: post #93
voidwtf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn’t competition though. This was straight up theft of resources/services. What? “extra-legal”? Don’t mix this with other behaviors Meta/Facebook/Instagram engage in, I hate them for all the bullsht they get away with too. However, this isn’t that, this is someone trying to build a platform on top of someone else’s platform explicitly against their terms of service and without reimbursing them.

It's hard to be sympathetic to a company that operates morally dubious amounts of data harvesting. If a program enables you to gain more privacy while using the internet, it's a moral good. I don't consider it to be stealing any resources or services. It's little different than an ad and tracker blocker on a browser. Any client-side user agent should have the right to act on behalf of the user. If it's not illegal to…

You had an argument up and until the idea that Ford wouldn't have a "good reason" to retaliate against a company that was causing them to lose money.

Not attempting to stop that act would be, for a public company, a violation of their duties to shareholders.

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

#138

Post by dleslie »

Many folks on here might be too young to remember, but there was an era where cable companies served premium channels with a scrambled signal to all customers, and sold access by way of attaching the appropriate filter. In fact, all channels were protected in this way, with your cable box holding the necessary filters. Albeit, some were merely hidden by a band pass filter and not scrambled.

Anyhow, those arguing that third party clients ought to have access to the API are making a similar argument to those who wanted to use third party filters to access channels they hadn't paid for. Why, it would go, if the cable company didn't serve the signal then it wouldn't be available to be used.

Which is not unlike claiming that the data provided by a private API is free for the taking. It's not, and it's certainly not with the consent of those endeavoring to keep the API private, even if it's accessible.

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

#139

Post by josephcsible »

voidwtf wrote: post #115
vachina wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Which social networks will permanently ban you if you ever visit them with an adblocker enabled?

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

#140

Post by voidwtf »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #58
voidwtf wrote: 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 completely agree that this isn't the right way to fight Meta, but I disagree about "Letting" you build a machine that consumes resources. It's not OG or Facebook's machine that is consuming Facebook's API Resources. It is software that is running on the User's hardware. The user should be, and generally is, allowed to make any request to Facebook that's not actively malicious - Using whatever software they choose a…

I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time.

Here’s the rub though, if you make and distribute a thing, with the sole intent that the thing will be used for stealing something. Is that ok?

If I made a device that could unlock and start a car, that required no knowledge of how the underlying tech worked, and I advertised it as “OGTransportation, transportation like you want it. No car payment, no paying for gas. Just get in and drive”

Not sure I’m feeling the whole argument.

Post reply on HN