Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team
twitter.com
twitter.com
Additionally, some apps are only monetized through advertisement, and 3rd party apps don't display them. How do you expect the 1st party to stay in business?
I don't align with Meta on a lot of issues, but they should be able to control what apps interact with their platform. Don't like it, don't use it.
Many 3rd party twitter clients have expressed a willingness to display ads if provided an API to do so.
As someone who has lost precious accessibility capabilities because of restrictions on 3rd party clients, I unfortunately have to point out that I don't really have a choice of what platforms I do or don't interact with in a lot of cases. I wouldn't stay at my job for very long if I didn't tolerate Slack's BS, for instance.
Like in this scenario to Facebook it is in theory effectively you. Not the app operating on behalf of you with a limited set of permissions.
This logic really bends over backwards to support FB's and similar business models.
This is of course ripe for abuse, but that's just synonymous for digital advertising in general. I don't consider it any different than me hitting mute on the TV during ad breaks or getting up and going to another room during that break.
If you don't think sites have a fundamental right to push ads to sustain themselves (as I don't), then blocking the request is the best place to do it for performance reasons.
But even if you do believe in that right - the site and advertiser care about a single thing: a human being seeing the ad. Serving the Ad request is not just useless for their purpose, it is actively costing them money, and potentially muddling their data.
If you found out Netflix actually streams their content from a public endpoint. You would not be legally allowed to take advantage of that.
When a platform's primary purpose is communication, certain legal rights should be invoked immediately. In my opinion, one of those rights should be the ability to access those communications by any 3rd party client that doesn't intentionally function maliciously. How "proper 3rd-party client behaviour" is evaluated can be a problem for the industry to solve. They have the $trillions to figure something out. I think they'll survive.
The argument "don't like it, don't use it" isn't a very reasonable argument when, socially speaking, you "have" to use a given service (usually the regionally-omnipresent service) to be included in society. Communication is the foundation of society and of human existence. I miss out on a shocking and honestly depressing amount of social activity because of my boycotting of FB, IG, WhatsApp and other similar services.
I expect that our ability to communicate is carefully protected and treated as something crucially important. There's a reason there are SO MANY commercial services around communication and they are largely the most lucrative, because everyone NEEDS to communicate. People will subject themselves to extremely disadvantageous conditions to enable communication with others. Think about it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, the internet, cellular phone service. These things are fundamental to communication in global society, and a TON of laws are written to govern their employment/usage. Internet communication just happens to still be pretty early in the stages of its effect on humanity, and as usual the legal world is well behind what those effects are. The effects are finally being felt. I believe my feelings on this subject will become more widespread as people realize how deeply they have been exploited by industry (once again).
And, actually, have you tried just not using Facebook for a year? Don't even log in whatsoever? Try it, seriously. I have missed parties, concerts, family gatherings (seriously), news of births, marriages, new homes, major life events (including deaths). I found out my cousin had a kid like 6 months later. I found out a friend died months after it happened. I miss out on the opportunity to partake in things that would have greatly enriched my life. This is the cost to me, personally, by opting out of THE platform that EVERYONE uses. I can't just constantly SMS and call everyone I know asking them every detail of their life, because they exclusively share it all on Facebook. You simply cannot invalidate this very real cost as "yeah well, just use something else".
These huge costs of exclusion are exactly why I believe that I should have the right to access de-facto-standard communication services with software that respects my psychological stability, privacy, accessibility needs (including cognitive), of my choice -- again, as long as that software conforms with proper API usage behaviour. Right now, I'm in a pretty coercive position where I either subject to the objectively-harmful design of the Facebook platform, or face pretty adverse effects to my socialization. That's one reason case where governments enact laws, to protect individuals from these sort of extremely skewed power imbalances.
BTW, I get what you're saying. All these services are tecnically optional. I kinda used to feel that way, until I actually started not using the services that I felt were manipulating and coercing me. Then I realized just how much power these services have over us. I realized these services are optional in just the same way as the telephone and the automobile used to be. Totally still optional. Just mail a letter instead. To me it's like, at this point, as a society, we need to decide whether we care if someone can be seriously cut off from modern society because they don't agree to have advertising shoved in their face, manipulative "algorithmic feeds" selectively shown to them to "drive engagement", and unprecedented surveillance cataloguing their every action 24/7/365.
They're welcome to find a different business model. Why should we sacrifice interoperability for everyone for their sake?
Or require an API key that's tied to a particular account that pays for access.
The problem here is that Meta wants to plug things into the internet and then control who gets to ask for those things. This is not how the internet works, at all. If you don't want third parties accessing your APIs, lock them down.
> unauthorized api requests
The word "unauthorized" has two meanings here:
One is authorized by the user, another is authorized by the vendor.
That should be forbidden too.
Absolutely the best reason why businesses should move to Signal. Imagine if your business gets cut off from Meta products, or if at any moment some of your customers get cut off.
Facebook is an extremely limited and poor platform for representing a business, and it too should be avoided for the same reasons (and for being such a garbage fire in general).
You can't reasonably make the "go elsewhere" argument with the monopoly hold FB has on much social data. We need to choose yo regulate them and others to force interoperability, or at the very least allow comcom explicitly (competitive compatibility).
If FB blocked any requests from Firefox Focus they'd likely be in hot water from government agencies.
