Why We Disagree with The New York Times • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#41

Post by burkaman » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

seanalltogether wrote: post #23

The limited responses so far in this thread only reinforce many companies decisions to pull support for public apis. How many years have developers been complaining that twitter and facebook have been restricting access to apis for 3rd parties, but now all of a sudden they're evil for ever offering apis to begin with?

It's hard to believe you're asking this question in good faith. I'm sure you understand there's more to it than "APIs are good" or "APIs are bad", obviously the purpose of the API matters. If Twitter offered a public API for information that users hadn't realized they'd made public, that would be bad. When they pull support for an API for information everyone intended to be public and searchable, that is also bad.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#42

Post by cm2012 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

miracle2k wrote: post #36

The New York Times should be ashamed of itself. Facebook let companies like Apple integrate with their platform. To do so, these companies sent the same sequence of bytes from your mobile phone to the Facebook server, as the Facebook app does, or as any person can do. I can write my own Facebook app today, and there is nothing that Facebook can do about it, except sue me. THAT IS A GOOD THING. LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES…

Developer communities which pride themselves on their reason would rather not look at paltry things like details when a company they don't like is being criticized.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#43

Post by esrauch » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #34

seanalltogether wrote: post #23

The limited responses so far in this thread only reinforce many companies decisions to pull support for public apis. How many years have developers been complaining that twitter and facebook have been restricting access to apis for 3rd parties, but now all of a sudden they're evil for ever offering apis to begin with?

There's nothing wrong with offering a public API. There's everything wrong with offering a secret, non-public API where you give a third party I didn't consent to full access to all of my data. See how that's a bit different? One of them is offering public information (say, stock quotes), publicly. One of them is offering private information (my sexual orientation and date of birth) to tons of third parties I didn't…

Surely it is only giving blackberry the information if you type in your login credentials on a blackberry right?

I don't see how the situation is actually different now: if you run the official Facebook app on your Galaxh phone then Samsung could scrape and exfiltrate the data anytime it wants. It is Samsung's fault if they do it not Facebook's.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#44

Post by Djvacto » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

miracle2k wrote: post #36

The New York Times should be ashamed of itself. Facebook let companies like Apple integrate with their platform. To do so, these companies sent the same sequence of bytes from your mobile phone to the Facebook server, as the Facebook app does, or as any person can do. I can write my own Facebook app today, and there is nothing that Facebook can do about it, except sue me. THAT IS A GOOD THING. LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES…

Forgive what may be a not-fully-informed question/opinion, but isn't the issue that 3rd parties were able to see private information? Not public information?

Like you send the same sequence of bytes that they do, but the difference is that it should be different depending on who is sending the bytes, no?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#45

Post by dominotw » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

jacobsheehy wrote: post #2

It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc. > These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than…

> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways.

Why is this, though? How is it different from any other legal agreements?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#46

Post by zakk » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

newscracker wrote: post #16

davidw wrote: post #6

The fact that you can't read messages (without switching to 'desktop mode') on their mobile web app is such horse shit. Yuck.

Either that or you can go to the basic version at mbasic.facebook.com for an even poorer (though somewhat better in some senses, like having messages integrated) experience.

> mbasic.facebook.com

Thanks!

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#47

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #18

Perhaps Zuck isn't as bright as we all think? This reply is far too tech-heavy, and jargon-littered to be taken seriously as a reply to something as mainstream as the NYT. Their PR problems aren't rooted in SV, yet that's who this is targeted to. It doesn't make (good brand) sense.

> Their PR problems aren't rooted in SV

Silicon Valley is the last place I'm consistently hearing full-throated defenses of Facebook. It makes sense to keep one's base in order.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#48

Post by zakk » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

billysielu wrote: post #30

Funny they don't like fake news when it's about them.

It seems to me that the NYT allegations are not exactly fake news...

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#49

Post by AzzieElbab » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

Your real data has already been mishandled by anyone from banks to healthcare providers to governments. This mass hysteria about FB is just silly nuisance constantly getting blown out of proportions by turf wars between FB and traditional media Oh and this particular case FB is calling the nyt fake news

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#50

Post by zaroth » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

Facebook’s response seems perfectly reasonable to me.

- Obviously in order to integrate FB functionality into a Mobile OS UI requires an API to render the data being displayed.

- If your phone has a home screen widget which shows friend data, obviously that friend data came from a Facebook API call.

- If you type your Facebook username and password into a settings dialog in order to enable that home screen widget to function, that’s pretty obviously consenting to enable the functionality.

- There once was a day when we demanded our social media platforms to provide these “open access” APIs to specifically allow for accessing our own social feeds on our own devices.

We trust our user agents to render our private information on our devices. Sometimes we even trust our user agents to leverage network services to improve the on-device performance (i.e. Amazon Silk)

If and when user agents exfiltrate our personal data off device for data mining purposes (i.e. Chrome Omnibar) it should be disclosed and opt-in.

It sounds like Facebook provided an API to device manufacturers to allow them to deeply integrate social features on device. This has historically been considered a Good Thing. It sounds like they put together a legal agreement that required these device manufacturers to take due care in implementing these features to protect user data. Also seems like historically this is what we would call a Good Thing.

When you enter your username and password in order to view your Facebook feed — that’s called a “user agent” and that’s something appreciably different than a third party quiz app sucking in friend feed data.

However, Chrome Omnibar aside, user agents are not expected to exfiltrate data in any way, and if that occurred, that would indeed be a story I’d like to read, and my ire in that case most certainly wouldn’t be directed against Facebook.