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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's hardly a duplicator. If anything it's a DVD player that removes previews, and that sounds like a great product.

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

#262
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meta isn't some utility people can't live without. This is not true for large parts of society. There are many institutions which force you to communicate via facebook, so not having access to it means you're locked out of parts of your real life. This is horribly wrong by those institutions, of course, but here we are. It should be illegal, but isn't yet.

Which institutions? if it affected “a large part of society”, I would imagine that I would be aware of it.

Schools tend to be worst offenders, clubs, companies (heard of at least one company which only honors warranty support via facebook!).

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean from another perspective this is effectively a MITM style way of interacting with Meta's API. They are behaving as another unauthorized layer between the user and Meta's API. In actual secure systems involving third party clients the client usually authorizes itself on behalf of some user requests or permissions, so while it does things for the user there's a clear and secure delegation of permissions.

Have you done much work with authorization? To put it in another way let's say there was a website that said it authorized with Steam. It asked you to put in your steam username and password. Is this secure?

Now let's say that same website instead redirected you back to Steam (properly) and requested authorization on behalf of you. Is this secure?

Now which bucket does this app fall under?

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ac…

Should you secure your API? Of course. But you should not secure my data from me.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Ad blockers are already a thing. Should they be forbidden?

My position is that if a website uses anti-adblock and you're using an adblock, circumventing it isn't okay. You're free to use a different website. Now, one could argue that by displaying ads in the first place, using an adblock is circumventing something therefore it isn't okay (basically remove one layer of abstraction from the previous sentence). That's also a fair position, but not mine because of entirely selfi…

> That's also a fair position, but not mine because of entirely selfish reasons (it's inconvenient to me and non-adblock users are subsidizing my use of those websites).

That's fair - you are knowingly subsidising adblock users. If you don't want to subsidise adblock users, you're free to use a different site.

(That's your basic argument, right? Freedom?)

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

#266
post #99

Maybe I’m just a graybeard but all this is reminiscent of the shenanigans that Ma Bell pulled. Not exactly the same but similar. History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, as they say. There’s a very simple solution here: common carrier. Treat social media as a modern utility. No viewpoint discrimination, censorship, algorithmic social manipulation or proprietary on-ramps. The bad behavior has gone on long enough.

There is one thing worse: Typically these phone carriers had a duty to provide service in exchange for their monopoly. Here FB can ban you from their monopoly playground piercing the liability shield working for a legal typically company gives you.

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

#267
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there should be "freedom of business model". We aren't obliged to respect and comply with your choice of way of getting rich. If your business model is dependent on people looking at you in the "right" way then tough luck.

I don't think there should be "freedom to use my stuff but my ignore rules" model - if a person (ot a company) is providing a service, they should be able to do it the way they like. Don't like the rules? Don't use the service. It there was fraud invoved, one party may get damage/compensation.. But forcing someone to provide service is just not right. (With the exception of monopolies of course. Let's regulate them.)

Should your power company be able to impose a rule on you that you must not plug any Samsung-branded appliances into any outlets in your house? Re your "monopolies" parenthetical, what if you live somewhere where you can pick what company generates your power? Would this be okay in those places?

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't use Meta products and services. It's that simple. Doesn't that basically completely cut you off from electronic communication with everyone else in most European countries, where WhatsApp has basically completely replaced SMS?

SMS didn’t disappear. You just have to pay for it with money. WhatsApp also isn’t the only IM on the market. If you want to use it, you have to use it on their terms.I didn’t like the terms so I dont use it. I prefer paying Apple upfront with money instead of paying other companies with my privacy and attention.

The issue isn't that I can't use SMS without paying. Even if I am willing to pay, it does me no good if none of my friends are using it because they're all only on WhatsApp themselves.

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

#269

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…

On the one hand I agree with you, and I detest FB/Meta, but the purpose of these apps is almost universally “block the ads that pay for the service”.

Given that, what should a company do?

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

p.s. to entertain your comedian argument, I think there are some situations where that may be correct. If a comedian tells vile racist jokes, I believe the writer of the joke, the talent manager who knew the comedians content, the person who booked the comedian knowing the content, and the venue who knowingly provided the platform for the content should all be similarly shunned.

And the student selling tickets at the counter and the lady cleaning the bathrooms. But not the venture capitalists who put up the million funding?
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