Do they have the right to block any other app?
Taking aside advertisement for a moment, what you're suggesting is that the level of control should go as far as which clients are allowed to speak a given protocol. This would be similar to the landline system during the monopoly days, where you were only allowed to connect an officially-approved phone (with a correspondingly high ongoing rental cost) to the copper lines.
From my perspective, there is no 3rd party involved here: there is an API surface which is developed and supported, and there is a client/customer who is interacting with the service through that API. Advertising either needs to be implemented into the API (good luck--see the demise of RSS), or the 1st party needs another business model.
Ad blockers are already a thing. Should they be forbidden?
Now, one could argue that by displaying ads in the first place, using an adblock is circumventing something therefore it isn't okay (basically remove one layer of abstraction from the previous sentence). That's also a fair position, but not mine because of entirely selfish reasons (it's inconvenient to me and non-adblock users are subsidizing my use of those websites).
One could argue that allowing adblock users is a strategic decision in hopes they can spread the use of the website and payoff their "debt" that way. I operate web games and I allow adblock users for that reason.
That's fair - you are knowingly subsidising adblock users. If you don't want to subsidise adblock users, you're free to use a different site.
(That's your basic argument, right? Freedom?)
I can't come up with a good justification why a private company on the Internet cannot dictate how you interact with them. Facebook isn't infrastructure.
We should push for MORE of the above, not less. We should push for laws that HELP people use the things they have, instead of locking them out of their own property. If Facebook doesn't like people trying to access their own content, Facebook shouldn't have built a business on everyone else's content. Nobody forced them to do that.
I make no particular comment, here, on whether we should be defending that business model.
Additionally, phones are only monetized through leasing, and 3rd party phones aren’t leased. How do you expect the 1st party to stay in business?
I don’t align with AT&T on a lot of issues, but they should be able to control which phones connect to their network. Don’t like it, don’t use it.
Here is a different way to look at what is going on lately in the short history of the internetowrked computer. To me, there is no legitimate "business". Meta cannot charge IG users a fee. They will not pay. If they would pay, then why not charge them. Instead Meta exploits IG visitors by spying on them. Advertisers will pay. Third parties will be interested in the data Meta collects. What Meta is doing with FB, IG or WhatsApp is not legit "business" IMHO, because, IMO, a business generally produces something of value that people pay for. Generally, Meta does not do that.
Newspapers sold advertising, but people were willing to pay for newspapers. Because newpapers produced something of value. They employed people to produce a product that people paid for: journalism.
Meta does not employ people to produce something of value that people will pay for. The content on these apps comes from the people who use them, and from journalists emplyed by newspapers, but not Meta. Meta make people the product, access to and data on which they sell to paying customers. Websites and apps are not "products". In this "business" the people who use them, their behaviour and the details of their lives, are the product.
A kid's lemonade stand looks more legit as "business" to me than a "tech" company producing so-called "products" that are given away for free, as bait. These are not the product that customers pay for, that no one likes to talk about.
Billboards owners sell advertising. They own or lease real estate with high visibility to traffic. It is difficult to avoid billboards because we generally use the same paths to travel in physical space. As such, billboards are regulated. Not everyone with land adjacent to high traffic routes can erect billboards. See, e.g., Highway Beautification Act of 1965.
Perhaps Meta is like a billboard company in a world that has yet to regulate billboards. IMO, Meta is far more of a hazard to life than a billboard is to the beauty of a highway. Meta does more than display advertising to people who use their websites and apps. Meta's "business model" is a threatening the stability of society. If it is allowed to continue, it should be heavily regulated.
Imagine someone telling you, "If you don't like the billboards, don't look at them." Or "If you don't like the billboards, don't use the highway." It is not so simple. Now imagine Meta tells you, "If you don;t look at the billboards, you cannot use the highway".
Meta is obscuring the true potential of the internet. It has given the internet a bad rap. Meta is not the internet nor its potential to improve people's lives anymore than billboards are the scenery. If left unregulated, billboards can obscure the scenery and eventually they can destroy it.
Billboards are regulated because they’re inevitable. You’ll see them just walking around. On the other hand, no one is forcing you to use Facebook nor Instagram.
I don't like it and I don't use it, but unfortunately it's more complicated than that because of the network effect.
tweetdeck.twitter.com exists and I use it regularly, what am I missing?
Would you be ok with a usage plan? Something like $1 per 10,000 tweets read? I mean, the developer could save money by caching the most popular tweets and serving them from their cache, I imagine they’d have to charge for that infrastructure though and somehow they would pass the costs into the user. Maybe the could offer a monthly plan, with some kind of fixed cost that would keep most users fed with tweets while also not making uses worry about usage based billing.
Maybe Twitter/Insta/whatever could just require you to have a paid plan to use 3rd party clients?
Previously there was App.net, which was effectively "Twitter but you pay for access". It had a free tier which had very reasonable limits. It was actually super awesome, and it actually provided a whole identity platform, enabling 3rd party applications of different kinds (for example an Instagram-like, Favd[0]). Unfortunately it didn't pan out, not sure the whole backstory, but it was a really amazing platform and I would love to see more internet services like that.
[0] https://www.eriksoderstrom.com/p/favd-app-nets-gateway-drug
If anyone could make an App, how would Spotify be able to properly track song plays and whatever else they need in order to pay the rights holders?
