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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Why is it surprising or even remotely controversial that an app that people explicitly authorized to access their messages (informed consent) then proceeded to access their messages? The app didn't have access to friends' messages, so I don't see what the issue is here, other than yet another clickbait headline.

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For people I've discussed with, the surprising part is that they can do anything with it. You and I know that (currently) if someone has the data, they'll scrape/manipulate it at will.

I believe, a reasonable person, would expect the limits of the access grant to end with the purpose of the app (a quiz) and not extend any further.

Most contracts/agreements have limits and this one is implicit in the working of the app. It is in no way clear that the app is earning it's money by selling/manipulating the data you're giving access to.

Additionally, it's disingenuous to ignore that a subversive app will make up/add features in no way benefiting the end user but for the sole purpose of scraping messages.

Intent is important, for some of these apps it is clear the only intent was to harvest data en masse.

Yes the user agreed to grant some permissions so a quiz could be taken. It cannot and should not be ignored that the app developer purposefully did not disclose the true nature of the app. This wasn't an accident. They didn't trip and fall into the data. They made something appear benign when it was really cancerous.

>Yes the user agreed to grant some permissions so a quiz could be taken.

You had to authorize the messages permission separately from all other permissions. If you didn't want your messages accessed, you simply declined that permission. This one's on the user, not on anybody else.

You're ignoring the 'reasonable person' argument which is important and forms a significant part of the legal system re: understanding contracts that you are signing. The reaction by the public and HN as a whole is perfectly justified. The permissions dialog is less interesting than the title of the app which wasn't "App to steal and repackage and sell your data you idiots!". In net, the app didn't tell the truth about itself, aided and abetted by Facebook's idiocy.

The permissions dialog is less interesting than the title of the app which wasn't "App to steal and repackage and sell your data you idiots!".

The Obama For America app stole data from about 4x the number of profiles that this app did - about 200 million people, less than 1 million of whom gave them any form of consent, much less informed consent, as was given here with the messages permission. Do you have an issue with that app’s title?

Where did OP claim they didn’t have an issue with the Obama for America app?

I strongly disagree - this one is on Facebook. For building a system that even allowed a "quiz" to ask for message permission in the first place.

Everybody (and Facebook best of all) knows that users will click [Accept] or [I've read the 27 page T&Cs] or [I hereby give Cambridge Analytica my firstborn child] without even slowing down to consider any consequences - in return for another tiny dopamine fix.

Sounds like both sides got what they wanted.

You are willfully ignoring the strongest point in my statement.

I think this is a concept that I find myself perplexed about. The defense of a lot of the use of acquired data is, "but you opted in!", which is of course true. However, when we give software access to things it's usually expected that the access is to conduct tasks pertaining to why we would want that software in the first place. For example when I use a web browser I give it internet access so that I can browse the web, or whatever. Not so that it can phone home and tell a company what websites I've been browsing. I feel like the defense, "yeah, but you opted in to allowing it access to the internet!" is a bit misleading.

Perhaps the personality quiz example that seems to be the cornerstone of this whole CA story is different: I'm not sure what your expectations would be allowing such an app access to your messages would be. However, there are quite a few examples of strange behaviour of software running on phones that it's pretty clear that isn't what you had in mind when you opted in. An example that comes to mind is Facebook apps activating your microphone to log conversations with people you have in person (I'm not sure there is any proof of this one yet but would anyone be surprised?): when you opt in to microphone use it's so that you can make calls on the app not to invite spying. "But you opted in!" Yeah, okay. "Sorry!" - Zuckerburg

Another thing worth thinking about is terms of service for websites. Most people don't read them, they just click accept because it's required to use the website. Most assume it's just standard legal speak that most sites use.

I feel like private messages are something that should never be granted to third party apps on Facebook. People just click allow because they assume whatever is listed, is being used for the purpose of the application.

I mean, just because I give the keys of my apartment to an electrician for a day doesn't mean they can use my apartment as they please and host a party for all their friends in the afternoon before I get back.

Yeah, but you just signed a contract that allows him to host a party in your apartment. So it means exactly that.

When it comes to permissions and electronic privacy, consumers don't understand how things work, so they aren't really giving consent. And many aspects of the modern Internet are designed to trick them.

I think it's worth emphasizing how much people are being tricked.

Users are only being asked for permission to their "messages", are given no further information, and can not proceed if they do not submit to the request.

