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Comment by o10449366 | Hacker News Reader

> Of course, these were all explicitly installed by users who gave these apps access. But somehow people were mad anyway - maybe users shouldn't be given the option to make choices they don't understand?

It's interesting to see the difference in attitude on HN towards Google and Facebook. Many readers on HN shared the media's outcry when it was "revealed" that Netflix and Spotify were given read/write access to users' messages if they had authorized those Messenger plugins/platforms. I'm not attacking your position--I wholeheartedly agree with it--it just seems like there's a double standard on HN when it comes to certain tech companies.

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If I connect IFTTT to my Gmail to automate some aspect thereof I can reasonably expect it to have access to my emails.

If I connect my Facebook to my Spotify so that I can log in with one account and maybe share music with friends, I don't expect Spotify to have access to my private messages.

Obviously context is important, but I'm not seeing the double standard.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the circumstances under which Spotify would have permission to read your messages are

1) if you use their Messenger app plugin

2) if you had connected to Messenger through Spotify's desktop app. I believe this feature has been deprecated for a few years now, though.

Even if you sign up for Spotify using your Facebook account or connect your Facebook account to Spotify that does not give them access to your Messenger messages. It is my understanding that it required the user to opt into specifically connecting Messenger for that circumstance to occur.

The Facebook integration with Spotify allowed you to send messages and receive from within Spotify. Could you think of a way to implement this without giving the Spotify client access to those messages?

What’s more, users explicitly opted in, giving Spotify permission to do so. [1] No reasonable person would use Spotify to send and receive messages after explicitly granting the client permissions and then claim “but I don’t expect Spotify to have access to my private messages”

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17561784/django-social-a...

At various stages of Spotify's life, Facebook login was required to use the service. I'm a long-time user, and I've learned about the messages feature from HN. It wasn't really even advertised in the UI, and not the reason I - or many other people - connected Facebook to it.

Oh wow you are totally right. It had never occurred to me that Spotify requiring Facebook to use the service was a means for them to gain access to your Facebook account.

Social logins is - and was, back then - a thing people are used to.

i can’t tell if this is snark, but as an app developer, i have considered facebook login as a means for a relatively frictionless user experience, not as a way for me to gain access to a users facebook account.

No no, if you added social login to your app it's because you're evil. You want to monetize your users, selling their data like it's 2014. You're literally Cambridge Analytica. /s

But security-wise, it is the same.

Not at all. FUD. If you're going to make a statement like that at least come with some facts. There is a massive difference between me getting login permission TO MY OWN APP, and accessing a users facebook account, or masquerading as them on other apps.

...until Facebook mishandles their end, for example, the API.

Which they have been shown to about a dozen times over this month.

I think you have either misunderstood the reports, misunderstand the API, or misunderstand how to integrate it. There is literally no way for me to accidentally steal a users data. You may not like facebook, but accusing me of putting my users data in jeopardy is just fucking cheeky.

Ok, but were you ever asked if you wanted to grant permissions for that? Did you ever see the UI I linked?

Or is your claim that you gave only permission for profile and friends but the Spotify client had messaging permission as well?

I can't recall having any idea that Spotify would have access to my messages.

>At various stages of Spotify's life, Facebook login was required to use the service.

I disagree. I have perused various trials for Spotify and other services over the years and never once had to resort to using a Federated ID/login.

Well you're disagreeing with a proven fact, so yeah... When Spotify released in 2011 Facebook was absolutely required. They removed that requirement a year later or so.

but how will a user discover the new app will allow him/her to send messages from within Spotify before installation? If the user only discovers afterward, then there is no valid informed consent...

as a spotify user since they only used facebook login, i wasn’t even aware of this messaging feature. blind consent is not consent

Even if I wanted to use Spotify's messaging client, I'd imagine a layman's expectation would be that Spotify needed access to send and receive it's own messages - it's not that obvious it needs to be able to read that email to your boss you wrote three years ago.

Of course as a technician with knowledge of how OAuth and web APIs work, the implication that it really needs access to all messages seems a lot more reasonable - but I don't think this view is necessarily valid in a larger context.

Implementing more fine-grained permissions is absolutely possible. See e.g. Telegram: Even though Telegram bots appear as mostly ordinary users, they by default cannot access the messages of the channels they joined - they can only access commands that users were explicitly sending to them. You need a special permission to have a bot actually be able to access a channel like a human user would.

This is a bit more like app situation on Android - if I download an SMS app, of course I’d expect it to read my contacts and read write my messages.

If I download a calculator, it has no business reading location, call logs, messages, contacts, full filesystem. That would make me outraged, even if I did technically click through permissions.

What is now a long time ago, Google indexed the web properly. At that time it was an unparalleled feat of engineering. They solved scalability. They also managed to do this without sliding into "portal" territory and won their search dominance fair and square.

FB never did anything but being at the right place at the right time and were pretty nefarious from the very start. If any innovation can be claimed to have come out of FB, it's new ways of large scale psychological manipulation.

I suspect it's the memory of those early Google years that make some more lenient towards Google, although at this point, they really shouldn't be.

Your comment is wrong in so many ways. React, Cassandra, OoenCompute, PyTorch, GraphQL: where did these come from? Facebook.

Facebook has had to pull off their own feats of engineering. It is a fact whether you like their product or not.

I work for FB. I am leaving for my own personal reasons. It is not a perfect company. Your comment, however, is wrong and I am calling it out as such.

I'm sure these are all fine pieces of software, and good on facebook for giving their smart people useful busywork to distract them from asking themselves the hard questions, but did any of these make possible the as of yet impossible and propel them to their current status?

Because as things appear, FB was a myspace for grown-ups at a time when there was a need for such a service, that is, the right time and the right place, and technology-wise there was nothing extraordinary about the service itself.

> It is a fact whether you like their product or not.

I like their product just fine. I just wish more of them held their privacy in higher regard.

HN is of two minds on quite a bunch of things, really. I'm chalking it up to different people coming and going―but it's weird, even if amusing, to see the comment section gravitate to opposite viewpoints on different occasions.

Maybe there's a daily cycle of various worldviews prevailing in the comments―I guess here's a toy project for data scientists.

More than days, I'd expect it's a matter of time zones and schedules. Someone in the USA might have a different opinion on these topics than someone in Europe and also be online at different times.

Defending Facebook in any capacity is currently outside HN's Overton Window.

I remember seeing a few comments similar to yours back then (and I agree with you).

I noticed that also, especially when it comes to Google, maybe less with Facebook. Criticizing anything Google and you will get downvoted. I think it's a reflection of how many Googlers are on here.

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