Plus, someone would end up creating a 3rd party client that silently plays some song, unbeknownst to the user, in order to rack up plays and earn more money.
While, in cases like this, I agree with you, I think there needs to be nuance to a rule like this.
Consider what would happen in the reverse case. A competitor arises to some aspect of Facebook's services—say, an app that does something kinda like Instagram, but not quite—and becomes somewhat popular.
Facebook adds support for accessing this competitor's service from their own app—look how convenient! You don't need to download two apps, just our app!
They replace the ads from the service maker with their own, thus starving them of revenue...or they just wait until some critical mass of users access the other service through their app, then offer free and easy migration from the other service to their own. Then they start introducing UX problems with the other service—oh, but it's not their fault. It's because of changes to the API or ToS of the other app!
In short, if this sort of thing is mandated universally, it simply tips the scales back in favor of the behemoths already ruling the roost, who can afford to build support for a dozen competing apps right into their own, and use the good old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (or any similar playbook) to make sure the competitors die of asphyxiation.
So, obviously 3rd party clients are thus able to perform malicious acts, but existing laws already forbid this.
My suggestion to ensure 3rd party clients are always legally permitted isn't mutually exclusive with existing laws protecting the creators of services and software. :)
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/valida...
Unfortunately for some types of games (first person shooters), a modified client can be game ruining for other players. For me, as long as it's only running while the client is running, and doesn't send private data remotely, I'm okay with it.
At least on Windows there's not much difference in terms of privacy of something running in the kernel vs userland in the same user as your important documents. It can read your entire filesystem and attach to running apps anyway without needing kernel access. So the "in your OS kernel" part is only concerning if their anti-cheat is coded poorly enough to cause a BSoD.
This is not true for large parts of society.
There are many institutions which force you to communicate via facebook, so not having access to it means you're locked out of parts of your real life.
This is horribly wrong by those institutions, of course, but here we are. It should be illegal, but isn't yet.
As I’ve already mentioned, meta isn’t a utility that people can’t live without like a phone. If they don’t like it, they should use something else. There are many alternatives
You don’t! Just don’t use meta products at all!
However, Meta blocking the developers fb accounts is basically harassment. Let the courts sort it out if their app is illegal. Meta shouldn't take things into their own hands.
This is the bit that's confusing to me.
If I want to access my FB/IG/whatever content, and present my credentials to the server along with a valid request for my data, why should Meta care how I do so?
I could be using nc[0] piped through openssl, rather than a web browser (do you believe Meta can mandate which browser you use and/or what add-ons/extensions it runs?). Is that "hijacking" the API?
If the answer to that question is "no," then shouldn't I be able to write my own client, to access my data, too? If you think I should, then how are either of those (nc, write my own client) really different from using software written by someone that's not me or Meta, as long as I (providing authentication/authorization for my own access) use it to access my own data?
They care because it is part of their business model. If you avoid tracking that affects their revenue.
Just to clarify, that means your answer to the question:
I could be using nc[0] piped through openssl, rather than a web
browser (do you believe Meta can mandate which browser you use
and/or what add-ons/extensions it runs?). Is that "hijacking" the
API?
If so, please consider what that means for your property rights.
> There's no reason I should have to be subjected to untold tracking, snooping and advertising functionality to be able to post or look at photos and comment on them.
Stand up your own PixelFed instance for your family and friends today!
Given that, what should a company do?
> Another way the FTC says Facebook violated the order was by failing to adequately assess and address privacy risks posed by third-party developers. Other than getting developers to click an “I agree” terms-and-conditions box when registering an app with the Facebook Platform, Facebook didn’t screen developers or their apps before giving them access to massive amounts of data that users had designated as private. Of course, in the wrong hands, information like that can grease the wheels for identity thieves and fraudsters.
> The order imposes additional requirements to address Facebook’s illegal conduct. For example, Facebook must implement a stringent program to monitor third-party developers and terminate access to any developer that doesn’t follow the rules.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2019/07/ftcs-5-bi...
If not, you're twisting things to the point of deception. Facebook is supposed to crack down, yes, but it's a specific thing they're supposed to crack down on, not ad-removal.
Yes, the app is downloading private user messages (ostensibly to show a modified messaging interface) and private photos, according to their feature list.
This isn't a simple DNS-level ad-block, its acting as a proxy where the app developers can intercept and see all data.
Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy, just a dummy link: https://www.theogapp.com/
Are their servers acting as a proxy? Whether that's a privacy issue depends on how they configure/limit/audit their servers.
The problem is that data ownership is complicated. If I know your phone number, can I share it with other people? That was CA (me downloading data about all my friends). Here the issue is private messages — is it okay for me to share the messages you sent privately to me? A lot of people will get quite upset if you do that!
Are they just supposed to take their word for it?
Cambridge Analytica said they weren't abusing their access, too.
The press and users will blame Meta, not the developers of this app, or the users that unwittingly handed over their data. The headlines will say "X million Facebook users' data leaked," or "X million Facebook users hacked."
Meta is acting in an entirely reasonable manner for a company under such regulatory and press scrutiny.
In 100 years, I wonder how we will look back at our generation tried to wrap its head around how digital information works. The implications are mind mending and we've been figuring it out our whole lives, with new aspects appearing regularly.
