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.
Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
281–290 of 442 posts
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution to that is to fix your infrastructure to not trust the client, rather than trying to enforce use of a particular client.
The "infrastructure" here is advertising, or rather, the need to fund real world things with advertising because there's no way yet to micrometer what users consume on the internet and get them cough up money for it.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#283Earlier 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.
No one should be able to control what apps interact with their platform. Companies should have exactly zero control over how people interact with endpoints they open to the internet and it should be illegal and unenforceable to try to create any contractual obligations about how someone interacts with your APIs.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#284It'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…
How did they get pre-seed funding for this? Unless I'm missing something, any angel who would invest $1M into a company that is building an alternative, ad-free Instagram client has to be one of the dumbest people around, no? How could anyone even conceivably think this could go on indefinitely? I'm asking genuinely because I don't get how anyone could've thought this would end any way other than by Meta putting the…
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#285Oh 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.
Here is a different way to look at what is going on lately in the short history of the internetowrked computer. To me, there is no legitimate "business". Meta cannot charge IG users a fee. They will not pay. If they would pay, then why not charge them. Instead Meta exploits IG visitors by spying on them. Advertisers will pay. Third parties will be interested in the data Meta collects. What Meta is doing with FB, IG or WhatsApp is not legit "business" IMHO, because, IMO, a business generally produces something of value that people pay for. Generally, Meta does not do that.
Newspapers sold advertising, but people were willing to pay for newspapers. Because newpapers produced something of value. They employed people to produce a product that people paid for: journalism.
Meta does not employ people to produce something of value that people will pay for. The content on these apps comes from the people who use them, and from journalists emplyed by newspapers, but not Meta. Meta make people the product, access to and data on which they sell to paying customers. Websites and apps are not "products". In this "business" the people who use them, their behaviour and the details of their lives, are the product.
A kid's lemonade stand looks more legit as "business" to me than a "tech" company producing so-called "products" that are given away for free, as bait. These are not the product that customers pay for, that no one likes to talk about.
Billboards owners sell advertising. They own or lease real estate with high visibility to traffic. It is difficult to avoid billboards because we generally use the same paths to travel in physical space. As such, billboards are regulated. Not everyone with land adjacent to high traffic routes can erect billboards. See, e.g., Highway Beautification Act of 1965.
Perhaps Meta is like a billboard company in a world that has yet to regulate billboards. IMO, Meta is far more of a hazard to life than a billboard is to the beauty of a highway. Meta does more than display advertising to people who use their websites and apps. Meta's "business model" is a threatening the stability of society. If it is allowed to continue, it should be heavily regulated.
Imagine someone telling you, "If you don't like the billboards, don't look at them." Or "If you don't like the billboards, don't use the highway." It is not so simple. Now imagine Meta tells you, "If you don;t look at the billboards, you cannot use the highway".
Meta is obscuring the true potential of the internet. It has given the internet a bad rap. Meta is not the internet nor its potential to improve people's lives anymore than billboards are the scenery. If left unregulated, billboards can obscure the scenery and eventually they can destroy it.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#288Earlier 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.
"How do you expect the 1st party to stay in business?" Here is a different way to look at what is going on lately in the short history of the internetowrked computer. To me, there is no legitimate "business". Meta cannot charge IG users a fee. They will not pay. If they would pay, then why not charge them. Instead Meta exploits IG visitors by spying on them. Advertisers will pay. Third parties will be interested in t…
Billboards are regulated because they’re inevitable. You’ll see them just walking around. On the other hand, no one is forcing you to use Facebook nor Instagram.
Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#290Earlier 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…
> “When we heard back from Cambridge Analytica that they had told us that they weren’t using the data and deleted it, we considered it a closed case. In retrospect, that was clearly a mistake. We shouldn’t have taken their word for it. We’ve updated our policy to make sure we don’t make that mistake again.”
If there is a third-party server in the middle of you and the service, you kind of have to assume that they are doing something with the data.
It is made worse because some developers aren’t doing questionable things. Others are doing questionable things. But you have no way of discerning between the two groups.
So, it has now become against the TOS to have a third-party make requests on your behalf.
Should we believe in the internet’s ability to be unequivocally good, or should we look at history and realize data protection is a serious problem?