Comment by cinquemb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cinquemb | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>It's still violated on agreed terms (even if not legally enforceable) so it can be called abuse.

If you grab data hosted on facebook or any other website, without having an account, where is the explicit contractual agreement? Are HTTP requests contractual agreements? MITM/DPI'ing facebook users who connect via your hardware contractual agreements?

The extent that is abuse, is that facebook (or any other site) service is engineered in such a way that makes such information it collects available to any degree in the first place. True, anyone can make dubious claims of abuse.

>Also, how does the provided link support claim that they are not necessarily enforceable legally? I read it but saw only criticism of TOS in general, nothing about whether they are or are not legally enforceable.

"These "terms" are actually purported legal contracts between the user and the online service provider (websites MMORPGs communication services etc.) despite the fact that users never get a chance to negotiate their contents and can often be entirely unaware of their existence."

purported legal contracts != legal contracts, i.e. just because someone says it's a legal contract, doesn't mean it actually is.

> purported legal contracts != legal contracts

Oh, learned the new word today. Do they have also some analysis that say why TOS should be purported legal contract and not valid legal contract?

> If you grab data hosted on facebook or any other website, without having an account, where is the explicit contractual agreement?

I assumed that we were about platform API abuse. In such case, each developer had to agree with TOS before he is allowed to use the API. So in this case, developer explicitly agreed to terms that subsequently broke. So I think it can be called "abuse". It's not random HTTP request.

For random HTTP requests, that is much less clear. My stance on this is that as long as you are respecting robots.txt, and not trying to circumvent any blocking measures by the site you are using, everything is fair game (in general, maybe there could be exceptions). I don't think it's right/moral to violate those two. And whether it is legal, it depends on jurisdiction, who you are scraping (I am assuming we talk about automated access), if you respect robots.txt, if you try to go around blocks, ...

Two interesting cases in scraping I know about are these ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur.... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-li...

> MITM/DPI'ing facebook users who connect via your hardware contractual agreements?

I am no expert in law, but MITM/DPI to extract data sounds highly illegal. I don't think that TOS have to handle this case.

> The extent that is abuse, is that facebook (or any other site) service is engineered in such a way that makes such information it collects available to any degree in the first place.

So you are arguing that Facebook should be walled garden, with minimal possibilities for users to share their data with developers (not that I disagree). I don't think this is problem with existence of these platform / capabilities, but that the users are not understanding implications of what they are allowing (but doing that is gargantuan task, they will probably invent new nobel prize for anyone who manages doing that).

>I assumed that we were about platform API abuse. In such case, each developer had to agree with TOS before he is allowed to use the API. So in this case, developer explicitly agreed to terms that subsequently broke. So I think it can be called "abuse". It's not random HTTP request.

Even assuming that, developers who check in their credentials to public repos, third parties that use such never agreed to the terms. You can do this do today, without agreeing to facebooks terms (i.e. go to github, get access tokens, connect to "open graph", no accepting terms or creating accounts needed).

>Do they have also some analysis that say why TOS should be purported legal contract and not valid legal contract?… For random HTTP requests, that is much less clear…

It's not really about random HTTP requests or not, it's that any of this will have to be argued in courts. From the examples you have listed, in the US, this is not really in Facebook's favor (unless they can scare people to stop doing such before getting to the courts).

>So you are arguing that Facebook should be walled garden, with minimal possibilities for users to share their data with developers (not that I disagree)…but that the users are not understanding implications of what they are allowing

Personally, I don't think facebook should be this at all, and although they may have sold developers on their platform, this has been less of the case over all as time goes on (bait and switch). They say they want to connect the world, but what they really mean is that they want to connect the world on their terms (and they have every right too, but they can't necessarily stop others from doing something).

I don't think it is facebook's responsibility to give its users any illusions of privacy since any "friend" they have on the platform or any third party app they connect with is just another attack surface agaisnt such: by design. I think every user of any platform needs to take to protections in their own hands, if they care about such, first and foremost. Expecting governments/corporations/organizations to coddle them and provide everything that they desire without doing anything for oneself, is just naive to how humans have operated throughout history. It's been over a decade since facebook has been around, people can keep saying that people just dont understand, but I will think people will keep saying such even after another decade (or more) if facebook is still around.

> . You can do this do today, without agreeing to facebooks terms (i.e. go to github, get access tokens, connect to "open graph", no accepting terms or creating accounts needed

if I go to pastebin and find login credentials dumps, i can login to those services without accepting any TOS. Yet, I would probably go to jail of caught. This seems to be similar case. but I doubt that user access token (that you need to access that users data) is somewhere on github. app user token sure (as sometimes you have to ship it with the app, or app can be opensource), but user access tokens are like passwords, so they should not be in the code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com