People like my grandparents couldn't ever download a conversation and share it, not in the same way
That’s not true at all. They have a privacy policy linked at the bottom of their page. It opens in a new tab by default which is probably blocked by our adblocker.
<a href="#" class="footer-link">Privacy Policy</a>
Do you have evidence of this? An example of network traffic indicating that the app is communicating with something other than Meta, perhaps?
This is what got Facebook in trouble with the FTC... they allowed developers access to all the users data without oversight. They are required by their settlement to not just trust app devs that they won't abuse the data.
That said, while I don't disagree with the point you're making, I disagree with the approach. There's a difference between recognizing that the market is interested in the approach the third-party app is taking and working with them to figure out how to move forward together, and nuking from orbit the unconnected personal accounts of everyone tied to the app on LinkedIn.
https://twitter.com/theogapp_/status/1574811386613334017
The app logs you in from a different location, requires an intermediate login if you use 2FA (they promise they log out immediately after), is sold for free by a venture backed startup, long-term vision is to export your data to other social media, and says logins always show up as Android (even on iOS).
Maybe they aren’t doing anything malicious, but wow I would not trust it.
What's the difference between me creating my own web browser that renders instagram according to my own rules vs Chrome?
It's also worth noting that the Instagram API is extremely locked down for typical users (which is the reason why there hasn't been a clone like this) as it is limited to Businesses and Creators, but the app demonstrates features not available by the official API: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram
They tweeted that they reverse-engineered the Android API, which would likely get personally you banned anywhere, even without a business: https://twitter.com/TheOGapp_/status/1574811387737407490
The question is - how do we even allow it do be legal? Not being able to reverse engineer applications running on your own devices is some kind of bullshit dystopia, tolerated only because average citizen is not technical enough to realize how dystopian it is.
Meta is wrong in a lot of ways, but this isn’t the right way to fix the problem. Just remove Meta from the equation entirely.
It's not OG or Facebook's machine that is consuming Facebook's API Resources. It is software that is running on the User's hardware. The user should be, and generally is, allowed to make any request to Facebook that's not actively malicious - Using whatever software they choose as their user agent. That means a third party client, developed with the express intent of not showing ads. It's my computer, not yours,
> “When we heard back from Cambridge Analytica that they had told us that they weren’t using the data and deleted it, we considered it a closed case. In retrospect, that was clearly a mistake. We shouldn’t have taken their word for it. We’ve updated our policy to make sure we don’t make that mistake again.”
If there is a third-party server in the middle of you and the service, you kind of have to assume that they are doing something with the data.
It is made worse because some developers aren’t doing questionable things. Others are doing questionable things. But you have no way of discerning between the two groups.
So, it has now become against the TOS to have a third-party make requests on your behalf.
Should we believe in the internet’s ability to be unequivocally good, or should we look at history and realize data protection is a serious problem?
Me installing a third party FB client on my phone and making request through that is not a third party making requests to FB otherwise browsers would then have to be classified as third party. There is no requirement for a third party client to go through a third party server.
Here’s the rub though, if you make and distribute a thing, with the sole intent that the thing will be used for stealing something. Is that ok?
If I made a device that could unlock and start a car, that required no knowledge of how the underlying tech worked, and I advertised it as “OGTransportation, transportation like you want it. No car payment, no paying for gas. Just get in and drive”
Not sure I’m feeling the whole argument.
The infrastructure has real costs, the api development, storage, and maintenance that they aren’t compensating Meta to use.
I agree with you that Meta is ass for society. Simultaneously, these third-parties are parasitic. Ultimately everyone sucks here.
If you don’t want to leak info then don’t expose it on the API, private or not.
Also sites block users with AdBlock enabled all the time, how is this any different?
It's not, blocking users with ad blockers is not tolerable either. If you're unhappy with people consuming content on their own computers, find a different business model that you're happy with.
They designed the machine.
It's the users that are making instances and running it, right?
This isn’t DeCSS, this is a company trying to build and sell a DVD duplicator that advertises that it rips copyrighted content and also removes the previews.
In fact I'd go as far as arguing that true software freedom isn't about availability of source code, but what you are legally permitted to even without.
https://vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-boundaries-of-revers...
You either hate yourself or you don't use the Web too much.
> that isn't equivalent
It absolutely is. There's a service out there that's meant to communicate with applications running on my computer. What my computer does is 100% up to me. If this means your business model that relies on locally running code is hurt, that's something you should have factored in into your decision to choose that business model.
Guess the investors should have stuck to real estate
How could anyone even conceivably think this could go on indefinitely?
I'm asking genuinely because I don't get how anyone could've thought this would end any way other than by Meta putting the kibosh on this.
It's not a bad argument - if you are allowed to view content in an official client, it must mean that you are licensed to view said content and that a third-party client which displays the same content should be allowed to do so since you've already got a license for it.
Adversarial interoperability is our only escape of big-tech monopolies.
Reverse engineering is not illegal and if there is genuine demand for an alternative client, why would investors not fund it?
Eventually, you will become big enough to be next plaid and force everyone to open their APIs.
This isn't usually a problem, except Facebook has a pretty unique position in our society. It might be the only social media some of our immediate family have. It's the de-facto social media presence for some smaller community organizations (like parent groups) and hobby groups. A ban from Facebook is a lot more deeply impactful than being banned from, say, gmail or something.
