Facebook bans, sends C&D letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension
techspot.com
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Here's the extension zip files that were archived from the Chrome Store. You can get all versions back to 1.0.
https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid... https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid... https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid...
They are CRX (Chrome Extension) files, some manual steps needed to unpack, or change .zip to .crx and open with Chrome. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...
Install Instructions: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...
(this is not legal advice)
Only on HN
The combination of over-tourism (accelerated by way too many Airbnbs), social media and rising sea levels means that this beach isn’t the beautiful secret it used to be, so ... have a nice time visiting!
That neighborhood was really special and weird. Streisand got a lot of negative press for what she did, but she was also legitimately afraid of stalkers and crazy people. It was a really sad situation to observe. I’ll write something about this at some point, after the other 100 strange stories in the queue.
If Mozilla has unbroken the Developer edition, and it's available to everyone, great! Firefox is almost back to the functionality it had in 2016!
In any case, no, I'm not on a corporate firewall, you were kind of jumping to (oddly specific) conclusions there. And firewalls don't work like that.
I think the unbranded version doesn't update. Or used to not update. But that's not developer.
Browser extensions have a lot of access to your browsing activity and can phone home as well. One of the reasons this extension was sent a C&D was that it was sending some data home to the author’s server. That might be what the install instructions above are hinting at with the warning to examine the JS and remove any phone-home code. The original author defended the data collection as just enough to make sure the plug-in was working, except for study participants who apparently submitted much more information through the plug-in. Either way, I wouldn’t rush to install a plug-in that was caught sending any of my social media data to a 3rd-party server.
I certainly would not install a browser extension from an unknown 3rd-party website just to spite Facebook, regardless the claimed origin of the code.
If you see bad behaviour from an extension, I would flag it on Chrome store.
If extensions were shut down quickly for shady behavior there wouldn't be a market for it.
1. Log in to Facebook
2. Open "Developer Tools" (F12), select the "Network" tab, locate "Request Headers", Alt-click on "Cookie:" and select "Copy value". Use this in each HTTP request. Do not log out yet.
The URL for the Friends list is
https://mbasic.facebook.com/friends/center/friends/?ppk=1
Using m.facebook.com as the domain will also work. There 10 friends per page.
3. Extract the UID for each friend from the HTML and create the new "unfollow" URLs.
grep -o "uid=[^&]*" 1.html|sed 's>uid=/https://mbasic.facebook.com/a/subscriptions/remove?subject_id=>'
Done.
Unfortunately we need a GFID in addition to the UID, so more steps are required
3. Extract and GET hovercard URLs.
grep -o "/friends/hovercard/mbasic/?uid=[^\"]*" 1.htm|sed 's/%3D/=/g;s/%3A/:/;s>%2F>/>g;s/&/\&/g;s/%26/\&/g;s/%3F/?/;s>^>https://mbasic.facebook.com>'
grep -o "href=./[^*\"]*" 2.htm|sed '/?/d;/data\/manifest/d;s>href=.>https://mbasic.facebook.com>'
NB Making too many requests for profiles too close together may draw a temporary, limited block.
grep -o "href=.[^\"]*" 3.htm|sed -n '/subscriptions/s>href=.>https://mbasic.facebook.com>p'
Done.
The five Facebook cookies needed are:
c_user xs fr sb datr
Further reading:
https://techexpertise.medium.com/facebook-cookies-analysis-e...
Even after step 3 three above, I have to enumerate and curl each unfollow url, at some undefined rate limit.
So maybe 5 minutes of work to complete all the steps? ~300 followees to make scripting the chore worth the effort?
https://www.facebook.com/adpreferences/ad_settings
I'm on over 300 lists. Removing myself from each one took 6 clicks. I tried to automate it with Selenium, but their bot detector caught it and banned my device from opting out of any lists (!)
The Devil is in the detail, and writing that script is far more work than installing an extension, which is just a convenient form of a script anyway (and one with details taken care of).
I always thought that Dropbox comment was related to people trying to predict successful startups. No one can do that, certainly not HN commenters. Most VC investments are losses. Im an end user. I really dont care for discussion of startups or what makes software popular. Ive never used Dropbox, and I never will.
I see you've already needed to post another comment to correct yourself, and now you've replied to me with more humps in the road. What next? Kubernetes set up on a Raspberry PI with a transparent proxy that uses a WebAssembly binary knocked up in Rust…
Perhaps it would be easier to install the extension and accept that sometimes it's easier to follow the well trodden path. YMMV.
