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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

#361

Post by chaostheory »

yaddaor wrote: post #328
chaostheory wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta isn't a utility that's been granted a legal monopoly / duopoly by the government, so it's not a great analogy.

Should websites be able to dictate which programs can access them? In a way a website is just an API too.

They do. Many of them expect Chrome. While Safari and Firefox are now much better supported than years past due to most sites complying with web standards, I still see some annoying incompatibilities here and there with older finance websites. I didn’t like it, so I switched to a larger bank. Your argument would have more teeth if meta had a monopoly. It doesn’t

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

#362

Post by chaostheory »

lightspot21 wrote: post #324
chaostheory wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask them to use something else, or get an exception by explaining that you were banned. It isn’t endemic and there are always options. After the Cambridge analytica scandal, Facebook no longer has unbreakable mindshare. This is especially true the younger the generation

>Ask them to use something else, or get an exception by explaining that you were banned. It isn’t endemic and there are always options Good luck if it's a business or public org. Why change their process for what amounts to a minority of customers? It's not worth the cost. Whether these people can't do business with them despite these services being essential to everyday life... well tough luck for them I guess? Own…

It’s not as endemic as you make it out to be or there would be a public outcry.

Banking and social media are also two very different industries. One is essential while the other is mainly bread and circus with a myriad of alternatives

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

#363

Post by protoc »

barnabee wrote: post #281
Matheus28 wrote: post #83

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.

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.

forgot /s

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

#364

Post by likpok »

Kbelicius wrote: post #340
likpok wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An app downloading data on behalf of the user is basically what Cambridge Analytica was doing. The problem is that data ownership is complicated. If I know your phone number, can I share it with other people? That was CA (me downloading data about all my friends). Here the issue is private messages — is it okay for me to share the messages you sent privately to me? A lot of people will get quite upset if you do that!

> An app downloading data on behalf of the user is basically what Cambridge Analytica was doing. Nowhere close. CA was asking permissions from users and then got the data from those users and all of their FB friends who did not agree to anything nor did they know their data is being collected.

This is exactly the crux of the problem. Consider Alice and bob, where bob used CA and Alice did not. Alice shares her data with bob. What can Bob do with it? Can he share it with CA?

It’s messy! Another similar problem in this vein is data about you that does not belong to you. Who owns your purchase history from Amazon, or which pages you clicked on? You? Amazon?

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

#365

Post by likpok »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #241
likpok wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An app downloading data on behalf of the user is basically what Cambridge Analytica was doing. The problem is that data ownership is complicated. If I know your phone number, can I share it with other people? That was CA (me downloading data about all my friends). Here the issue is private messages — is it okay for me to share the messages you sent privately to me? A lot of people will get quite upset if you do that!

> An app downloading data on behalf of the user is basically what Cambridge Analytica was doing. That's half of it. Is the app sending the data back to the app makers? If not then it's extremely different.

If the app is downloading the data, what’s stopping it from sending the data to the app makers?

Previously FB paid a 5 billion dollar fine because of insufficiently policing third part app developers.

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

#366

Post by likpok »

josephcsible wrote: post #119
likpok wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An app downloading data on behalf of the user is basically what Cambridge Analytica was doing. The problem is that data ownership is complicated. If I know your phone number, can I share it with other people? That was CA (me downloading data about all my friends). Here the issue is private messages — is it okay for me to share the messages you sent privately to me? A lot of people will get quite upset if you do that!

If I send you something, you should be able to copy and distribute it as you see fit, no matter what I wish you would and wouldn't do with it, and my recourse should be limited to not sending you more things in the future.

In this interpretation, FB should not have been fined for CA. While it’s a cogent theory, regulators disagree with you and they have guns backing them up.

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

#367

Post by josephcsible »

chaostheory wrote: post #360
josephcsible wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just my personal choice. I can't choose to use SMS to communicate if the people I need to talk to don't also make the same choice. And iMessage falls back to SMS when you send messages to people who don't have it.

SMS is standard and available on every phone by default. Again people’s personal choices, many of which have alternatives, are not meta’s problem.

Remember when Nestlé gave new mothers free trials of baby formula, that lasted just long enough that they'd stop producing breast milk? Was that okay too, since the mothers could have declined but made the personal choice to accept?

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

#368

Post by nobody9999 »

cortesoft wrote: post #357
nobody9999 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. But isn't such an application running on the end-user's hardware and making requests at the end-user's behest? If so, what does Meta have to do with it at all? Should the…

The user is risking more than their own data; they are also risking the data of their friends. If I grant a friend permission to view my photos, I am not also granting some random 3rd party that permission.

>If I grant a friend permission to view my photos, I am not also granting some random 3rd party that permission.

Assuming the "third-party" client is just that (a client app), there really shouldn't be an issue. If I use FluffyChat[0] instead of Element[1], do the FluffyChat folks have access to all my (and those with whom I communicate) Matrix communications? If I use Element, do they have such access?

If you use Firefox to access Facebook, are you granting Mozilla full access to your (and your FB friends') profiles?

There has been a lot of noise about "third-parties" and how they only exist to steal your data.

But we use "third-party" clients all the time. Web browsers, IRC clients, and a host of other "third-party" apps. Why aren't you up in arms about them stealing your data and that of your contacts?

[0] https://fluffychat.im/

[1] https://element.io/

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

#369

Post by nobody9999 »

free652 wrote: post #322
nobody9999 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course they should be able to block 3d party clients. Just because it's technically possible to hijack an API, doesn't mean it's legal or ethical. If you don't want to be tracked, don't use Instagram. This is the bit that's confusing to me. If I want to access my FB/IG/whatever content, and present my credentials to the server along with a valid request for my data, why should Meta care how I do so? I could be us…

The data server via API isn't yours, that's FB's data. You can download YOUR data via a page on the FB site.

>The data server via API isn't yours, that's FB's data. You can download YOUR data via a page on the FB site.

Just to clarify, that means your answer to the question:

   I could be using nc[0] piped through openssl, rather than a web 
   browser (do you believe Meta can mandate which browser you use 
   and/or what add-ons/extensions it runs?). Is that "hijacking" the 
   API?
Would be "yes." Is that correct?

If so, please consider what that means for your property rights.

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

#370

Post by origin_path »

Nextgrid wrote: post #331
origin_path wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way these schemes usually work is that the pairing is done at the factory. Apple switch the iPhone on for the first time as it's being made, it generates a private key that never leaves the secure chip and then presents the public key. The public key is then signed to create a certificate chain and the certs handed back to the device for storage. So, there's no way to beat it except by extracting a private key, o…

You don't need to extract the private key though, just use it to sign things. So if you have shell access on the phone, you can tell the SE to sign the request you want.

Only to some extent. Apple work very hard to prevent that from being possible, and it's not necessarily signing just anything the app processor sends. Usually this stuff is integrated with the bootup process.
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