Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

251–260 of 442 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's fine by me. Or even "video content is restricted to 240p unless you have a paid subscription, then you can see videos in 1080p". Right? It's 1000% possible to come up with totally fair business models that aren't so blatantly exploitative. Right now "the user is the product" on ANY free service. Previously there was App.net, which was effectively "Twitter but you pay for access". It had a free tier which…

Ok... what if they said, "it is free if you use our app and let us advertise to you, or you can pay us and use any client you want"?

Great, I'd love that

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not stealing if they gave you the data.

They gave you the data conditioned on an agreement not to use unauthorized clients, the same way any number of real-world businesses "give" you things subject to conditions, like the waffle maker in the hotel lobby which requires you to stay there overnight to use it.

What if your neighbor lends you a book, subject to the condition that you only read it to your sons, not your daughters? Are you stealing if you read it to your daughters anyway?

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people can and will write malicious programs. Those will sometimes take the form of third party clients for a service. That is not and will never be a valid argument against them being allowed to exist. Monopolies are not ok. Abusive behavior by the dominant market players isn't ok.

Yes, but my point is that said clients should have to talk through properly secured APIs and required by law. Until then, an app like this is a massive, MASSIVE security risk and I would question the sanity of any team that saw something like this and ignored it.

> should have to talk through properly secured APIs

I don't follow what you mean by this. The API endpoints that a company provides ought to be secured properly. In practice they might or might not be but obviously they ought to be.

I don't see what that has to do with third party clients though. A third party client is stuck interacting with whatever API the company provides, however secure or insecure it might be.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me offer you a question then: Do you know how much data the OG App is taking from you while you authorize it to work on your behalf? How do you know it's not reading through your entire message history? Or building its own network graph of your friends to sell? How about security? How do you know it's securely storing your credentials? Or that it's not selling said credentials as well? Like in this scenario to Fa…

Sure, there's a risk there. But it should be my choice whether or not to accept that risk, not Meta's.

In this case the risk you take doesn't matter (though I argue from a security standpoint this is something you should really care about in any argument around Meta), it's the risk Meta takes by allowing it. Because if the company takes your data and runs, Meta is the one also on the hook for not securing their APIs. If it turns out they're farming passwords from users to sell to whatever group ultimately the class action lawsuit will come out with knives facing Meta.

Like this is a security problem, straight up. I would hope that you can agree on this and that not securing your API is bad.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, an individual can do that. That is not the point. The person you replied to wasn't saying they know for sure they were stealing user data, just that Meta has no way of knowing they aren't, and even if they aren't right now, no way of knowing if they will start in the future. It doesn't matter what the app does at this moment, it can be changed at any point.

Should Meta also ban users who connect to their services from GrapheneOS, since it could be updated to steal all of your application data in the future?

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This seems a bit unrelated but I'll chime in with my opinion. Unfortunately for some types of games (first person shooters), a modified client can be game ruining for other players. For me, as long as it's only running while the client is running, and doesn't send private data remotely, I'm okay with it. At least on Windows there's not much difference in terms of privacy of something running in the kernel vs userland…

All wonderful. Except the anticheat doesn't work and only active moderation stops the game from being ruined.

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic, it should be illegal / a breach of contract for you to run an ad blocker, since the company may not make money? Should you also be forced to look at ads and not switch channels while they're on TV, with the channel being free to cut access if they find you haven been looking at the ads they serve? This logic really bends over backwards to support FB's and similar business models.

Rather than just blocking the request for the ad, if an ad blocker allowed the requesting site to make the request for the ad but then just sent the data to the browser's equivalent of /dev/null, I'd be fine with that as long as I never had to see/hear the ad. This is of course ripe for abuse, but that's just synonymous for digital advertising in general. I don't consider it any different than me hitting mute on the…

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If you don't think sites have a fundamental right to push ads to sustain themselves (as I don't), then blocking the request is the best place to do it for performance reasons.

But even if you do believe in that right - the site and advertiser care about a single thing: a human being seeing the ad. Serving the Ad request is not just useless for their purpose, it is actively costing them money, and potentially muddling their data.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They gave you the data conditioned on an agreement not to use unauthorized clients, the same way any number of real-world businesses "give" you things subject to conditions, like the waffle maker in the hotel lobby which requires you to stay there overnight to use it.

What if your neighbor lends you a book, subject to the condition that you only read it to your sons, not your daughters? Are you stealing if you read it to your daughters anyway?

I don't know, because that's not a real agreement, unlike the hotel waffle maker and Instagram's client rules.

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

#260
post #29

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 m…

The problem is that the only reason the app is getting press is because it's a ripoff.

Is NewPipe a "ripoff" too?
Post reply on HN