Sometimes the reason is to protect users (e.g. banks), sometimes to protect the service from abuse. But often the reason is to ensure value can be extracted from users (e.g. serving ad impressions) or the power that can be exerted over users. Regardless, I believe this comes down to power: computer scientists understand that acting through a computational agent is fundamentally more powerful than acting directly as a human user. Computational agents can operate at scale, they provide virtualization (e.g. throwaway identities), and thereby conserve the ultimate scarce resource: our attention. Many systems seem to have computational power asymmetry as their fundamental principle: as little human contact on the system's side as possible; as much human contact on the user's side as possible.
If there's any path ahead that avoids a totalitarian nightmare resulting from asymptotic concentration of power, it depends on cultivating a more widespread understanding of computational power and developing new social norms and policies. As a CS educator, this is one of my top priorities.
Imagine if almost everyone knew that they could use things like userscripts and stylesheets to enhance their browsing experience. Or that DRM can often be cracked by changing a single byte.
This is why the war on general-purpose computing started. There are some things they don't want you to know because they'd lose control.
No material in the universe has ever been resistant to understanding, to probing, to exploration. It's from this exploration that humankind has emerged & whatever of greatness of civilization that we have has been built. These mechanized systems that we legally are not allowed to explore or work is one of the most de-humanizing hells I can imagine.
Humanity as we know it can not endure in a world where we are never allowed to understand or go further. Shame on any company or law that acts otherwise; they are monsters.
Thank you for your very succinct well captured write up. Humankind seems desperately in need of a defense force, needs to be able to grasp what an existential threat forced-consumierzation is, how radical of a historical upset this juncture we're at is. I 100% agree that giving people insight & visibility & faculties to work with, understand, see, & monkey with computers is essential to keeping our core liberaties alive, in an increasingly mechanizing & automating world.
Yeah, I assume this is the most common reason. This needs to be fought on principle. It doesn't matter what their terms and conditions say. It doesn't matter how much money they lose. We should always have full control. We should be able to block their advertising. We should be able to automate our browsers. We should be able to turn our user agents into cyberweapons against them.
This is legitimate self defense against their abuse. We're talking about a company that gets people addicted to bullshit feeds so they can make money by showing ads. Of course an "unfollow all" button is necessary. They won't provide one because they want us addicted to their feed. So we'll provide one for them.
People spend their days on social media because they're addicted to it. If a browser extension can somehow help people break free, it's objectively a good thing for humanity. If this world was just, courts would rip Facebook a new one if they dared to waste their time with this stuff.
That's the key thing nobody is telling people about the so-called "attention economy": it's whole point is to make things as inefficient as possible - because money is made on the friction. In order to make money off attention, companies need to capture it (thereby making you spend it on something else than what you wanted to). To make more money, they need that attention to last longer (thereby making you spend more time, and/or spend it more often, on things that make them money).
Seen this way, it's clear why services hate end-user automation: their whole business is causing the very friction the users would like to automate away.
Time spent on FB is time not spent on another site. And the higher-friction FB can make activities (to the pain point of driving away users), the better for FB.
There's a similar notion in other areas, and one of the most ridiculously malevolent examples I can think of is a brick-and-mortar sales promotion gimmick: a furniture store would run a midsummer sales event on a weekend where every family visiting the store would receive a free gallon of ice cream.
Because if you've just put a gallon of ice cream in your trunk, you can't visit another furniture store, you've got to head home to put it in the freezer. And time not spent in a competitor's furniture store is time not spent assessing and purchasing their products.
(That leverages the sunk cost fallacy as well, among others.)
So, family appears at strore, is unexpectedly gifted a gallon of ice cream, and finds they have to head home so as not to "waste" it. (What is actually being wasted is the comparison-shopping opportunity.)
Hrm... Maybe this was on an economics podcast / programme ... possibly Freakonomics. I'll see if I can't turn it up.
Reddit is another possibility.
Thank you for putting that thought into words.
My bank is not showing me ads (or at least, not paid ads - they advertise their own services). The friction comes from the authentication process. I must produce a username, then a password, then a personal secret (a relative's middle name), then I have to cross the room and get this device, activate it, key in a PIN, and read an access code from the device's display, that I have to type into the browser.
The password and the relative's middle name amount to the same thing; it's just a longer password.
I'm OK with the device - "something you have". It's annoying, but it's the only bit of robust security in this loop.
I'm OK with the username/password ("something you know"), although I question the value of the password - it amounts to just an extension of the username. The middle-name business is just silly. And of course, the password I use is 12 characters long, and I have to look it up in a password safe, because it's not memorable.
I can't see what possible benefit there could be to this bank (a very large international bank) from increasing the friction of authentication. They are not showing me ads during the 3-minute authentication process; if they make it hard for me to authenticate, then they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs.
That's actually half of your answer right there - and the answer for the question why banks don't want you to automate your finances. They want you to do every operation through their webpage, mobile app or branch office, because they want to sell more financial products to you.
> they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs
Being on a call with them is another perfect opportunity for them to do some upselling.
