Facebook Has No First Amendment Right to Send Unauthorized Texts, Says Court
reason.com
reason.com
That, and you also can't change your relationship status to married retroactively without Facebook notifying every person in your contact list.
https://brachistochr0ne.wordpress.com/2016/12/26/facebook-ha...
Until I've decided to try it in the Chrome Incognito Mode. It worked correctly, without redirecting to the normal facebook's mobile site.
But after coming back from Incognito, it started working as intended on normal browsing mode too.
I know this, because I make a very clear distinction between work and non-work data, facebook is non-work, so I will never have colleagues or work related contacts on facebook.
Suddenly one day, out of the blue, I get a facebook "friend suggestion" for a boss I had many years back. There's absolutely _no way_ there are any contact paths from my facebook friends to this person.
The only thing I had done was (reluctantly) installing the facebook mobile app. I researched it and found other people had experienced the same thing. The app simply took your entire address book and started matching up "friends" using that.
WhatsApp seems to do the same today.
Facebook is an evil company that absolutely will take any data they can get their hands on.
b) It's funny how the HN crowd spins the separation of the messaging component from the rest of the product as a bad thing. When it comes to Unix, we repeatedly hear about how having separate smaller utilities to accomplish different tasks is the only right way to do things. But a company who splits their essential messaging component from the extremely heavy, unnecessary, optional, nice-to-have addons like a "wall" is somehow evil.
A "messaging app" is a very tiny fraction of the functionality found in a "social networking app". It's extremely sensible to separate them. How anyone can even pretend to attribute this to some nefarious motive is beyond me. And hell, I'm an anti-Facebook nut.
But in fact Messenger is a trojan horse app which spies on users and gathers much information about the systems its installed on, without user oversight, in order for Facebook to better profile its users.
Fact: Messenger isn't a messaging app. It masquerades as one, because in reality its a user-profiling app, designed to serve one master, and one master only: Facebook. Not its users.
And to be clear, "spying" simply means granting the app those privileges. You could complain about Apple's or Android's approaches to approving individual privileges, but it's not like Facebook is doing anything super illegitimate that users haven't had to permit - even if the reason for granting those privileges isn't fully disclosed.
>App privileges
Sure, just like the NSA isn't spying, since it has permission from Congress. You won't ever know what it does with the data - because of course, those rights are privileges and not granted to you, the individual - but it doesn't make the net result any better for those of us who care about privacy and controlling our own lives, un-hindered by corporate policies requiring the mass usurpation of our individual rights.
If I wanted to contact people on messenger they would already have messenger.
I was at dinner with a friend. Because of unexpected circumstances, we ended up sharing a table with one of her friends and some people that friend was with.
One of her friend's friends was quite gregarious and engaging towards my (non-romantic, by the way) friend. Seemed pretty obvious to me, at least.
We get back to my friend's place, and this guy is IM-ing her on FB Messenger with a bunch of flattering and engaging texts. She didn't give him her number, despite his hints in the restaurant parking lot, but he readily found her on FB through their mutual friend/contact. (Who, by the way, told her, "Yeah, no... He was a jerk to me and you don't want to go there.")
Sorry for the lengthy story. This friend of mine also went through an extended period of significant but not always close network building, this past year. And this is how much of that worked: Where phone numbers weren't shared, PM-ing through FB Messenger.
Messenger is well on the way to becoming the de facto "public" venue for IM-ing.
Other platforms tend to be turned to for more private, personal stuff -- at least among folks who actively use multiple platforms.
P.S. Invasive as it is, and with all the reservations I have, you nonetheless have to give FB credit (as a self-interested business) for turning Messenger into this. And, privacy concerns and limitations aside, it pretty much "just works". Which is the definition of win and first choice, for most "ordinary" folks.
Either it's a brush off, or they're a bit..different.
Although trying that it seems the certificate isn't trusted by iOS Safari.
Facebook Messenger came out first.
Facebook (2011): http://web.archive.org/web/20120310004637/https://play.googl...
Google (2014): http://web.archive.org/web/20141112233236/https://play.googl...
(okay, that was a joke)
But I gave that stuff up in 2005 ;)
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Gives-Messenger-Twi...
Updating your relationship status to single doesn't notify anyone any more, fyi.
It's always like that. Power seeks more power, and users be damned!
-Silicon Valley, Season 1, Episode 1
It isn't just facebook, although facebook is probably the worst. I live in a city and I pretty much need a smartphone to do anything, but it has become so annoying dealing with the myriad of notifications and advertisements from random apps, and trying to find settings to disable everything.
