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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

#431
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing that is borderline fraud - I believe that GP meant to highlight this. If it gets counted as actual clicks, it's actually explicitly defrauding the advertiser.

Is it though? Most people sometimes leave the room while ads play on TV. The advertisers know that and work the percentage of pepole that do that into their pricing, etc. Also, non-organic click fraud is rampant already (and maybe even the majority of clicks). /dev/null + click would at least route ad income to reputable sites that at least have some human readers to view future ad impressions.

There is a difference between you ignoring ads as a user, or an adblock tool removing the ads entirely, and a tool that explicitly tries to make it look as if the user is interacting with the ads. The last tool is actively malicious and deceptive in a way the others are not.

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

#432
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the site and advertiser care about a single thing I disagree. The site just wants the advertiser's money. The advertiser wants the human to see an ad.

The user wants to support the site, and doesn't want to see the ad. Why not have the browser /dev/null them, and click a few for the heck of it? It would be in the user's interest.

AdNauseam does this, it clicks all or most of the ads that it blocks. It's based on uBlock too. https://adnauseam.io

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

#433
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? Most people sometimes leave the room while ads play on TV. The advertisers know that and work the percentage of pepole that do that into their pricing, etc. Also, non-organic click fraud is rampant already (and maybe even the majority of clicks). /dev/null + click would at least route ad income to reputable sites that at least have some human readers to view future ad impressions.

There is a difference between you ignoring ads as a user, or an adblock tool removing the ads entirely, and a tool that explicitly tries to make it look as if the user is interacting with the ads. The last tool is actively malicious and deceptive in a way the others are not.

I never meant to imply clicking the ads in order to get fake clicks. What I meant was for any ads posters/videos that are loaded during page load to go ahead and load them BUT don't display them. This gives the website the impression count, but no fraudulent click throughs. This was how I was equating it to walking out of the room during broadcast commercial breaks.

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like a valid analogy to me. Access to an API isn't the same thing as intentionally accessing a paid service for free. If someone writes an app that somehow bypasses needing a Netflix account and lets you stream video from them without paying them. That would be analogous. The intent would be to illegitimately access a paid service. Using a third party client with a valid account to access API endpoints t…

By ignoring the agreed upon terms of service and violating those terms you would be violating the consent of the service provider. If you don't find those terms favorable the correct action is to not use their service; violating their consent is not morally sound.

Well on the contrary, I'm saying that I find those particular terms immoral, that those terms should be disallowed by law, and that I think it is either morally neutral or possibly even virtuous to intentionally and knowingly violate them.

It's similar to civil disobedience I suppose, except in this case not a law but rather a civil "contract" inasmuch as an impenetrable ToS that a user is forced to click through can be viewed as a proper contract as opposed to a written notification from the vendor that they intend to terminate your service if they discover you doing any of the following things.

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

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and that isn't equivalent

> No You either hate yourself or you don't use the Web too much. > that isn't equivalent It absolutely is. There's a service out there that's meant to communicate with applications running on my computer . What my computer does is 100% up to me. If this means your business model that relies on locally running code is hurt, that's something you should have factored in into your decision to choose that business model.

> You either hate yourself or you don't use the Web too much.

This doesn't seem like an appropriate thing to say. Good luck to you.

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

#436
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you accusing these developers of violating privacy? If not, you're twisting things to the point of deception. Facebook is supposed to crack down, yes, but it's a specific thing they're supposed to crack down on, not ad-removal.

> Are you accusing these developers of violating privacy? Yes, the app is downloading private user messages (ostensibly to show a modified messaging interface) and private photos, according to their feature list. This isn't a simple DNS-level ad-block, its acting as a proxy where the app developers can intercept and see all data. Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy, just a dummy link: https://www.theogap…

Proxying.. i don't think it means what you think it means. By that logic they should ban all of google's employees because chrome "proxies" information from facebook's servers (i.e. chrome shuffles private data from facebook's servers to user's eyeballs)

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No You either hate yourself or you don't use the Web too much. > that isn't equivalent It absolutely is. There's a service out there that's meant to communicate with applications running on my computer . What my computer does is 100% up to me. If this means your business model that relies on locally running code is hurt, that's something you should have factored in into your decision to choose that business model.

> You either hate yourself or you don't use the Web too much. This doesn't seem like an appropriate thing to say. Good luck to you.

Is the Web going to be sad because of what I said about it?

Let me rephrase: "browsing today's Web as-is is an extremely miserable experience and the fact that you can put up with it doesn't mean everyone else should".

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

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

> Work out standards, lobby for them etc. Back in the AT&T monopoly it required a third-party device (the Carterphone) to actually be released on the market for their anti-competitive terms to be challenged and eventually struck down in court. > circumvent the compliance of meta How? If an idiot user gives their credentials to a shady third-party, it's the user's fault for compromising their own data, not Meta's. If…

> Back in the AT&T monopoly it required a third-party device (the Carterphone) to actually be released on the market for their anti-competitive terms to be challenged and eventually struck down in court.

That's so american to think that another company should fix this. It's the state's responsibility to fix that, if people want it.

> How? If an idiot user gives their credentials to a shady third-party, it's the user's fault for compromising their own data, not Meta's. If a user were to print out pages of the Facebook web UI containing private data and then start distributing them in the streets, would you also blame Meta, and not the user? What about if the user writes down the private data manually, and then distributes it? Etc.

I mean content and distribution. Also, providers might be liable for not protecting the user enough. Sorry but your other examples are stupid and totally not what I meant.

> Is there any evidence they captured or misused the proxied data for beyond what's needed to provide the service?

I bet you take care of security in your job ... not. "ThEy DiDn'T aBuSe AnYtHiNg (yet)".

> Someone who's actually interested in setting the legal precedent that would allow this behavior and invalidate ToS preventing it?

Still, liability is a bitch, as you can see. The risks were all laid out quote clear beforehand.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would they have to circumvent anything? The app relies on the user providing valid credentials, no circumvention needed. It just has to mimic an official client.

> Why would they have to circumvent anything? The app relies on the user providing valid credentials, no circumvention needed. It just has to mimic an official client.

Somebody else said they're using oauth. Afaik, instagram does not provide a public API. So it seems like they abused oauth for that?

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

#440
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*that tried to lynch VP, Congress via tweets

So we're just making stuff up now? This tweet doesn't exist.

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/jan-6-hearing-today-trump/c...
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