That said, your description of the authentication process sounds like a pathological case. Most banks aren't like that. The banks I use have all been streamlining authentication - but they do this by requiring users to go through the mobile app, which is full of attempts to sell you credits, insurance and investment accounts.
EDIT: two more points.
1) Some of the auth flow in banks may be (bank's interpretation of) regulatory requirements. This applies especially to banks that (like the ones I use) offer identity services for interacting with my government on-line. That is, one of the ways I can authenticate myself when filing taxes, or starting a company, or checking my medical receipts, or other stuff like this on-line, is through my bank's web page.
2) Let's look at behavior of banks through a different lens. There's one thing I want that, according to my research, no bank provides. I want a bullshit-free way to programmatically fetch my account balance. Say, an API token I could use with CURL - something I can set up and forget, so I can make myself an "account balance" widget containing up-to-date balances from one or more accounts of one or more different banks. I can't do that. It's an obvious thing to offer when building a digital service, but nobody offers it. There is a reason - and I posit that the reason is, they don't want to do it, because it would reduce my visits on their webpages / in their apps, depriving them of opportunity to advertise financial product to me. I.e. the purposeful creation of inefficiencies I talked about.
I've been told that this is nowdays commonplace among UK banks. It might be to do with regulation, but I don't think so.
Wrt. the ads, no ads are presented during the authentication flow. So I don't think that flow is cackhanded because of ads. Self-promotion occurs before I begin trying to authenticate (with a non-dismissable "call to action" that takes up half the screen real-estate on my laptop).
I actually think half the problem is "mobile first" - I don't use a mobile to access websites, because I'm too clumsy to type on a mobile. I think companies create a "mobile first" website, and then don't really bother with the "laptop next" bit. Infinite scroll, multi-part forms with one field per part, and widgets that can't be operated using a keyboard, seem to have conquered the world.
Why put effort into supporting desktop users, if mobile users are now the majority of visits, and desktop users are only going to diminish? I've never tried to use my bank's site using a mobile, but I bet it works better.
They badly want to bot the #%^* out of us.
Just as a sidenote/fyi: In Europe, the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) requires banks to provide API access to payment accounts.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/intro/mip-online/2018/html/18...
It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.
It would be nice if I could easily switch between networks but I have to keep the same pared down list of people and things I follow.
It reminds me of Google circles where you could have more fine grained networks.
There is nothing in my follows or "likes" that would indicate that this is anything I'd be interested in. It's just as bad as the broadcast TV ads that they "disrupted:" indiscriminate, obtrusive and unwanted.
Now that I think of it, a client side extension that automates this process, would be an interesting thing. Generally the same idea as the extension mentioned in the top post, which automates the client-side of unfollowing everything, but for attempting to 'block' ads from everything. I wonder if they've rate limited that...
If someone knows why obscuring HTML to force ads isn't more common practice, I'd be curious to know. I get it maybe for small websites that need the organic traffic (I assume Google would hit your SEO if your page structure looks like FB's), but how can it be so hard when it is indeed possible? I could understand if Google more specifically doesn't even try as they may lose adblocking nerds and they could use the data anyway, but I would expect to come across more sites that found solutions or clever ways of serving ads around UBO/ABP, at least make me use the picker. Is it really a colossal job to obscure ads and if it is reachable wouldn't medium-sized websites that find implementations remain unpatched for quite a while (big world out there)? Do you really need to own >$100B/Y business on godly margins or AWS to afford a fighting chance at that arm's race?
Three basic reasons:
1. For websites that aren't as large as Facebook, most advertisers insist on running their own code on the page to do things like count impressions (to make sure the owner of the site can't lie about how many views the ads got). This is easily blockable.
2. It's not profitable for most websites to engage in an arms race with ad blockers. Your web developers' time is almost certainly better spent on trying to grow the userbase, not showing ads to a subset of users who will almost certainly not click on them. (And businesses will often make decisions based on data from third-party trackers that are also blocked by ad blockers, so it's possible the relevant department does not even know those users exist.)
3. There is already a very difficult-to-block form of advertisement available to many websites: sponsored content. Just bake the advertisement directly into the video, or as a paragraph of a long blog post with no distinguishing CSS, or something.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/anila7/faceb...
The ad-buyers funnel their ad buys through agencies and separate accounts.
For almost a year, a plurality of my ads have been either for some sort of meat, or Dubai.
I have tried "Never show from this source again" and I get very similar ads, from a different source.
I have tried "This is a sensitive subject" and I will seem the same ad in a day or two.
Oh, they also show ads for fake electronics gear at a tiny fraction of the price of the real thing.
Oh, and they show me ads for US politicos. I'm a Briton in the Netherlands, though a lot of my friends are Americans.