90% of the time when my phone buzzes it's because sprig is telling me I need to eat dinner. Messenger is telling me it's someone's birthday. Yelp is trying to tell me there's popular a new spot nearby. Hell, even youtube was sending me recommended videos and touching the notification caused this random video to immediately play, using mobile data.
It is getting out of hand. You have to figure out how to disable this stuff in each app independently, sometimes digging through confusing options menus looking for buried settings. Sometimes I haven't even found a way.
This has taught me to usually ignore my phone, but it's especially annoying if I'm waiting for an important e-mail or text. My smartphone has just become an advertisement line sending bullshit that I don't care about, that I have to wade through to get to important stuff.
Am I the only one? Is there a solution to this?
The Facebook Mobile website issues quite good. Unfortunately no messenger support, but my circle of friends aren't messenger people.
But if you're looking for a way to get free services from these companies, I got bad news. Nothing is free.
Settings -> Notifications -> {app} -> Block All
Settings -> Sound & notification -> Manage app notifications
This took me several minutes to figure out because I had a mental blind spot to "Sound & notifications" due to the fact that the option has a speaker/volume icon. I made the mistake of trusting the icon as a sincere shortcut for understanding the text it's supposed to represent.
No. Disable notifications. Both iOS and Android have this configurable.
I am increasingly convinced that RMS was/is a man so far ahead of his time that he was bound to be misunderstood, misconstrued, and lambasted for it, but in the end I think he is right.
Either the user controls the program or the program controls the user. The problem here is not the app, but the platform the app is on. Android isn't much better. Google had a good chance to put linux on phones for everyone, but had to go and proprietarize and BSDize the fuck out of it until it became almost impossible to have root on some phones. I'm sure In-Q-Tel and the after-sex smoking level of coziness google has with the gov doesn't factor into that though /s.
When the totalitarian dystopia hits, people who have learned how to deal with the imperfections and quirks of FOSS ecosystems will be the new freedom fighters, ahead of the game.
I use my iphone for reading news sites, looking at raw data while I'm out waiting for..say food or whatever. Google/duckduckgo I use for basic searches sure. I don't use weather's app, I prefer weather.gov which when accessing via iphone is a mobile site not an app.
I don't suspect people going this way in mass, but I could see it catching on so there might be a way to hedge towards that.
I am constantly picking up my phone (iOS) to make a call or look something up, placing my thumb over the home button, and realizing before its too late that there are some kind of messages/notifications on the lock screen that I wasn't alerted to, previously, while the phone was locked. Its too late because the screen unlocks, but no matter where I go I am never able to re-locate those messages. I just see them, get a clue that there are notifications, but they are nowhere to be found - not in the notifications screen (apparently designed for this purpose), nor in any app with badge indicators, or whatever. Its gotten so bad that I refer to these as 'ghost notifications', and I'll never know what they were.
So I think its just a complete cockup, UI-wise.
Anyway, I don't know about Android, but it's easy to turn off notifications in iOS, and the notification settings for every app are all in one section of the global phone settings:
https://cdn1.tekrevue.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/disable...
This will take you to where you can disable notifications for that specific app.
Definitely not.
> Is there a solution to this?
Nokia Asha.
* Production appear to be the only QA they do
* Most of the time _something_ doesn't work... then you come back and it suddenly works, then it's broken again
* The news feed is non-deterministic. You can refresh and see something completely different
* Features [like the one in question] are always "opt-out" or "on by default". The attitude is "force the user to use the new feature" rather than improving it until people _actually want_ to use it
I'm glad to see them get into hot water on that last point. I see this user-hostile "we know better than you" authoritarian attitude taking over quite a few tech companies.
This always struck me as intentional. It gets you to refresh more and stay on the site longer hoping to get a little bit of something new.
"Oh, I guess my friend didn't post that, Facebook was just showing me something they reacted to".
No way of ever finding it again, unless if someone can conjure up or point me where to watch my friends reactions? The inconsistency of the newsfeed (between the above behavior, and the constant need to change the sort order to "most recent" because no matter how many times I choose that option I always find it flips back to "Top stories") is by far the most aggravating thing about using the site to me, personally.
Actually, they are not even "opt out" just "not now" (temporal opt out). Some time later, they WILL ask you again and then some time later again. Pretty annoying!
This [1] is a good video on part of their QA process, and it gives an overview of how something goes from dev to production.
