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Making Control Simple

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Re: Making Control Simple

#61

Post by anthonyb »

what wrote: post #33
singer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating an app to extract Facebook contacts would be a piece of cake.

I don't think that's allowed. "III. Storing and Using Data You Receive From Us ... 7. You must not use user data you receive from us or collect through running an ad, including information you derive from your targeting criteria, for any purpose off of Facebook, without user consent." [1] I suspect that means you need consent from every user whose information you collected (your own list of contacts is made up of oth…

It's possible to extract emails. I've done it using the steps here: http://www.labnol.org/internet/export-email-addresses-from-f...

It's generally within FB's terms of service to store Facebook ids, but unless you're a larger company like Yahoo, I don't think you're allowed to do much else other than use the data for your app.

Re: Making Control Simple

#62

Post by anthonyb »

what wrote: post #33
singer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating an app to extract Facebook contacts would be a piece of cake.

I don't think that's allowed. "III. Storing and Using Data You Receive From Us ... 7. You must not use user data you receive from us or collect through running an ad, including information you derive from your targeting criteria, for any purpose off of Facebook, without user consent." [1] I suspect that means you need consent from every user whose information you collected (your own list of contacts is made up of oth…

From a more thorough read of the policy, III. 3. looks like it means that you're ok to use "basic information" from someone who connects to your service however you like, as long as you don't go selling it to ad networks/third parties. That means that you can store one person's first name, last name, email address, profile pic, FB ids of friends - but not any of their friend's details other than their id.

It's not much, but it's enough to help create someone's account on your competing social network. Whether you'd be able to store/export their posts/other people's comments is a different question - it depends on the definition of application, but FriendFeed seemed to be able to do it, so why can't someone else?

Re: Making Control Simple

#63

Post by jacobolus »

axod wrote: post #52

Has anyone else been caught with random popups on facebook "offering" to link your profile interests to public pages? It's really scammy. Once it pops up, you're trapped. Click on the facebook logo, and it doesn't take you home. There is no way out unless you either agree, or manually go back to facebook.com yourself. What are they thinking doing crap like that...

Even worse, once you close out of that page a few times and navigate back to facebook manually, at some point they just delete all of your interests, unprompted.

Totally obnoxious.

Re: Making Control Simple

#64

Post by thedjpetersen »

jacobolus wrote: post #63
axod wrote: post #52

Has anyone else been caught with random popups on facebook "offering" to link your profile interests to public pages? It's really scammy. Once it pops up, you're trapped. Click on the facebook logo, and it doesn't take you home. There is no way out unless you either agree, or manually go back to facebook.com yourself. What are they thinking doing crap like that...

Even worse, once you close out of that page a few times and navigate back to facebook manually, at some point they just delete all of your interests, unprompted. Totally obnoxious.

This is because they are replacing your interest with a linked page. The offer to link is the prompt.

Re: Making Control Simple

#65

Post by waterlesscloud »

jayair wrote: post #60
axod wrote: post #52

Has anyone else been caught with random popups on facebook "offering" to link your profile interests to public pages? It's really scammy. Once it pops up, you're trapped. Click on the facebook logo, and it doesn't take you home. There is no way out unless you either agree, or manually go back to facebook.com yourself. What are they thinking doing crap like that...

Found it incredibly annoying. I haven't visited my profile since.

I changed everything to blatant lies, decreasing the value of the service.

Re: Making Control Simple

#66

Post by mrvir »

keltex wrote: post #18
singer wrote: post #6

I suppose this might put an end to the Diaspora dream.

I doubt it. The cat is out of the bag... Facebook can at a whim change the privacy of your personal data. Sure they caved under pressure and took a step backwards, but whose to say things might not change again in the future? Some people are totally comfortable with the risk, but frankly I think it would be good for everybody that the "social networking infrastructure" is not owned by one company. Then... like email,…

Facebook has kept taking two steps forward and one step backwards for the last years. The direction has stayed the same however. On the Washington Post article Mark said: "Sometimes we move too fast", which is totally different than saying "we went to a wrong direction".

Re: Making Control Simple

#67

Post by what »

anthonyb wrote: post #62
what wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's allowed. "III. Storing and Using Data You Receive From Us ... 7. You must not use user data you receive from us or collect through running an ad, including information you derive from your targeting criteria, for any purpose off of Facebook, without user consent." [1] I suspect that means you need consent from every user whose information you collected (your own list of contacts is made up of oth…

From a more thorough read of the policy, III. 3. looks like it means that you're ok to use "basic information" from someone who connects to your service however you like, as long as you don't go selling it to ad networks/third parties. That means that you can store one person's first name, last name, email address, profile pic, FB ids of friends - but not any of their friend's details other than their id. It's not mu…

FriendFeed is part of Facebook though?

http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/08/friendfeed-accepts-facebo...

You might be able to take a user's data to establish their profile, they consented by using your application after all. But I don't think you can export their friend list and use it to invite them to your new social network.

Either way, I think Facebook could find something in their ToS to shut you down if they feel like you're stealing their users away. There was a recent article about a tool from Power Ventures that allowed you to login to multiple social networks and aggregate the messages, friends lists and what not. Facebook seemed to claim it was a violation of the ToS because they were accessing account data using "automated means."

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/05/03

Re: Making Control Simple

#68

Post by Hexstream »

izendejas wrote: post #35
mootothemax wrote: post #2

Fair play to Facebook, they've done exactly what they said they would, and to the same timeline. I don't like the long preamble trying to justify themselves, but now that I can turn off Facebook Platform entirely, it's a small price to pay.

wouldn't it be great if instead, you could turn it on and it was turned off by default? give people a compelling reason to use a product (in this case to turn it on), or you have no product--period.

You get raped by default unless you "opt-out". It's become a tradition. Because after all, where's the wrongdoing if you can opt-out, eh? Sometimes I hate the world.

Re: Making Control Simple

#69

Post by agentultra »

singer wrote: post #27
agentultra wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's a pain, it's possible and they cannot actively take steps to prevent you from backing up your email. Not true for all the contacts in your fb profile.

Creating an app to extract Facebook contacts would be a piece of cake.

I'd wager than any such app that could help users migrate to a competing social network would be shutdown extremely fast.

Most users migrating their emails to another provider can do it through a desktop email client. At most it might require learning how to download an mbox file or some such. Pretty hard stuff for an average user, but not impossible.

Try telling a user that they'd have to program their own app on a proprietary third-party API and host it on their own servers and go through some sort of vetting process just to get a backup of their emails and... well I hope you can see where I am going.

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