If you unfollow all your friends/pages, your feed will be empty and will look something like this: https://romanvesely.com/static/b031d9ff5bb48d618d1226fb363a9...
Looking back when I left in 2014, facebook has turned into 4chan but worse because its connected to real life identities. It's an utter garbage fire and I laugh at the users of it.
You'd think "targeted advertising" would encourage people to limit their payments to people in the correct country.
I did much the same. I unfollowed every page, and any person I hadn't seen in person within the past year.
My Facebook is now a carefully curated list of people I like, and cat pictures. It's done wonders for my mental health.
Facebook and other social media platforms actually gives users a lot of tools to tailor their feeds. Muting or unfollowing people (leaving the friend connection intact) should be the go-to operation for anyone who's always posting things you aren't interested in.
The other half of tailoring your feed is learning to embrace the like button. If you see something you like, click the like button. Sounds simple, but I know a lot of people who refuse to click the like button because they dislike the concept of like counts, but they forget that it's one of the primary mechanisms for telling the algorithms what you want to see. The more you like content, the more you'll see it.
No way will I ever engage with like/dislike buttons. My preference is that organisations like Faceache should never learn that I even exist.
I don't have a problem with ranking my feed, by the way; I don't have a feed. I've never had a Faceache account, and that fact causes me zero grief.
This way advanced users get the feeds they want without FB worrying about creating another "API" to be discovered by NYT journalists on a slow news day
Also there is no dislike button. FB needs to understand that when I say I don't like an ad it means I don't like it, and should not only immediately apologize but also ensure I don't see ads like that again, if they want me to use their platform.
One thing I struggle with is the tags. You unfollow someone and your feed won't include their posts anymore, but it _will_ include random posts that they're tagged in, and I haven't yet found a way to curtail this. I've used "Hide this post" repeatedly because the option text says "see fewer posts like this", but it hasn't really had an effect. Have you found a way to fix this?
Unfortunately, in my situation, my family is so deeply steeped in Facebook that I have no choice. We already have group chats and the like, and some stuff gets posted there, especially if someone wants me in particular to know something. But if you try to go down that road, you're only going to get the newsworthy headlines: your grandma died, Matt had a kid, etc.
But in a lot of cases, people just want to shout little things at the world, and when my family does that, it's on Facebook. It's unreasonable to expect everyone I care about to announce everything twice, once to everyone and a second time to just me, so I knew I was going to miss some things. But recently it came to my attention just how much I was missing, and it's just not worth it. You only get your family once. Keeping up with the little things means getting back on Facebook, so I'm back on Facebook.
I'm trying to think of a for-profit business that does not do that and coming up short.
Look at GoDaddy, a near-universally despised company that has managed to become a dominant player by engaging in anti-user practices. But there's plenty of other players that profit in that same space while maintaining really positive relationships with their customers.
So while I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that for-profit businesses always and only act like for-profit businesses, there's still some room to maneuver. Facebook has clearly chosen to manipulate and data mine every single user to within inches of their lives in what amounts to a scorched earth policy.
Another key thing is to simply not install FB on phone. Only use it once a day when on desktop. Such a nice tool to connect with old friends otherwise.
Less and less people are using facebook. Most (worldwide) never did in the first place. But an ugly man compensates for insecurity about his physical appearance by pretending he has more power than he does, despite him in reality having plenty of power to feel secure.
Facebook: you want to do something in an automated way? Enjoy your two day clickfest. Real life: yeah, I'm going to just use something else, and people coming of age will laugh about this legacy antiquated service.
Do you know how you get a fresh start without this process you found tedious? Put in a bunch of fake info into your profile, then just leave the account alone, forever. Then go somewhere else. Facebook has a large userbase. If you're not there for the other users, why in the world would you not use one of the hundred other similar services?
Now, as far as my personal opinion: facebook should lose the lawsuit. This extension is a script run by the user. There might be something that says the user has to click and can't run scripts, that the user agreed to. Facebook then has a case, against the user, and should start suing their users. Facebook has no standing against the people who wrote the script, but are not running it against facebook servers. I am free to write any piece of code, that does anything, as long as I don't have a contract with Facebook saying I won't. This is called freedom of speech, and a government does not have authority to make me stop. And a private company has no enforcement authority, because they're a company, not a government.
So I hear. This is the trajectory of all social-media sites; they cease to be fashionable and hip, as their early users (late teens to early 20s) move on. What remains is then children, old fuddy-duddies, politicos and advertisers. So they become even less fashionable and less hip. Consider Myspace.
What surprises me is that Faceache has lasted so long. If I were into gambling on stocks, I'd be shorting Faceache.
If you don't like what FB as a company is doing, the only way to resist it is not to play. So eventually I abandoned my carefully constructed feed and went to look for better pastures.
