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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

At what point will Facebook totally kill m.facebook.com and force users to download the app? They've already done this with messenger; it's only a matter of time before they do the same for Facebook.app.

That will be the day I finally leave Facebook for good, because I have no interest in downloading that monstrosity of a spy device onto my iPhone.

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I don't care so much about m.facebook.com, but I've been using mbasic.facebook.com on both desktop and mobile since someone on this site pointed it out. It's awkward, but it works with absolutely no JavaScript, and lets me keep in touch with Facebook-oriented friends (in the original sense) with much less potential surveillance. It's also part of their "altruistic" Free Basics program, so it has enough PR value to stick around for awhile.

You can still read Facebook messages on the mbasic site.

https://mbasic.facebook.com/messages

On Android you can download faceslim. It's the mobile site with the messages in an app. They used a special user agent to reenable the messages. You even have notifications ! (Manually checked every 30 minutes or so)

Maybe you can have it too by downloading Firefox for iPhone and changing the user agent. (I haven't tried but it's worth a shot)

what makes you think that your iPhone is not a spy device itself?

Because Apple, unlike Facebook, doesn't have any product that would benefit from utilizing your data? As far as I know (could be wrong, never had iPhone), Apple doesn't tweak your iPhone experience based on your previous usage.

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