It does say, "Move fast and break things" on the walls there.
Given that things are broken so often, maybe they don't.
I almost quit FB. They got me back with the news feed, but as always, with a fake idenity. It's just going to get better--which is troubling.
I see so many new start-ups, and wonder why I still can't get a good news site. A site that takes advantage of big data?(Yes--I know you don't have that easy "viewed" data).
If I was designing a news site, I would first need a good source of news. I would then need a program (didn't say algorithm because it's overused) that feeds the news to the customers on data(views--where to get that? Twitter? Google?). Then you need the program to filter out the gratituios views(any news story with a big ass, or sexual in nature). The API needs to be intuitive.
There's probally a website out there that accomplishes this, but I'm too lazy to hunt, and will not pay yet.
Hell--at this point; I thinking of incorporating a serious news site, with a light porn site. It seems like porn is the only thing that most people will shill up for?
The case will go forward with Facebook defending its text
messages on technical grounds; it argues that the texts
were not automated because Brickman and others who received
them had supplied Facebook with their phone numbers.
A slashdot poster once compared that to (if I can add some embellishment) saying that "I have a valid driver's license and comply with local laws, therefore I can park on your lawn."
https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/2qbg9j/reply_1_to...
Typical of fb "new features". Annoying and half broken
Debt collectors get a special exemption?
Does anyone know how to selectively turn off the email notifications without first receiving them?
The timing on this seems unfortunate (for professional TCPA claimants):
We have a president who might not like this law so much[1]. He also wants to reduce regulation (see his executive order). Ajit Pai has first amendment rights as one of his core issues[2]. I could, howe er, be incorrectly conflating Pai's conception of the first amendment and Facebook's.
Ready for a repeal of the TCPA? We could be headed that way.
[1]: Thorne v. Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.
The new chair of the FCC could whittle away at many of the consumer-friendly rulings of the agency, but those date back to 2003 and it would be hard to throw all of them out. Any new regulations could also be challenged judicially and that would delay their effective date. So I don't anticipate a major, sudden change. It also seems like Pai's agenda puts a high priority on reversing net neutrality and other telecom stuff and not the TCPA.
This ruling against Facebook is not that important. Article itself says that the Ninth Circuit has shot down constitutional challenges to the law in '95 and in '14, the latter went to the USSC but not on those grounds.
(to answer your first question, it's about 3-5 years from filing to final settlement.)
I am sure lawyers are laughing over whiskey somewhere.
"You see, Brickman had opted out of receiving texts from Facebook via the platform's notification settings."
then later in the article
"The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that Facebook's sending unauthorized text messages is a violation of the federal Telephone Communications Privacy Act (TCPA)."
If this IS about sending notifications then I'd agree that it's very poor. However, if Facebook are sending SMS messages when the user has opted out then I think that a suit is probably fair enough.
Sending a text does no harm, receiving a text incurs no harm. This lawsuit is ridiculous. There has to be some sense of harm done at some point, doesn't there?
We're filing lawsuits over being annoying now...
How many crucial conversations have taken place only on Facebook?
I removed my account a couple of years ago when I found out stuff about people that I would have been happier not knowing. And I haven't missed much.
I don't expect that my social life and yours are that similar though.
I still don't really use facebook socially at all.
Eventually it became a place for people to show off or bitch at each other because it's easier than doing it in person.
The ranking algorithm prioritizes annoying shit that will maximize ads and "engagement" over things I actually want to see like pics from my friends wedding.
Fuck Facebook and messenger. I login about once a week to check my messages and immediately log out. Snapchat now is a lot of what Facebook used to be
Want microsoft or google or facebook to have a 4th amendment right not to give up your searches or email? Sorry, not a human entity!
Want CNN to have the right to publish news under the 1st amendment? Sorry, not a human entity!
At least in our legal system, you have no standing to really raise constitutional violations or rights issues of others (except in very very specific circumstances). This is in large part because it would be ridiculously difficult and complicated to make such a thing work (can anyone do it? If so, who gets to do it? First person? Person you like the best? etc)
So the solution chosen was to treat these entities as having rights.
Not an ideal solution on it's own, mind you, but let's call it a "workaround" for a set of very very hard problems.
But every time i see someone say "corporations shouldn't be treated like people", my answer is, "sure, this is pretty much a truism. How do you actually implement it in a way that isn't a complete disaster, though?"
No court has said they are human beings. And they do not have all human rights. They have only those rights which law and case law have put upon them.