Sadly, I think very few people use it this way, billions of people use it as all-in-one hub, and that leads to disaster we see nowadays.
The problem is that bad behavior is normalized and rationalized in our society, 'everyone needs a paycheck.' This legitimizes working for companies like this.
I doubt that shaming individuals works. But having thoughtful discourse about it is probably much better - let people hear the arguments and make up their mind.
With this being said, I do find it a waste that some of the best minds in the world are working towards ads and engagement businesses. Having a tool for global communication is wonderful, but their unethical behaviors are unexcusable.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Have a nice long thoughtful conversation with your friend about why you disapprove of what they're doing with their life, offer to help them find a new job if you're so inclined, but cut contact if/when they refuse to reform. Tell others what you've done and encourage them to do the same.
Shaming almost certainly does work, otherwise humans wouldn't be so inclined to try it all the time. I'm quite certain that shaming is a tactic baked into our social instincts by evolution.
But e.g. you don't see many people openly self-identifying as racists anymore.
The movie Thank you for Smoking, about a tobacco lobbyist, calls this the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense." All manner of immorality, even shilling for a tobacco firm, will be excused away with hey man, I've got a mortgage to pay.
I once applied for a job at Phillip Morris in VA. On the reception desk (you had to walk about 30 yards from the entrance through the marble-lined lobby to get there), there was a sign saying "Enjoy smoking!"
Every office had ashtrays everywhere, and staff were provided with a carton of 200 free cigs every week.
Now while there are a lot of things that facebook probably can be prosecuted for, there are many things that they probably can't be. So I think we have an obligation to shame and shun those who act in reprehensible ways. And obviously in proportion to how culpable/complicit those individuals are.
The book's conclusion (as I recall) is that shaming is far more cruel than we commonly think, and shaming used to be more common until people realized its cruelty.
However FB is part of the FAANG group that pays top dollar. That is attracting enough good engineers, especially the type that don't care too much about the ethics of their work results.
FWIW their recruiters seem to be getting desperate in the past couple of years. Until then, I'd see a FB recruiter ping me about once every year. But from 2019 on, it's much more frequent, and I know it's not just me - there's many other people I know who have observed that, and you can find more testimonies along those lines in these comments. Furthermore, I have explicitly told them to GFTS in no uncertain terms, and I still got recruiters contacting me after. This tells me that they are feeling the crunch.
Another is that it must. Supply.
There are those who respond to recruiter contacts with "Please tell M.Z. F-U personally for me."
For those who do work at FB, we're well aware of the price of your soul.
This is a perfectly valid opinion to make, but I think everyone doing so should disclose where they work.
Additionally, I would hope they apply the same scrutiny to all companies that are harmful or don’t provide value; for me, that would include (non-exhaustive list): tobacco, alcohol, soda, fast food, junk food, high-frequency trading, gambling, and any company that is currently not or does not have an actionable plan to become carbon neutral, and that’s just off the top of my head.
Or we could just let people (and by extension advertisers) decide for themselves.
> Or we could just let people (and by extension advertisers) decide for themselves.
That's the idea of shunning though. People can make their own decisions to work wherever they please, and in response to these choices other people can likewise decide to disassociate with them.
I’m also against the action taken against the extension developer, both in principle and as someone who unfollowed everyone, one at a time.
p.s. next time you reply to a FB employee please begin your message with un-shun and end it with re-shun
\end{un-shun}
Immoral and unethical practice, unfortunately a lot of people here today fail to realize that, just because they allegedly are "in the right" camp or have the "right politics", it doesn't mean they are the right to behave like garbage toward others.
Alcohol bottles, cigarettes, sodas, burgers and high-frequency traders don't follow me around everywhere to get me to drink them. Facebook does.
Alcohol bottles don't monopolize socializing and drinking; I can still go to the bar with alcohol-drinking friends even though I would only order a soft drink. Facebook tries to, there's no way I can communicate with Facebook users unless I am also on Facebook and accept the ToS and "privacy" policy.
> A lot of the industries you mention don't try their hardest to get my attention
Huh? You don't think those industries run any advertising campaigns?
> there's no way I can communicate with Facebook users unless I am also on Facebook and accept the ToS and "privacy" policy.
This is the strangest complaint I've ever read. Are you suggesting anonymous people are able to message Facebook users without agreeing to any terms of service? I definitely can't see anything going wrong with that. Why not ask them to message you on one of the 1000 other messaging apps? No one's forcing you to sign up to Facebook, it just sounds like it's being successful at providing an easy way to message between friends.
Well.... Don't you see the problem in your own text? Yes, Reddit & Twitter exist but they are different. You wouldn't typically use those to keep in touch with family for example.
> You don't think those industries run any advertising campaigns?