I could understand if they sent the developers a cease-and-desist or initiated some sort of legal action with this as a potential consequence. I could even understand blocking the app until it was resolved. But actually searching up the dev team and banning their personal Facebook accounts for something they're building on Instagram...
This makes it so much scarier because Oculus is also Meta, and the community there is still heavily reliant on developers to grow since Meta has sunk so much money into it and it still hasn't quite found its footing in the market. Do they think more people are going to develop for it if a potential consequence is their facebook account will be perma-banned as a first-resort? Would you be willing to experiment on that platform?
Anyways, I'm no gazillion-dollar monopoly, but it seems vindictive more than good business sense.
It's funny how prevalent this meme is. But I'm not expected to have an AOL account just because it's the only social media grandpa has. Or MySpace just for Aunt Lolita's sake. No, they are both supposed to get Facebook accounts because that's what cousin Ralph has. And I'm supposed to move for the same reason. Well, if Ralph wants me to know what he ate for dinner, he can find me at my local bbs.
Anyhow, those arguing that third party clients ought to have access to the API are making a similar argument to those who wanted to use third party filters to access channels they hadn't paid for. Why, it would go, if the cable company didn't serve the signal then it wouldn't be available to be used.
Which is not unlike claiming that the data provided by a private API is free for the taking. It's not, and it's certainly not with the consent of those endeavoring to keep the API private, even if it's accessible.
They have no intention (that I know of) of banning new browser technology. They don't say you must use Firefox/Chrome. Which means I can make my own browser and render it however I like.
If the data was meant to be secret, it would be encrypted. At the moment, if I do
> curl -L instagram.com
I get a mix of HTML, JS and CSS. In plain old text.
What am I allowed to do with this data?
Do I have to render it according to what WHATWG says? Obviously not.
If they were trying to limit access to their data, they would, like cable companies do, provide a secret to me so that I could decrypt the response.
Why don't they do that?
Because they want the data *public*.
They could make instagram available only via its own app with its own transport layer.
If they did that you would be violating anti-circumvention in the DMCA by reversing and publishing the protocol.
They want the data open and available to everyone to lower the barrier to entry to make more money. The tradeoff is that they don't control how that data gets presented.
Entirely their choice.
Their ToS disallows the use of unauthorized clients; if one were to accept the ToS, create an account, and use the unauthorized client then they would have violated the agreement and circumvented the legal protections around the private portion of their API.
> If they were trying to limit access to their data, they would, like cable companies do, provide a secret to me so that I could decrypt the response.
They do. That's the effect of having portions of the API and data accessible only to those who are logged in, and have agreed to the terms of service.
If someone writes an app that somehow bypasses needing a Netflix account and lets you stream video from them without paying them. That would be analogous. The intent would be to illegitimately access a paid service.
Using a third party client with a valid account to access API endpoints that respond to that account. I don't see a problem with that. I don't care what the ToS says. It should not be legal to disallow that in a ToS. It also shouldn't be legal to intentionally obfuscate your APIs.
Third party clients are okay and attempting to block them is morally wrong and should not be legal.
If you don't find those terms favorable the correct action is to not use their service; violating their consent is not morally sound.
It's similar to civil disobedience I suppose, except in this case not a law but rather a civil "contract" inasmuch as an impenetrable ToS that a user is forced to click through can be viewed as a proper contract as opposed to a written notification from the vendor that they intend to terminate your service if they discover you doing any of the following things.
Even more esoteric, there was an over-the-air company, IIRC called Vu, that broadcast an analog encrypted signal that required a box to decode properly. Tuning in without it resulted in a signal that was not in-sync so the h&v blanking floated across the screen. In my area, it was a UHF channel that would switch to the premium encrypted signal at 7pm. The decoder was about the size of an Atari 2600 console.
The third party clients can only be used in a way that violates the ToS.
Vindictive actions like this are rarely profitable, they tend to scare people off from doing business with you.
Anyway Meta's customers, and the only entities it cares about, are large ad buyers. None of them will give a crap about this random app and these random human beings getting banned. This has zero impact on their ability to continue writing checks to Meta and continue getting in front of your eyeballs.
If anything Meta's customers will be happy about the ban since this app caused fewer people to see their ads.
The business of social media is ads. In the US the vast majority of social media ad spend goes to Meta. Thus, monopoly.
Google and Meta hold a duopoly over digital ad spending in general.
The FTC agrees and is suing Meta for monopolizing social media and the "metaverse." Anything could happen with these lawsuits but they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think they had a good case.
Good, you should be able to choose who you do business with, or at least that’s what conservatives argued for years.
It's only a matter of time until the Leftist tech platforms ban a critical amount of content producers and make themselves irrelevant. After all, each creator you ban represents a multiple of monetizable viewers that you just partially or totally told "don't come to my site".
Take Rumble for example. It still has a substantial amount of gristle, but a growing amount of mainstream content. It is also now a publicly listed company undergoing hockey stick growth at a time when most companies are not.
I hadn't heard of Rumble until now. But I'm just seeing some putin defense, covid conspiracy, and joe biden is a terrorist videos. And the UX is early 2010's.
