Hacker News Reader

Comment by aestetix | Hacker News Reader

1. If the data in question were public, Facebook would not need to be the ones selling it. There would be a whole market of third party data aggregators.

2. If this were true, why would we need the Bill of Rights? The entire point of the Fourth Amendment, for example, is to protect citizens against unreasonable searches -- by law enforcement.

3. This would be true if the data were only shared on a need to know basis, which has not been demonstrated. Facebook allows users to give it data under one set of pretenses, and then turns around and uses/sells this data under a different set. I agree the other questions are important, but none of them would be possible if Facebook were not abusing its role.

The NSA FISA orders are getting endless complaints, and yet Verizon and others are handing this data over under a "court" order. In this case, Facebook is doing effectively the same thing, but for profit.

View on HN

1. The data is freely viewable to anyone on the internet. There is just no practical means of searching / discovering it without the companies' feeds.

2. They shouldn't call it user data, as if Twitter / Facebook were selling private information they store about users. This tool just searches the public stream of posts.

1. Practical and apparently legal means: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/2037976

"• Accessing Facebook or collecting user content or information using automated means without Facebook’s prior permission;"

So it's clear that if I know of someone's public data feed and gather it, that's fine. But what if I gather from a list of 10,000 peoples public data feeds? So I'd argue there are two points of contention here:

(1) Does making something hard to discover make it less public? Assuming there is such a thing as "public"

(2) By creating a legal barrier to a particular kind of discovery (automated), and then selling access to this data, does this make it less public?

2. I'd argue that there are different kinds of public. For example, in one kind, I can look at a room full of people, find a man, learn that his name is Mr. Brown, and see that he is wearing a green hat. In another kind, I'd need to create a request to find out if Mr. Brown exists, if he is wearing a hat, and if so, what color. In both instances of "public", this information is readily available to me, but in the second, I have to have some idea of what I want, and specifically request it.

What Facebook is doing, for me, seems like they are selling access to the first kind of public, and then allowing everyone else free access to the second kind of public, within limitations: I cannot write a script to cycle through a list of names and clothes, and I'm probably restricted in how many requests I can make within a certain timespan.

re 1): as this situation stands now, facebook threatens via C&D or sues other companies that try this invoking us law.

However if you incorporate in countries that are actively hostile to companies like facebook/google (i.e. Indonesia, China), you can operate aggregators of such data more effectively. However that barrier is a bit different from jumping over this barrier in the due to Facebook incumbent status.

Can you provide evidence of that? I find this interesting, because a lot of people are saying "it's public data." I would argue that if you get a C&D for scraping/etc, it's no longer public.

Facebook's c&d against me and my friend's company we bootstrapped to about $100k annualized before decicing to close stuff down to changes from this: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/2037976

I'm in Indonesia now, and still have everything pretty much ready where I left off (and technically its even easier than before to exfil data from this walled garden sans user account, because of the huge surface of oauth keys out there in the wild as it is for every website with similar protocols and api's) so i'm just doing due diligence now to make sure that like me and my friend handled CNIL[0] from the US, we can effectively send any facebook requests to /dev/null

So I say to anyone else if you think its "public data" try to start a company that builds a derivative product within the US leveraging such "public data" ;)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_nationale_de_l%27in...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com