Most of these industries' advertising is limited to places where advertising is accepted and relevant. I don't mind seeing branded glasses/beer taps/etc at the pub, or Coca Cola branding in fast foods. I do mind seeing these in my communication tools, even more so when a monopoly essentially forces me to use said tools.
> This is the strangest complaint I've ever read. Are you suggesting anonymous people are able to message Facebook users without agreeing to any terms of service?
I can call or text someone in America right now without accepting AT&T's terms of service. I can email someone on Gmail right now without accepting Google's ToS. Why is it so controversial?
That one was bought by facebook ages ago.
"high frequency trading"
How serious do you think the problem really is? How much of it do you think Facebook is responsible for? What would you do if you were in charge?
They all provide a value...it's called FUN, too much Fun is never good but a little bit is.
Your comparison lacks the basic understanding of having a good time.
toxicity tends to come in symbiotic pairs
Shunning is likewise immoral.
So, I have to ask. If shunning is off the table, what's the social punishment for people who do shun?
I haven't figured out the reason for the out-of-whack disparity yet. Is it because Zuckerberg lacks charisma, because he has Aspergers and people hate the awkwardness, or because FB is the tallest poppy, or because journalists have found a credentialed home on Twitter (blue check mark)?
This.
Twitter made a deliberate decision to recruit opinion-formers early on.
The face of Faceache is Zuck, with his blank expression and absurd haircut (surely after 20 years, he could find a decent stylist). The face of Twaddle (in the UK) seems to be Stephen Fry - a comic that I used to admire. Now, not so much.
I think Twaddle did a better PR job than Faceache from the beginning. I think they're still doing a better job.
/me never used either service
There are lots of great people doing great things at FB, and if we apply this standard to FB we should also be applying it elsewhere. I'm not entirely sure many major companies have been completely controversy-free... Work for Apple? well you are complicit in sweatshops. Work for Uber? Complicit in sexism and workers being taken advantage of. Work for Spotify? Complicit in artists not getting paid what they should get. I would be interested in hearing where I am allowed to work if we follow this to it's conclusion.
(NB: I don't work for facebook or any of these companies...)
"Well I GUESS I CANT WORK ANYWHERE THEN"
Really? There is a vast amount of smaller companies that are great employers and where you will enjoy your work just as much.
Besides, different people have different moral perspectives, and I assume most people at Facebook probably think the company has had a net benefit on society (even if you don’t).
Unless software engineers "vote" by going to work elsewhere, this won't change.
Looks for companies with solid ethics, and with founders who have background working at or starting other similar companies.
But not coincidentally, the pay at these companies will be at least multiple times less than at Big Tech.
> you are complicit in things like this by developing the technical infrastructure that makes it all possible
Employment status – especially at the top strata of a high-skill industry – is determined entirely by individual choice. You must first choose to apply to the company, then choose to accept the job, and then continue to make the same choice each day you don’t quit.
Every single engineer at Facebook could walk out the door and get a new job within a week. But if you’re a US taxpayer, good luck renouncing your citizenship. There is no legitimate comparison between the moral obligations of which megacorp direct deposits $10k a month into your bank account, and which geographical lottery you won based on your mother’s birthing location.
I once refused to work on a project for the USAF, and I think that decision limited my pay and promotion. But I still own my own home, and have an adequate pension.
Isn't "I'm just a cog" what the defendants at Nuremberg have usually said?
Genuinely asking: what alternatives are there that HN doesn’t consider “evil” and can provide the same remuneration and working environment?
Also consider that not every FB employee works in the Bay Area.
I have made that choice. For me it was a simple one to make.
The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else. It's complete abuse of process, and really should be dealt with more harshly than it is.
It would be an appropriate way for Facebook to phrase their C&D considering the forms that cyber-bullying take on the platform
Great idea.
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans have gmail accounts, many companies use google workspace or office365, etc. For example.
An Afghani can access GitHub or the chrome extension store, but those are both run by American companies who will obey Facebook's takedown requests.
Once a firm grows accustomed to following orders from their competitors, bad times lie ahead.
It's true that some low-level manager in the chrome web store organization might just submit to this sort of letter. It would be a mistake for such a manager to ever receive this sort of letter. This is for the legal department. There's no way that a competent general counsel would decide that the best strategic move is to just follow the orders of major competitors. Google already employs dozens of lawyers; it's not costly to send a couple to court. In this case, the PR alone would be a huge win.
IANAL.
if you really want to make a DMCA complaint against youtube they will honour it, but they try to push all requests through their own DMCA-alike system that lets copyright holders file takedown notices, but it doesn't have any legal standing under the DMCA or any other country's copyright laws. the youtube takedown notice system is basically "if you ask nicely we'll take it down".
