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You realise what the most successful thing built on top of that open social graph was, right?

Cambridge Analytica.

The issue there was collection of massive amounts of public data by Facebook. Open data APIs can be used to build nice things, if the data isn't user information.

No, it was Cambridge Analytica using the old FB social graph API ("Open Graph") to build a network of people that they could make predictions on.

The app "This is your digital life" let people do a psychological profile linked to their FB profile. The Open Graph API then gave Cambridge Analytica to (some of) their friend's data as well,

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica...

https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-th...

https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/

The problem here is that we don’t really have a consensus on what should happen if people share the information they know about you with others without asking you, not that we should not have API access to our own content on social networks.

No particular argument there - just noting that the original comment was calling for return to "the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs'".

Turns out that wasn't a great idea. Disappointing because it's what I wanted too.

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