I don't think you should be able to ban someone because you don't like them. If it's the case that you should, why doesn't Facebook scrape off and ban known sexual offenders list? Criminals? Should someone that beat their exwife in 1987 really be on Facebook, let alone be able to look up his victim?
I personally think people should be allowed on unless they break the actual rules of the platform on the platform.
What you’re talking about is the platforms relenting and finally enforcing their own terms of service. In this case, _not_ giving a president special exemption from rules that would have caused another user to be banned.
The only special treatment they applied was ignoring their rules for years. Your imagined persecution was simply equal treatment.
If you build an app using the meta platform in a way that is a clear violation of their tos, the app will obviously be killed the second it gets popular. If I was running a service and another company attempted to do this to my service (violated my TOS, built on top of my private API in a way that striped all my revenue and repackaged it under their name, etc) I would definitely ban them...
Because of the network effect.
Now I'm all for trying, I use adblockers and SponsorBlock, but we all know that they're unofficial methods that could be taken down at any time. That's exactly what happened to Vanced.
It would be good if companies did not ban you on one site for violating the TOS of a completely different site.
Except for the part where the TOS explicitly states that you will be banned from all Metas products…
I don’t want my gmail account permanently because of a comment I made on YouTube, nor do I think that should be commonplace. I’m not sure what the best solution is though.
I once worked for a server hosting company that had a few different “branches”. It was pretty common to see different types of misuse or abuse. Whether it be credit card theft, hosting copyrighted content, or hosting phishing sites. I would go out of my way to monitor for and ban all associated accounts at all branches of the company. Not because I wanted to ban their personal accounts, but because 99% of the time those associated accounts would immediately engage in the same behavior. You can sit there all day playing whack-a-mole, or you can exterminate the mole.
There’s a very simple solution here: common carrier. Treat social media as a modern utility. No viewpoint discrimination, censorship, algorithmic social manipulation or proprietary on-ramps.
The bad behavior has gone on long enough.
Should they?
There is no logical difference between:
Creating a new web browser that renders HTML from www.instagram.com and manipulating it via extensions.
The OG app that renders JSON from api.instagram.com.
If we can do one, why not the other?
> UN1feed says Apple removed The OG App, which let users create and share Instagram feeds without ads and suggested posts, from the App Store; the app ranked #50
There's nothing hypocritical about this position. They allow me to use their content in this way so I will, if they didn't, I wouldn't. Working against their explicit wishes (circumventing anti-adblock) is what's wrong.
I'm unable to block their ads on my phone app, so I use it less, but when I use it, I have to see ads.
The companies want you to look at all their ads and be indoctrinated to them. They'd even get you to drink a verification can if they could. Is this the world you want to live in?
Part of personal freedom is about being able to do what you want on your own property, even if others don't like it.
Is it legal to look away from ads or mute the volume? If so, it's just as legal to delegate this work to a machine (or to an assistant you hire), or at least, it should be just as legal, though again, I'm not sure that any law has been broken here. Breach of ToS != breach of law.
Whether to use the service or not is a completely different question, but when it comes to Facebook, the problem is the network effects. Facebook has a monopoly on humanity's social fabric in a lot of locations, and since they don't want to intentionally interoperate and cooperate with third-party clients (so your Apple-branded client won't be able to message someone on Instagram), adversarial interoperability is the only way out.
You’re free to install whatever you want on your machines, but meta is also free to block you from connecting to their servers. It’s not a utility
I understand the feeling, but these weren’t random people that had nothing to do with a company action. These were all individuals who took part in the act.
I agree it’s petty, and yes this is what many free market proponents want (unless free market is just a convenient guise to get what they want).
The pettiness isn't the problem, the extra-legal power that consolidation of capital and media enables is. Competition in the market ceases to be about the best product at the best price, and becomes a game of strategic alliances and power abuse instead.
Edit: To clarify once more: Facebook may have a legitimate interest in keeping this company off Instagram. What it does not have is a moral right to use unrelated properties for retaliation. This is what I meant by "extra-legal" - it's using its market power to punish a company, instead of the courts. If Instagram was independent, it could not engage in this sort of business-warfare.
What? “extra-legal”? Don’t mix this with other behaviors Meta/Facebook/Instagram engage in, I hate them for all the bullsht they get away with too. However, this isn’t that, this is someone trying to build a platform on top of someone else’s platform explicitly against their terms of service and without reimbursing them.
Are you claiming that building and/or using adblocking software is theft?
I don't consider it to be stealing any resources or services. It's little different than an ad and tracker blocker on a browser. Any client-side user agent should have the right to act on behalf of the user. If it's not illegal to build this kind of program yourself to protect yourself, it shouldn't be illegal for another company to build it and profit from it. A company like Facebook shouldn't have the right to strategically stifle innovation and improvement, in a way that makes the market better for the consumer. That undermines the entire point of capitalism, which is to benefit maximally for the consumer by forcing companies to out-do each other. It reads more like anti-competitive behavior to me, and Facebook refusing to try to properly adapt to somebody making their product better than they can do themselves.
If Ford produced an on-board tracking device that tracked your use of the car to sell to advertisers, and another company sold a device that disabled the tracker permanently, there would be no good reason for Ford to be able to forcefully ban the company from buying their cars. Even if the car was sold at a loss because the ad revenue subsidized the remainder and then some.
