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?
Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
161–170 of 442 posts
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each employee willingly participated. I understand the feeling, but these weren’t random people that had nothing to do with a company action. These were all individuals who took part in the act. I agree it’s petty, and yes this is what many free market proponents want (unless free market is just a convenient guise to get what they want).
If a comedian is deplatformed should they ban the production team, ban Alex Jones' sound guy maybe, what about the people who voted for Trump, willing participation? I could imagine certain protests being demonized and their attendants removed from meta for violating terms of service. The real question is do they virtually round up the avatars for public deletions, or do they just disappear them? I think a lot of peo…
I was careful in my choice of the word participated. I chose to use that word as I intended it to only include people who worked on the product. If anyone at the company who did not work on the development of the product was banned then I wholly disagree with their suspension.
Also, while I enjoy your alliteration, it’s also an extremely steep “slippery slope” argument. It’s certainly not an argument I was trying to entertain.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Again, I'm asking _the person in the thread above_ who made these claims that the app is stealing user data to provide any supporting evidence, perhaps via the methods I described in my last comment. I'm not talking about Meta.
THat's not the what you were asking. You asked 'What evidence do you have that this application was acting as a "proxy" where the developers can "intercept and see all data"?'
The app is by definition acting as a proxy, and therefore the developers can intercept and see the data, though they might not be doing so currently.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a naive view. If/when the app devs go malicious, it will be Meta on the legal hook for users' "stolen data." The press and users will blame Meta, not the developers of this app, or the users that unwittingly handed over their data. The headlines will say "X million Facebook users' data leaked," or "X million Facebook users hacked." Meta is acting in an entirely reasonable manner for a company under such regul…
Does Microsoft get blamed every time credentials get stolen from a Windows box? Why would this be any different?
Because FB was blamed for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which, at its core, was simply an issue of providing Oauth2 logins to third parties.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
This argument feels like it would also work to support indentured servitude, since people agree to that at the beginning too.
That’s a pretty hot take, can you elaborate? I’m not sure I understand.
Your argument is basically "what Meta did is okay since you agreed to it in the terms of service that you accepted", right? I'm saying that like selling yourself into indentured servitude, accepting Meta's TOS is not always a completely free choice.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#166Earlier 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?
Meta isn't a utility that's been granted a legal monopoly / duopoly by the government, so it's not a great analogy.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#167Earlier 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…
>Yes... Do you have evidence of this? An example of network traffic indicating that the app is communicating with something other than Meta, perhaps?
How is Meta supposed to verify this? And verify that they don't start behaving badly in the future?
This is what got Facebook in trouble with the FTC... they allowed developers access to all the users data without oversight. They are required by their settlement to not just trust app devs that they won't abuse the data.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We're not saying they shouldn't attempt to stop them. We're saying they shouldn't be able to stop them.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#169Earlier 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 was literally how phones worked on the beginning- AT&T had to be taken to court to stop it.
Exactly - until legal action happened. I think internet user rights have a LONG way to go, and I can only pray that stuff like "forced to look at insipid, manipulative advertising so you can continue to talk to your family" may indeed become a thing of the past.
I currently have an Inbox of multiple messages from family members awaiting me, except I refuse to log into Facebook to view them. The only remaining notification email I have left enabled for Facebook is exactly that -- private messages. This way I can contact the relevant person elsewhere and ask them what the message was. This is the kind of "bending over backwards" I have to do to avoid the surveillance-capitalism crap I'm coerced towards by these platforms that can do essentially whatever they want AND demand exactly how we are _allowed_ to interact with them. Why can't I use an unofficial Facebook Messenger client and read the <100 bytes of communication my family member wanted to send me? Ahh yes I have to agree to a hundred-page ToS and subject myself to ads and privacy-invading user tracking to see those few bytes. This is fine.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#170It's worth noting that the app received $1M in preseed funding: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-... It's also worth noting that the Instagram API is extremely locked down for typical users (which is the reason why there hasn't been a clone like this) as it is limited to Businesses and Creators, but the app demonstrates features not available by the official API: https://developers.facebook…
> 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.
This is the point that Richard Stallman tried to hit over 2 decades ago with Right To Read (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html ) and got close but not quite --- yes, source code is valuable, but even without source code you should still have the "right to read" what your own computer executes, as otherwise it is not truly yours.
In fact I'd go as far as arguing that true software freedom isn't about availability of source code, but what you are legally permitted to even without.