Comment by apozem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apozem | Hacker News Reader

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> The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services.

On one hand, forcing Facebook to open up its social graph would have serious privacy implications.

On the other, it would provide an incredible boost to any new social network, which could quickly bootstrap off your existing friends. That's what Instagram did with Twitter and what Vine did with Facebook.

The most important feature of a social network has always been whether your friends/family use it. If any new social network can take advantage of Facebook's social graph via API, that neutralizes this advantage. Now Facebook is forced to compete by being a better social network, not just a bigger one.

> On one hand, forcing Facebook to open up its social graph would have serious privacy implications.

There shouldn't be much additional privacy concern with a Facebook user saying "I trust user Alice and service example.com, so please send all my posts to alice@example.com using ActivityPub."

Similarly, Alice should be able to tell example.com that she trusts the Facebook user Bob with ID 123456789, so that example.com sends her posts to Facebook addressed to Bob (perhaps authenticated with a pre-shared key that Bob emailed her).

Once users are free to move between providers, those providers can compete based on their level of privacy and security, which right now Facebook has little incentive to improve.

I'd agree with you in theory, but in practice, those API endpoints end up being exploit vectors for data leakage in various ways - either through actual security vulns or through the security vulnerability that exists between the monitor and the chair.

They tried this and had to stop after “I trust Cambridge Analytica, so please send my data there”...

It's worth noting that part of Facebook's culpability regarding Cambridge Analytica is that the CA "personality survey" was able to gather "personally identifiable information such as real name, location and contact details" of participating users, and also "the app did the same thing for all the friends of the user who installed it".[0]

I suppose that a lot of personal data could be gleaned about someone (and their friends) from a rogue ActivityPub node reading the posts that were federated with it, but people would be suspicious if, for example, Mastodon suddenly started asking users for their phone number, Social Security number, and a picture of their driver's license.[1] And people would be very unlikely to sign up to a node which was actually run by Cambridge Analytica, right?[2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/06/cambridge-analy...

[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/parler-is-not-the...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201116/01141545710/what-...

Parler asked people for their SSNs, and Cambridge Analytica wasn't a household byword for invasion of privacy when people were clicking on quizzes.

So, it's worth considering that people might indeed happily sign up for a rogue node that steals their info without knowing what's going on.

Opening up the social graph seems almost exclusively a privacy concern. The examples you bring up between Instagram / Twitter are primarily about marketing and onboarding new users to competing services. This isn't actually going to lead to much user conversion unless the competing service is actually meaningfully more interesting. If it is meaningfully more interesting, then users will share it on their own (see Tik Tok), rather demonstrating that regulating the social graph is completely pointless.

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