People are hungry for privacy and a better experience. Facebook needs to learn to adapt for the good of the consumer, or die by letting other companies eat their lunch. This is good capitalism. It sucks for Facebook, but it's good for the public.
I could imagine certain protests being demonized and their attendants removed from meta for violating terms of service.
The real question is do they virtually round up the avatars for public deletions, or do they just disappear them?
I think a lot of people would enjoy virtual public executions, if anyone from meta is listening.
Also, while I enjoy your alliteration, it’s also an extremely steep “slippery slope” argument. It’s certainly not an argument I was trying to entertain.
If a comedian tells vile racist jokes, I believe the writer of the joke, the talent manager who knew the comedians content, the person who booked the comedian knowing the content, and the venue who knowingly provided the platform for the content should all be similarly shunned.
This is a PR nightmare waiting to happen because they're siphoning data using a reverse engineered API. You could argue 'what's the worst that could happen' but if they're inserting themselves into the middle of that process, they can effectively behave as that user and request anything they wanted as that user.
OAuth exists for a reason and it's to ensure that users are made aware of what exactly an app is requesting on behalf of them and so that full chain can be properly tracked. If you really want to argue that third party clients should be allowed then it should be from the standpoint of forcing companies to offer something along those lines, not this. People defending this app is horrifying from a security standpoint.
aren't developer and personal accounts separate on facebook?
All larger issues regarding infrastructure providers and user rights aside (and that’s a big swipe), this is childishly silly. It’s the equivalent of stealing some merchandise from a big box store, getting caught and claiming that it should be okay because “everyone’s doing it”. No, it is not okay.
And I say that as someone who fundamentally despises Facebook/Meta. Effective regulation needs to happen resulting in a different set of incentives driving actors like Meta. However, unnecessary stunts like this will only ever cause a storm in a glass of water.
Stunts like this are also intellectually dishonest – they confuse, twist and blend different issues together just to try to amplify their outrage potential until they dissolve into meaninglessness. If the developers are actually serious about this, I’m at a loss for words. Then again, maybe that’s today’s social media in a nutshell.
You fuel the monopoly, you suffer the consequences. You have no real power against them and you still actively support them by creating tools for them. PSGWSP.
2. No clear privacy policy (re: how does the app protect and utilize user info)
3. Circumventing user access/security policies
Maybe I missed something, but it sounds like everyone on their team participated in multiple violations on Meta’s platform. I admire what they were doing, trying to polish a turd, but I don’t think they should get upset when they get sh*t on their hands.
Meta/Facebook/Instagram are a cancer that needs to be excised. No amount of plastic surgery will cure the rot within. The platform exists only to get users into a feedback loop that they can use to advertise to you.
Best of luck to the team, hopefully they come to see this as a positive thing, find alternative solutions, and never have to deal with that garbage platform again.
Just wanted to give my thoughts on the whole situation. This is in addition to our official statement here: https://twitter.com/TheOGapp_/status/1575217497011200001
I want to start off by saying that everyone in this whole comments section has been making points as if what they are saying is "fact". Nothing here is "fact" because there are no laws around API usage. I don't think lawyers even know what HTML or JSON mean. Everything here is an opinion and there are clearly opinions on all parts of the spectrum.
Meta is currently completely within their rights to put in their terms of service that there should be no 3rd party clients, there should be no way to access their APIs, etc. That is true. However, we believe that shouldn't be the case. People should be allowed to have the freedom to choose how they use platforms. People should be allowed to control which apps access their data and what they do with it. Some people in the comments mentioned that this is very similar to "Ma Bell" and the whole anti-trust situation along with that, and it very much is. We are stifling innovation and creation of jobs, wealth, and truly wonderful products in the social space because of the stronghold Meta has over the market. For example, both Brazil (PIX) and India (UPI) have open instant payment systems that came about due to Government anti-trust regulation that encouraged competition. This led to a boom in digital payments and was a huge boon for both countries. If you have tried either of these systems, you would know that they are leagues ahead of more "modern" countries like the US. By not allowing interoperability and portability of social networks, and user data at large, we are stifling the growth of the economy and of the products that can be built. Listen, this is no small amount. Social networks were responsible for onboarding the first billion people onto the internet. These tools now help everyone in the world communicate at all times. Do not underestimate the impact they have and the reduction in value across the world because they are not interoperable. Users who use UPI in India have a choice of over a dozen payment apps, that work with all banks, and they can send money to any other bank, instantly, 24/7! This is HUGE. Similarly, social networks that allow for portability and interoperability will allow for dozens of different apps that fit specific use-cases, allowing for more internet users, and a greater value to the entire world.
So, we built OG because we thought this was the first step to realize this vision of the social internet that was truly open, portable, and interoperable.
> People should be allowed to have the freedom to choose how they use platforms I absolutely despise meta but this is just weird. If a company provides a service, they can do so as they see fit, as long as they are compliant to laws etc. If you don't like it, don't use it.
There are nice projects like mastodon or matrix, which seem to have very similar goals as you. I just can't shake the feeling of you guys being shady af. You can't be naive to think this would work? You have no privacy policy, circumvent the compliance of meta (which is afterall, one of the most watched companies) and essentially proxy all user data. WTF? And who on earth would fund that?