If you're a good hearted person, you assume that an app needs to use your messages for one specific purpose, much like some apps ask permission to your text messages just so they can automatically validate incoming sms code requests.

Anyway..

So permission to access your messages could mean "we just need to do one thing" or it could mean "we're going to siphon up all of your private data"

The generically worded option preys on the user to be trusting enough to give the other party the benefit of the doubt, which is not how the system should be handled and really is the entire focus of the GDPR being passed in Europe right now to prevent specifically this sort of thing from happening.

Waving 'user consent' around as a reason to do nothing is the wrong approach.

Therefore we must regulate the internet to the tastes of the most paranoid person in existence, because anyone less paranoid is clearly incompetent to give consent?

By granting access to your messages, they are also implicitly gaining access to your friend's messages with you.

All people should have an expectation of privacy that when they send a private message to someone, that someone does not have the right to disclose the conversation.

It's been years since anyone should have had that expectation.

That doesn't make it ok

So you would also like to impose a ban on email forwarding then right? Because that means the person who received your message took it, and exposed it to others that you didn't authorize. I can tell you that at least in the US, legally, your position doesn't hold water.

We're getting a little ridiculous here. There are valid complaints against Facebook in all of this - this just doesn't happen to be one of them.

> So you would also like to impose a ban on email forwarding then right?

The difference is that email forwarding is part of the RFCs and IETF standards that define email, e.g.:

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5322.txt

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5598

http://arc-spec.org/

What do RFC's have to do with his comment that he has an expectation of privacy when he sends people messages? Regardless, at least under US law, he's way off base.

If two or more parties are communicating via a standardized protocol, then using that standard constitutes an implied agreement between the parties communicating.

Whereas with Facebook, while one or more parties might be bound by some agreement with the company, that doesn't create any clear agreement between users.

This is a pretty weak argument. Using a standard established by an RFC implies a user has read that standard about as much as using Facebook implies a user has read the TOS. The TOS establishes a transitive condition that the user agrees to about as much as they agree to one-to-one commumication under the RFC.

If you have a problem with usage implying consent to a TOS then you can make that argument, but this one is flimsy.

You think people using email know anything about email standards? RFCs?

They see a "forward" button in their email client. Just like Facebook Messenger has a "forward" button on messages.

No one is expecting a different level of privacy in Facebook Messenger over email because of the IETF.

Email as a protocol explicitly does not come with any guarantees (of privacy, or sender's identity, or receiver's identity, or anything else as far as I can tell).

Facebook makes a lot of noise about privacy (using their own definition, naturally, being 'preventing anyone outside Facebook from seeing your data') so it's reasonable for a nontechnical user to not expect that an acquaintance installing a "what's your pirate name arrr" app should lead to their 'share with friends only' info being acquired and sold by a data broker.

With GDPR, you may get in hot water pretty quick when forwarding thoughtlessly. At least in a corporate setting, you may think twice about it.

Edited to add: Granting for instance access to your contacts fro an app is controversial from a legal perspective in Europe. Data protection agencies at least in Germany have the opinion that you need opt-in consent from everybody in the address book to do that.

When the first person goes to prison for restoring an iCloud backup, I hope we’ll collectively realize how insane that is.

I am not sure if I understand you correctly. I for sure am very uncomfortable about giving my email address and phone number together with my full name and address to third parties without my consent. I regularly get "invites" from LinkedIn. I don't like to be in their database and I never consented to that. LinkedIn surely will get some uncomfortable requests after May, 25th.

> So you would also like to impose a ban on email forwarding then right?

No. I would impose a ban on selling our conversations for money or for services.

Edit: to clarify, I believe users on Facebook were bartering with data that wasn't theirs for access to Facebook's services.

That expectation has never existed. If you share something private with someone else, it belongs to them now, and they can forward it to whoever they want regardless of the sharing medium. The system is based on trust, not some arbitrary security measures.

The Canadian Supreme Court disagrees with you (5-2):

> "The court here has taken hold, embraced the challenge of the technology and caused the law to catch up with the technology, in line with Canadians' values," Lonsdale said. "Canadians can expect that their private, one-on-one communications with each other remain ones that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/supreme-court-texting-privac...

Funny, I feel like there have been a bunch of _revenge porn_ legal cases recently that disagree with your assessment

If a friend of yours authorized access to their messages, then the app would have access to your private messages with that friend.

