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Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#111

Post by drexlspivey »

Facebook also installed root certificates through Onavo to spy on their competition. Some email exchanges from this court doc https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

From Zuck:

Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . . Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.

From Danny Ferrante (FB Data Scientist):

- We developed "kits" that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage (i.e., specific actions that people are performing in the app, rather than just overall app visitation). This is a "man-in-the-middle" approach.

- Our plan is to work with a third party—like GFK, SSI, YouGov, uTest, etc.—who will recruit panelists and distribute the kits under their own branding. We already have proposals from several of these providers.

- The panelist won't see Onavo in the NUX or in the phone settings. They could see Onavo using specialized tools (like Wireshark).

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#112

Post by [deleted] »

drexlspivey wrote: post #111

Facebook also installed root certificates through Onavo to spy on their competition. Some email exchanges from this court doc https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36... From Zuck: Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . . Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#113

Post by nemothekid »

benreesman wrote: post #84
nemothekid wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If substantiated, such accusations would be among the most damning in the history of technology. If substantiated? Just search Onavo on HN search - I thought this was widely known for years.

As a former employee until 2018, I heard the words “Project Ghostbusters” two days ago. I was peripherally aware of something called Onavo but I had no notion that anyone was talking about “kits”, we all thought it was some kind of metrics thing that was sort of iffy sounding but lots of iffy ideas got proposed by some PM looking to make a name and shot down by the grownups, what is alleged would have provoked a riot…

I had a friend tell me about Onavo in ~2015. I wont delve into what he told me, but at the time I had the "move fast and break things" spirit and thought it was a pretty cool tool that they had figured out to get competitive information. He never showed me anything, but allegedly they could even see what features were being used in other apps.

But I don't think this is something he made up, it's been discussed on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16381812

>I wonder if it's be possible to make a social networking startup, optimise solely for Onavo metrics, and get bought out by Facebook.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16373339

>The Onavo VPN service from Facebook is disguised as a protection mechanism but tracks the user for the benefit of Facebook.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14971839

>The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.

I am surprised that this accusation is at all controversial.

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#114

Post by rezonant »

YeBanKo wrote: post #86
tsunamihippo wrote: post #21

The article skips a lot of context to make it sound significantly worse than reality. Facebook didn't just randomly give Netflix access to everyone's messages. Specific user would need to purposefully log in to the Netflix app with their Facebook account in order to grant Netflix access to the chat functionality (intended to send movie recommendations to Facebook friends inside the Netflix app). https://about.fb.com/…

Thanks for the context, it's important. But from the link you posted: > In order for you to write a message to a Facebook friend from within Spotify, for instance, we needed to give Spotify “write access.” For you to be able to read messages back, we needed Spotify to have “read access.” “Delete access” meant that if you deleted a message from within Spotify, it would also delete from Facebook. No third party was rea…

> So here Facebook acknowledges that an app that sends messages needs write permission, not read.

I guess the feature at issue here is that you could actually hold a conversation with a Facebook friend inside of Netflix or Spotify which does indeed necessitate the ability to read back messages from the other user.

Whether it was wise to allow that instead of the kind of sharing systems we use today in 2024 is another question.

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#115

Post by rezonant »

soraminazuki wrote: post #97
cm2012 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this wasn't Facebook it wouldn't even be news.

I hope you’re being sarcastic? Or is that actually your stance on people’s privacy rights?

Boiling it down here... some users hit the "Yes" button when Facebook asked them if it was OK to allow Netflix to access their DMs for a feature that allowed you to chat (bidirectionally) with your friends inside the Netflix app. That's a privacy violation?

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#117

Post by slowmovintarget »

rezonant wrote: post #106
lupire wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if a user consented to Netflix-based chat, Facebook overshared all chat data, instead of only the Netflix chat data, because they couldn't be bothered to build a properly isolated API? That's like asking permission to read and write your entire phone, just to provide the ability to write and read back a file.

This isn't how permissions work in most OAuth APIs. When you request permissions on apps like this, you request an "action" on a "subject". The "action" can be read/write/delete, the subject can be "DMs". How does Facebook determine whether a specific DM is a Netflix DM? In the database it's just a message from one user to another, with a certain text content. By the way I'm not suggesting that it cant work this way,…

This is why OAuth is insufficient for privilege management, especially for multi-tenant systems, or what should be segregated data sets. You want to grant access to dataset abc123, but not dataset abc124 belonging to the same user.

This leads to an explosion of scopes, or an explosion of API keys, unless you have a policy engine, or resource-based access control. A company as big as Meta should be able to (is able to) do better than they did, but they probably didn't think this was worth prioritizing because money lie in attention farming, not in mending the fences.

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#118

Post by rezonant »

hipadev23 wrote: post #30
scarface_74 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give access to your chat as the parent poster claims, why are you surprised that Netflix has access?

Because it’s not a reasonable expectation that your private messages would be shared with an advertising partner when you link your account to it, and “give access” is rarely a step that your average user actually reads, much like agreeing to TOS’s upon signup. And catering to the average user’s expectation is what should dictate policy, not a “technically we have permission” caveat.

In the sense that some users may not have realized what they were allowing, that's fair. But that just implies that the permission dialog for this sort of thing should be pretty onerous while being very easy to understand.

There are details that aren't clear here too: Did Netflix request read permissions when you signed in via Facebook? If so, that's shitty and is worthy of condemnation, but the onus falls more on Netflix than Facebook there. You should be able to sign in with Facebook without expecting your DMs to be sent to Netflix. It's still on Facebook, but to a much lesser extent: They should make what's being shared super clear when you sign in with Facebook, and that includes making the sign in super onerous and scary if its something like reading DMs, so the user doesn't miss these details. And they should be reviewing third party apps and what permissions they request, and making sure its inline with the functionality the app is presenting.

However, if the normal Facebook authentication flow did not grant this permission, and the permission was only granted when the user accessed the "Netflix Chat" or whatever feature which obviously did, in actuality, require the read permission to function, then this isn't that big a deal.

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#119

Post by sashank_1509 »

SoDmbIHadToRply wrote: post #82
scarface_74 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you give your mail client credentials to read your email , would you not expect your client to be able to read your mail? On Android, when you give a third party client permission to receive SMS, you don’t expect it to have access to your SMS?

So when I give thunderbird my email details, someone at thunderbird gets access to all my emails ?

unless I’m wrong thunderbird software has complete access to all your emails when you give thunderbird your email details. Of course, that does not imply that a specific thunderbird employee can read your emails, it is probably encrypted on that end but if they pull a switcheroo and download all your emails into an AWS instance, yes that might be possible (and probably wildly illegal too)

Re: Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

#120

Post by rezonant »

SoDmbIHadToRply wrote: post #82
scarface_74 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you give your mail client credentials to read your email , would you not expect your client to be able to read your mail? On Android, when you give a third party client permission to receive SMS, you don’t expect it to have access to your SMS?

So when I give thunderbird my email details, someone at thunderbird gets access to all my emails ?

If Thunderbird had a hosted web version, yes. Are you arguing that data portability and interoperability should never be possible if the receiving app is an online service?

Of course Thunderbird could send an automatic update that starts shipping your emails to Thunderbird's servers. You dont expect that, but only because you trust them.

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