Facebook communication and lawsuit documents: 7000 pages leaked | Hacker News Reader

Facebook communication and lawsuit documents: 7000 pages leaked

computerweekly.com

113 pointspmlnr21 comments

> Six4Three’s lawsuit alleges that Facebook made threats to shut down developers’ access to data unless, for example, they sold their companies to Facebook for a price under their market value, spent large amounts advertising with Facebook, or agreed to feed all of their data back to the company.

It's not like we haven't heard about this stuff before, but these documents will likely make a stronger anti-trust case if that's where the government wants to take it. I'm sure they've been keeping a seat warm for Zuck in preparation for his next Senate hearing.

> Facebook made threats to shut down developers’ access to data unless they sold their companies to Facebook

How does this even make sense? "We will only give your company data if your company is not your company"? Sounds more likely that they were denied access generally and then separately had talks about acquisition.

You can sell your company and still retain an ownership interest. If you owned a company and data access was critical to profitability then Facebook has a lot of leverage to "encourage" you to sell: you can either own 100% of the company without access to the data or own 10% of the company (or whatever percent Zuckerberg was generous enough to allow you to retain) with access to the data.

My read is that it’s referring to the other companies’ (possessive) data.

You only get Facebook data if you agree to send them any non-Facebook data you’ve collected.

Agreed, anti-trust action seems in FB's future - FB called this tactic "the Switcheroo" internally:

> Initially, Zuckerberg promised developers that they would be able to operate on a level playing field with Facebook, before quietly removing their access to mission-critical application programming interfaces (APIs) – a plan dubbed the Switcheroo – once the company had grown its user base, the documents reveal.

I really don't understand the prevailing narrative about this lawsuit. Six4Three ran an app for downloading all your friends' bikini photos, and I don't think there's any serious argument that it's a bad thing for Facebook to shut that down. Why should we trust their selective leaks?

You're talking about 3 things.

1: whether or not the leak is selective, we don't know. Given it was a sealed doc in a lawsuit vault, it might not be that selective, and it very much looks like they may not even be the people who leaked it.

2: the morality of the app was never the topic.

3: Facebook has been doing switch & bait for too many years, even with one's own data. See https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ for more details on this. It's the same story as Twitter: yes, come, develop apps, spread our influence, then board up all the resources. This needs to stop, both from an anti-trust perspective and with developer awareness.

What you call a bait and switch, I would argue is an honest lesson the industry has learned. Nobody realized, in the early days, just how easy it was to abuse a social network API.

We don't know for sure whether the leak is selective, but Facebook claims it is. The morality of the plaintiffs seems very relevant to evaluating whether you believe that.

> We don't know for sure whether the leak is selective, but Facebook claims it is.

Well then, all they need to do is leak more :)

I'd sure like to see more leaks, but I'm sure you understand why it's unfair to expect a company that has its documents stolen to respond by publishing a bunch more of them.

I kind of like transparency, so no. Facebook lied enough, and if those lies will only get out by leaks, so be it.

Wouldn’t say “Nobody”. It was obvious to enough folks in the privacy and security sectors. Facebook, along with others in that space, received view points from some of those concerned but made the decision to proceed as they did.

The privacy and security sectors are pretty consistently aware of ways things can go wrong. But they were overwhelmed at the time by the popular consensus, that openness is super important and it's terrible that social networking companies don't have more of it. Remember when Tim Berners-Lee criticized Facebook for not putting all your data on the public web? (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8151101/tTim...)

Did you read the article you linked?

You have a very uncharitable interpretation of Sir Berners-Lee's comments. He's railing against walled gardens being poor stewards of user data and having nonexistent data portability (as well as telcos violating net neutrality.)

Relevant then and even more relevant now. I see nothing about him wanting Facebook to enforce publicly-published profile data.

I’m not trying to pick on the guy. My memory is that this simply isn’t what data portability meant in 2010; data portability was widely understood to mean that there should be a public API to access any resources the Facebook web app will serve me. (Note how the article ties this into calls for Facebook to open up the social graph API.)

> Nobody realized, in the early days, just how easy it was to abuse a social network API.

Actually, both normies and hackers were super concerned about this Facebook thing, and whether or not people were putting too much personal information on the internet.

Young adults - the early adopter demographic - didn't care though, because many of them weren't thinking much past boose, parties, and sex. And, thanks to network effects, you rather needed Facebook, if you didn't want to be a social pariah at your school.

Since the sky did not fall in an obvious way, eventually, their parents started using it, too.

> Nobody realized, in the early days, just how easy it was to abuse a social network API.

Well the article linked is from January 2019, not "the early days". It's about a GDPR request that Facebook is/was avoiding answering.

I was mostly responding to the points in the comment. That linked article... I dunno, it's not obvious to me what more the guy wants or why he thinks Facebook has to provide it.

An app I made in 2014 that scraped the entirety of information available through the Graph API (things like conversations and where your friends party), and printed it into a spooky NSA style booklet: https://github.com/some1else/Edentity

So Facebook must allow easy access to data through an API (because users have a right to their data, etc), but at the same time, they must not allow easy access to data through an API (because developers will exploit that, Cambridge Analytica, etc).

Facebook is held to what basically is a double standard. They simply cannot win. I can understand Zuck's apathy.

Hacker News was mentioned in these twice, first as the source that discovered a bug, and second as a place to reach developers for article promotion.

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