Of course I know this is all a joke, but I enjoy taking jokes seriously. It seems that only nations who are carbon copies of USA in the very worst sense could harm their own citizens to enforce TOS of American firms. (For instance, no one would be surprised if Australia did this.) I suspect that even a very extensive drone force would fail to accomplish Facebook's goals in Afghanistan.
You don't even need to bother with h dark web and cryptocurrency. It will just flat out show up on your bill without issue.
Before I clicked send, I verified that Paypal said they'd send the money without charging a fee. He received it, minus the fee they claimed they wouldn't charge. So, I tried to send another $10 to cover the difference and I got torpedoed into some black hole of no return.
Now I can't use paypal to buy anything without submitting a bunch of documentation, which is super weird considering I don't have to send anything like that to use their competitors' services, so it's never going to happen.
I assume it's some sort of regulation they're attempting to follow, but haven't thought through, but who knows? It's definitely costing them money, but maybe not enough to justify improving the UX.
If they did, half of the accounts in Venmo would be banned already - have you read the comments in the public feed? People know that feed exists, and use it to troll their friends all the time.
Such a plugin is beholden to the extension “marketplaces” so it would be good to include instructions on how to self install the extension if chrome bans it.
What if someone creates a Telegram group where developers from hostile countries(like US&Iran, UK&Russia, Japan&China) pass each other projects that are not obviously illegal but not feasible due to risk of persecution?
In this case, If FB thinks it has a case can try its luck by sending Google a scary looking letter then proceed to compel Google to remove the extension by court order.
You forget we have Guantanamo where people were "renditioned" with little or no legal basis either in the US or otherwise, and I believe there are people in Guantanamo that have no publicly provided evidence to be there?
All it takes is waiting for some politically opportune reason to enact a little dragnet and getting someone on some CIA list with little evidence, and BAM, You're in something like Guantanamo or even worse (client torture security services, assassination, etc).
Yes we withdrew forces, but we've been there a decade and likely have a large network of CIA contacts that would kill or injure a random Afghan civilian.
The US Government is a very very very very dangerous entity to anyone in the third world should you get on their radar. They are dangerous to US citizens with the Padilla case, antiterrorism law overreach, no fly lists, and a variety of other harassment techniques.
The state department and CIA are power extensions of the corporate elite in the United States. We have toppled regimes for oil... minerals... even bananas.
Russia would be far better.
Hiding in other countries is a not sustainable solution, they are going to force extension stores to remove it etc payment gateway not to process you, pushing you as a dev to the fringes and silence others
The chilling effect is the real aim, they are effectively signaling that they can come after anyone who pisses their business model of.
He had a lawyer but after burning through a lot of money with carefully-written objections, he decided to just start ignoring them altogether. Which generally worked. These lawyers (and their clients) were just trolling for easy cash and never actually wanted to go to court because their claims were bogus and they would almost certainly lose.
Sometimes, however, the other party's law firm would call him on the phone to follow with their demands. He would let them yammer on for a few minutes, ask some innocent questions, and then finally interrupt them with something like this. "Here is what I have to say to your client's claim... you have a pen and paper ready? I need you to write this down. Okay, good. Here it is: 'Fuck you.' No wait, I'm not done yet. Just let me speak. I want you to also add, 'and go to hell" please. That is my official legal response. Have a nice day." And slammed the phone down.
Take the story with a grain of salt, but he said it worked 100% of the time.
https://prunescape.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reply_Given_in_Arkell...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossa...
2: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cleveland-browns-letters/
It definitely doesn't help their image or any antitrust lawsuit FB might be facing.
The doubling—and sometimes even tripling—often originates in the transition from use of one language for legal purposes to another… To ensure understanding, the terms from both languages were used. This reflected the interactions between Germanic and Roman law following the decline of the Roman Empire.”
Desist - Latin to stare (sta-re, not homonym of stair) meaning "to stand", then (still) Latin to "sistere" meaning "to stop" plus prefix de, which in this context is "an order (from top, aka court) to down (aka to you)", then Old French.
Huh.
So this is basically court-enforced stop and yielding to the other party.
> Doublets may also have arisen or persisted because the solicitors and clerks who drew up conveyances and other documents were paid by the word
(Its also why lay people shouldn't write their own contracts, because a lawyer with contract experience won't use words that haven't been tested.)
So perhaps they should be cease or desist.
It seems pretty straightforward to me - the Facebook terms of service say that you won't make scripts that interact with the Facebook site except through approved APIs, the cease and desist is telling him that he is breaking this agreement. There's no lawsuit involved, Facebook will just enforce this themselves by banning the account and making the script not work. It's not a big deal, this probably happens hundreds of times a day for various bots that people make that manipulate Facebook in different ways.
If I own a general purpose computer, and I purchase a connection to the internet, I'm entitled to interact however I desire* with an internet service, or the information it chooses to send me.