Back in the AT&T monopoly it required a third-party device (the Carterphone) to actually be released on the market for their anti-competitive terms to be challenged and eventually struck down in court.
> circumvent the compliance of meta
How? If an idiot user gives their credentials to a shady third-party, it's the user's fault for compromising their own data, not Meta's. If a user were to print out pages of the Facebook web UI containing private data and then start distributing them in the streets, would you also blame Meta, and not the user? What about if the user writes down the private data manually, and then distributes it? Etc.
> essentially proxy all user data
What's wrong with proxying? Plenty of mobile e-mail clients for example do proxying as well because there's just no way to maintain a persistent connection or do regular polling on mobile devices due to network & battery life constraints.
Is there any evidence they captured or misused the proxied data for beyond what's needed to provide the service?
Also keep in mind that a vast majority of Instagram data is public by design - people put it out there because they want it to be seen, and it can be seen by anyone accessing the web interface. The people who ultimately own the data often don't want it to be private.
> who on earth would fund that?
Someone who's actually interested in setting the legal precedent that would allow this behavior and invalidate ToS preventing it?
That's so american to think that another company should fix this. It's the state's responsibility to fix that, if people want it.
> How? If an idiot user gives their credentials to a shady third-party, it's the user's fault for compromising their own data, not Meta's. If a user were to print out pages of the Facebook web UI containing private data and then start distributing them in the streets, would you also blame Meta, and not the user? What about if the user writes down the private data manually, and then distributes it? Etc.
I mean content and distribution. Also, providers might be liable for not protecting the user enough. Sorry but your other examples are stupid and totally not what I meant.
> Is there any evidence they captured or misused the proxied data for beyond what's needed to provide the service?
I bet you take care of security in your job ... not. "ThEy DiDn'T aBuSe AnYtHiNg (yet)".
> Someone who's actually interested in setting the legal precedent that would allow this behavior and invalidate ToS preventing it?
Still, liability is a bitch, as you can see. The risks were all laid out quote clear beforehand.
So let's say there's a bad law on the books that prevents this. How do you get people to understand why they should revolt against it without giving them a tangible example? There's plenty of bad laws out there such as the CFAA, yet it's virtually impossible to get people/politicians to care about it because they're not affected by it directly. On the other hand, giving people a tangible example of why the law is bad, such as by breaking it to deliver something valuable, will immediately get people's attention when that valuable service stops because of the law and they got used to relying on the service.
> providers might be liable for not protecting the user enough
How do you effectively protect the user when they are voluntarily giving away their credentials? Furthermore, is it even "protection" (as opposed to rent-seeking) if the user consensually and voluntarily shares their credentials because they trust the third-party?
> I bet you take care of security in your job
Well my security model is that the user is only allowed to access the data they are entitled to. If the user gives away their credentials voluntarily, despite all warnings, there's really nothing I can do, and maybe I shouldn't do if it turns out the third-party is actually operating a legitimate service that the users find valuable.
> Still, liability is a bitch, as you can see
Well, all of this will have to be determined by courts, and ultimately depends whether there's any money to be collected in the first place. This entire operation may have been planned ahead of time with the company structured in such a way that there's nothing for Facebook/Meta to collect even if they end up winning any eventual lawsuit.
Without that and no privacy policy, no monetization scheme etc leads me to have zero trust in anything you say about a truly open and clear internet.
> Get the OG Instagram experience.
> Remove ads and suggested content, create completely customized feeds, download content, turn off read receipts, and more.
- Yes, Facebook had the right to do it. They're terrible for doing it, though. Meta is terrible? No way!
- I'm extremely exhausted of the "tough luck, it's a private company" shtick when it fits someone's personal interests, but cry corporate capitalistic Hell when it doesn't.
- There is nothing I've seen in the Apple Developer Guidelines that would warrant it being removed, though I'm open to this (it's been a while since I've read the full thing)
Perhaps we should ban accounts over iframes next?
Just persusing them, I can see violations of sections:
1.6 Data Security
4.1 Copycats
5.1.1 Data Collection and Storage
5.2 Intellectual Property
5.2.2 Third-Party Sites/Services
5.2.3 Audio/Video Downloading
Why do you assume they're not doing that? Why do you believe storing 3rd party account access information is inherently insecure? It's not.
> 4.1 Come up with your own ideas ... Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or UI and pass it off as your own.
Why would the whole copyright-fair-use-deal not be the standard here? The app in question is absolutely transformative - it's the entire reason people would ever download it.
>5.1.1 See 1.6, it's the same exact reasoning. There is nothing the app does that is inherently insecure or privacy-destroying from a conceptual perspective. Is there something specific in this monstrously-large section you'd like to call out?
>5.2.2 + 5.2.3
Ah, you're actually right here! I don't actually remember seeing 5.2.2 before. OG does violate Apple's developer guidelines. Interesting.
Somebody else said they're using oauth. Afaik, instagram does not provide a public API. So it seems like they abused oauth for that?
Look at who some of the people here work for.
>look on the bright side, now you don't have to use facebook any more.
Seeing this "OG App" complain about Meta, and Meta fighting back, is truly like two turds fighting over which is worse. It's all crap in the end.
It also seems extremely petty considering they KNOW this company has endless fake accounts they use, and losing their personals doesn't really mean much other than a personal loss.