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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

#381

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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.

Rules about things like DRM already have carve outs for "interoperability". A big example is back in the 90s, EA didn't like the rules Sega made for putting games on the MegaDrive/Genesis, so they did some reverse engineering work and made their own cartridges that worked great. Sega took them to court and got smacked down pretty hard, basically invalidating their entire anti-copy strategy. We should push for MORE of…

EA making games for MegaDrive/Genesis doesn’t cost Sega any money. You using the api without ever seeing any ads will actively cost Meta money. Not the same thing.

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

#382
post #183

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You mean that document saying something like: "we can do what we want, no recourse possible"? That should be forbidden too.

I'm pretty sure there's a line there about reverse engineering

You can put whatever you want in a contract, and the other party can sign it, but that is not enough for it to be valid. Contract law usually has call outs against obviously absurd, overreaching, or "I own everything and anything" clauses

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

#383

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> 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? They're welcome to find a different business model. Why should we sacrifice interoperability for everyone for their sake?

If shops don’t like shoplifters, they should stop putting products on shelves where anybody can just take them and walk out - it’s dumb to get the police involved to keep sustaining this obviously-flawed business model.

Stores DO lock stuff up. Nevermind that shoplifting is barely even a concern for most large stores, as they lose significantly more to other means of "shrink"

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

#384

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>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

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

It's a matter of time. Even if it's not endemic in the US (which I severely doubt) it's endemic elsewhere. Don't underestimate the public's ability to put up with things, especially if they are mostly kept in the dark about the most sinister effects.

> 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

Both are essential. Social media is what you make of it. It can be bread and circus, yes, but it is also an invaluable tool for communication. Losing access to them can stifle your communication efforts by a lot. Why, you may ask? Because network effect is in full swing: "Phone call? Who still does that? Just use messenger like a normal person". No one's gonna bother to call you or SMS you cause 1) you're not on messenger or whatever app they use and 2) can't be bothered to contact you at your preferred non-app way, when the whole friend group has a group chat from which every single interaction and update is broadcasted to everyone. In the end, keeping you in the loop is too much work, and then you start missing out on outings etc. And even if you somehow persuaded all of your friends to use alternative methods of communication, 99.999% of the planet just can't be bothered, especially when they have friends that are reachable over 5-6 different apps, one on each friend.

Don't underestimate the network effect.

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

#385

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Quoted post unavailable.

This kinda is how freedom works though. You're free to use whatever client you want, and Meta is free to implement API in a way that will not allow your client to call it.

Technically free and actually free are not the same thing.

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

#386

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Should phone companies get to force you to use phones you rent from them, instead of having the freedom to bring your own?

If that's their business model and they want to, sure. I'd guess that most wouldn't because it's not as profitable (they'd lose too many customers).

The United states government disagrees with you.

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

#387
post #224

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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?

Nobody has a monopoly on power generation, $30k can get you a self sufficient solar setup so obviously power companies should be allowed to create whatever conditions they want...... /s

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are first parties serving unauthorized API requests? If the API request is unauthorized, surely the proper response is "401 Unauthorized" and not "all the data you asked for, but then I'll find the people who helped you and get mad at them"? The problem here is that Meta wants to plug things into the internet and then control who gets to ask for those things. This is not how the internet works, at all. If you don…

I'm willing to bet the instagram app already signs their api requests to make sure they're coming from the app. Third party apps are reverse engineering that. If you try to send a request without those headers, it'll very likely give you a 4xx code.

The DMCA already has provisions that say reverse engineering for interoperability is fair game.

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

#389

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…

Without control of the client, it gets much harder to fight abuse.

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

#390
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I don’t see any reason that fair use limits or blocking interactions that behave like attacks should be incompatible with allowing and not penalising the use of third party clients.
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