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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

#311

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.

[deleted]

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

#312

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…

Nonsense, it’s a private company, they can allow or not any access to their platform. I’m not a fan of Facebook in any way, but they have the right to do this, and ban users for their own reasons. Don’t like their policies? Don’t use the service, I don’t.

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

#313
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems extreme. Do you support fair use limits, or is blocking a DOS attack also a violation of these rules?

Let’s not be ridiculous. DOS is not use, it’s abuse.

I want to preface this with that I agree with your point that DOS is abuse and not actually trying to use the platform.

I disagree with calling the question ridiculous. If we’re involving legality like the poster up thread implied with making this illegal then there needs to be some sort of test or rule put in place on what constitutes illegal activity. We currently don’t have one and whenever a new rule is put in place you quickly find out that there is a significant chunk of people who would find anything you think is obviously wrong to be obviously right and vice versa

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

> They are behaving as another unauthorized layer between the user and Meta's API.

Unauthorized? Hasn't the user explicitly authorized this layer by installing the app?

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

#315

Founder of the company behind the OG app here. Just wanted to give my thoughts on the whole situation. This is in addition to our official statement here: https://twitter.com/TheOGapp_/status/1575217497011200001 I want to start off by saying that everyone in this whole comments section has been making points as if what they are saying is "fact". Nothing here is "fact" because there are no laws around API usage. I don…

Getting to interoperability won't be achieved by questionable third party clients essentially abusing the API of a company. What a weird way of thinking. Work out standards, lobby for them etc. You very well knew what you were doing and what you'd risk.

> People should be allowed to have the freedom to choose how they use platforms I absolutely despise meta but this is just weird. If a company provides a service, they can do so as they see fit, as long as they are compliant to laws etc. If you don't like it, don't use it.

There are nice projects like mastodon or matrix, which seem to have very similar goals as you. I just can't shake the feeling of you guys being shady af. You can't be naive to think this would work? You have no privacy policy, circumvent the compliance of meta (which is afterall, one of the most watched companies) and essentially proxy all user data. WTF? And who on earth would fund that?

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

#316

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.

Because it allows for market competition at a tiny cost to a corporation. Free market competition in these ways makes people's lives better.

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

#317

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…

Devil's advocate: you see a ToS when using service for the first time. If that ToS is not illegal in your jurisdiction - you may either accept it, or abstain from using the service. How are you eligible to use any service beyond their ToS? It's like a private club: adher to the rules or go find another club. Or, even better, open your own.

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

#318
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems extreme. Do you support fair use limits, or is blocking a DOS attack also a violation of these rules?

Let’s not be ridiculous. DOS is not use, it’s abuse.

And using their servers and resources without generating them any revenue is not abuse? They clearly don’t want you to run a third party app without ads, yet you feel entitled to it?

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

#319

It is absolutely incredible to me that people are defending Meta in this thread. - Yes, Facebook had the right to do it. They're terrible for doing it, though. Meta is terrible? No way! - I'm extremely exhausted of the "tough luck, it's a private company" shtick when it fits someone's personal interests, but cry corporate capitalistic Hell when it doesn't. - There is nothing I've seen in the Apple Developer Guideline…

You don't think this violates apple's developer guidelines? Just persusing them, I can see violations of sections: 1.6 Data Security 4.1 Copycats 5.1.1 Data Collection and Storage 5.2 Intellectual Property 5.2.2 Third-Party Sites/Services 5.2.3 Audio/Video Downloading

I think they also statically analyse the code. So who knows what weird thing they did to circumvent auth.

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

#320

It'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.

In Europe, reverse engineering is legal by the means of observation, and decompilation in some cases, as long as you have a license for using a program:

https://vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-boundaries-of-revers...

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