Only in the same way that apps that you authorize to work through Gmail also have access to your emails with other people. I just don’t see an issue here. The messages permission required explicit, separate consent from other permissions. There is not a single user that could argue that they didn’t understand that specific aspect of this app. This story is just a grab at clicks.

If we have a private conversation, you shouldn't have the right to reproduce the contents of my contributions to the conversation.

Then you better go protest at Google's offices, because Gmail allows apps to interact with your email too.

by using Gmail, you are allowing Google to scrape what might otherwise be private messages

Indeed, and I am going to stop using Gmail as a result of this thread.

not sure if you're being sarcastic, but you really should. Everyone should. It will cost about $5/mo [fastmail] to make it happen, unfortunately most people don't seem to assign much value to privacy.

You are the one who put it in their phone/inbox in the first place. You can argue about copyright laws or NDAs, but otherwise "private conversation" means nothing.

One-party recordings are illegal in many states. Just because I unicast some information something does not always give you the right to retain a record of it.

Recording laws are for phone calls. How would you even apply them to emails or texts?

But was it? "Informed" consent, that is?

I think the new CONSENT Act, by one of the authors of the child-privacy law COPPA, looks quite promising to make these things much clearer for users.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/facebook-would-n...

I watched the hearing and Zuckerberg kept evading questions about users "controlling data" responding with nonsense such as "Of course users control the data - they decide what to post on Facebook!"

Completely omitting the issue about what happens to their data once third-party developers have access to it, even in the context of sharing something with friends (and not "the public"), or in this case private messages.

And I agree with others here. Private messages should have never even been as part of a permission. I think now I understand why Facebook recently said that they see Messenger chat as "public". I thought it was just more of a metaphor, but they seem to be thinking of that quite literally. Your private messages on FB are no different than your public profile data to both Facebook and third-party developers.

Oh and by the way, Facebook also recently admitted that most of its 2 billion users' profile data, including email and phone numbers, have been scraped off the website.

> Why is it surprising or even remotely controversial that an app that people explicitly authorized to access their messages (informed consent) then proceeded to access their messages? The app didn't have access to friends' messages, so I don't see what the issue is here, other than yet another clickbait headline.

I'm not sure if we have enough details to say if this was informed consent or not.

But I doubt it was informed consent if the messages were gathered by the Facebook app. Back when I had that app installed, Android did not support granular privacy. One day I got an update notification that said a new update would get the permission to read text messages. I believe the rational was so the app could automatically parse a text message confirmation code. Since I'm savvy, I never installed that update or any other update it ever again. Now it turns out Facebook used that permission to slurp up people's text messages into it profile of them.

This wasn't informed consent: I wasn't honestly told what they would use the permission for, the request wasn't clear (just the standard android notice), and it was an all or nothing ask.

Why is it even possible for an app to request your Facebook messages though?

You used to be able to build an alternative client using Facebook's published API.

I didn't think it was. The API docs have always said that the thread endpoint is only available to the developers of the app making the request. It's possible to get the contents of the inbox though.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2....

I could imagine interesting apps designed to riff on your launguage patterns

There are a lot of valid uses. Why would it be better for your data to be locked up and unexportable?

False equivalence. Exportable doesn't mean acessible to the world.

But someone could pay you for your exported Facebook data (which can include data from friends such as your message history, etc). From my understanding, this is essentially what CA did. CA just obfuscated they were doing this by using the Facebook developer program to automate this process and Mechanical Turk to pay users to give them their data. I agree the Facebook developer program made it really easy to phish for this data.

The commenter didn’t make that “false equivalence.” Their point is that there are valid reasons a user might want to allow an application to access their messages.

For example, reddit’s API allows applications to access messages, which is useful for third party clients.

It isn't...today. Remember, this app was deployed many years ago, prior to the 2014 API neutering.

I trained my predictive keyboard on Android on my Facebook messages and emails.

Context and intent matter.

If someone at a gas station asks me "hey could you give me $5 so I can buy some gas. I'm out of cash." and I give them the money. Then they proceed to fill up a can and go burn down a house. Should I be arrested as an accomplice?

There was no indication that they would do that and if I knew there's no chance I would agree to give them anything.

You'd have to find additional evidence that I consented to that action. In this case, I really doubt anyone knew that their data would be used in this way when all they wanted to do is take a quiz.

Because in the public if you mentioned the possibility you'd be accused of fearmongering.

It is disheartening to see people label it clickbait, this is a very important message that needs to be embedded in the public.

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