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Comment by retox | Hacker News Reader

I'm still astonished people on HN trust Facebook enough to have any of their apps installed. Since day one their developers have shown complete disregard for users privacy.

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I useful Facebook lightly/moderately, but I uninstalled its app from my phone a long time ago, initially because it was a battery sucking monster, but also because it didn't 'feel' right.

These days, I pretty much don't install apps on my phone. I just use it as an everywhere web browser and live with the web version of various things.

I also use their web app, which means I can no longer access the private messages people send me. Sometimes it tells me I've got a new message. Friends, I'm sorry that I'm ignoring you, but I'm not installing the battery sucking privacy steeling app that is required to view those messages. Wish I could disable the ability for people to send me private messages so they would get a notice instead of thinking I'm an a-hole.

I had this problem for awhile. Now I'm using mbasic.facebook.com for a much more functional experience.

I will give that a try, thanks!

Yes, this is the big downside.

My 'SLA' for facebook messages is about 24 hours, and people who send me things there learn that over time. I generally just tell them why I don't see their messages right away.

In general, I make a point of not being too responsive with any online/async notification systems, except for SMS. It's one way I keep myself from being so scattered.

> I also use their web app, which means I can no longer access the private messages people send me.

You could actually do that through the Facebook.com web interface much longer than you could through the FB mobile app. Of course, you can still do it on the web, though it's a separate domain (just as, on mobile, it's a separate app.)

But since they really want you to use the Messenger mobile app, to use the web interface on mobile you have to use "Request desktop site".

If you go to messenger.com and select Request Desktop Site, you can get a web version of messenger which is tolerably ok to use.

Facebook seems to be one of the few apps that gets privacy right, only asking for permissions to certain things (e.g. camera and microphone) when you want to use say a video recording feature. Now what's the general trustworthiness of the company? That's hard to say for sure, but at least they're doing app permissions right.

That's because of how iOS grants camera and mic permissions, not because Facebook did anything right.

It's partially Facebook doing it right, but not exactly noteworthy. iOS devs can proactively request permissions whenever, and tell you whatever useless reason they want, but that usually gets users to tap "Don't Allow" (and may get your app rejected by Apple.)

I didn't really think about it until the iOS Facebook app helped itself to my Christmas morning photos this year. I had assumed that Apple had stronger protections in place for users' content. It's one thing to say in an alert or popup or something "did you take photos of the kids opening presents this morning? want to make a photo collage using our helpful tool?" and quite another to access my photos (and, presumably, other personal data) without prompting.

You can deny it access to your photos, under Settings -> Privacy -> Photos.

You must have granted the app permission to your photos/camera roll earlier. Still I agree it's sneaky for the app to go in uninvited at a later point in time.

Agreed. It might be nice if Apple extended their "Do you want to continue allowing XYZ to use Location Services" prompt to other permissions, provided it wasn't too aggressive.

Or even better, offer a restricted photo access permission that only works with the built-in image picker. Then at least the user has to tap on an image before it is transferred to the app. I don't care about the fancy custom image pickers with real time preview effects that various apps build in.

I uninstalled FB from my phone years ago after all of my FB friends suddenly showed up in my Android Contacts.

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