It is not entitled to have the information it sent to me displayed in a certain way, and it certainly isn't entitled to bitch when I choose to interact with it in a way different than its preferences.
If that's what it wants, then it's welcome to sell a sealed appliance that only interacts in allowed ways. And we'll see what choices people make.
* With the exception of actions that impact others, e.g. DoS, authentication bypass, malicious hacking
And let's be honest, and I'm the last person to defend FB, but they are not likely to be going to be going after a lone user who has automated something for his own convenience with Selenium or whatever...
Once I decided I wanted to delete a lot of old email from a webmail account. There was no "select all" function so I wrote a one-liner in the javascript console of the browser. When that worked, I automated clicking the "delete" button, and then added a loop to do it over and over. This probably violated a TOS clause somehow, but nothing ever came of it.
Why are you entitled to all these things? What gives you the right to demand that others act in accordance with your desires?
What entitles me to control of my computer? “My computer is mine, and you cannot have it.”.
That being said, I’m somewhat more open to the validity of restrictions for how to interact with the server.
If someone e.g. is running an MMO with e.g. in-game items with real money value, and someone else is like, distributing cheats to get these items immediately, it seems fair that the MMO owner should be able to make them stop (though, like, ideally their game would just be secure?)
But if users are permitted to interact with the server in a particular way, I see no reason to allow requiring that users actually touch their mouse and keyboard while doing things they are allowed to do using their mouse and keyboard.
Lets have a law that requires all large services to expose all account settings though an API(?!)
Basically, 1) you [as usual] get to set up the terms of service that your users must stick to, 2) you get to pick what account options you want to offer to the user. i.e. do you want to receive email notifications yes/no, do you want to upload an avatar yes/no, what url/email/phone number do you want to display on your profile etc 3) You do not own these settings and shall provide an API for the user to change them.
You could extend the concept with things like allowing the download of a contact list with the contacts who have this enabled and the information they chose to share. Or say offer TOS updates though the API.
But the initial goal should be for browsers to offer a uniform settings page for all websites you have accounts for.
Remember that unsolicited email check box just above that for to the terms of service? If you use the site all the time you might want to opt in but who wants to dig though a website looking for it? Maybe in hind sight targeted advertisement is just what you wanted? Maybe a feed of updated settings would be useful.
Or maybe you just want to delete your accounts in a convenient way.
It is very easy to DoS by accident with software; and while I’m in favour of totally breaking the economic model of FB in this way, doing so definitely has an impact on others (specifically the Other which is FB itself).
And in a choice between user autonomy and service stability, I can't side with the latter over the former.
Because it's the only avenue we have. Providing accessibility tends to require creating holes in otherwise user-hostile UX, and big companies can't give up on accessibility due to PR reasons - which makes it a perfect beachhead for people who just want a sane and respectful computing experience.
There is a whole category of law where they just go around suing businesses for not being accessible enough. Quite a lot of money in it.
Messing with this is a lose-lose for Facebook.
Messing with this is a lose-lose for Facebook.
Nah, this sort of thing really happens all the time. Think hundreds of scripts like this automatically disabled each day. This one just flukily got some press attention. Large tech companies will have teams entirely dedicated to preventing scripts from doing things while keeping the site running as normal for regular users.
Extension is more like a automated tool. Don't need any permission from Facebook. User can install the tool, and click on a button to unfollow your friends.
Facebook could write TOS for his users not to run a script on their website.
I write scripts (userscripts) all the time. I have a script for Gmail that I use it all the time. Gmail doesn't know that.
The actual timeline of events doesn't match what you think would happen. They banned him and then used the threat of a lawsuit to get him to take down the extension/code.
How is this legal in any shape or form? It is a browser extension, running on users' browsers, installed intentionally by his users. This is insane. The level of arrogance and entitlement here is mind blowing.
IANAL, but have some experience with this from a business matter, resulting in obtaining advice of counsel.
And, yeah this is not a criminal matter, but a civil one, so you're right that the developer isn't likely in civil breach unless they are using FB resources (e.g. API or SDK) that they access under agreement with FB and are violating.
The irony is that if the FB standard user agreement prevents users from, say, using software to programmatically access the site, then it's the user of the extension who would be in breach with FB.
So, as long as the developer doesn't use the extension on their own FB account, then FB doesn't have much to stand on (and even then the C&D would only be applicable to the developer's use of the extension as a user).
On a related side note, if the extension actually did something not related to a specific account (e.g. scraped a public profile while not signed in), then even the user would likely not be in breach, as there is no affirmative assent (i.e. clickwrap) to terms of use required to simply visit the site.
But, my understanding of the standard for that particular tort would make it difficult for FB to prevail. In particular, the two tests that might be hardest to meet are that FB would have to show damages and they would have to show that the developer's conduct led to the breach.
I'm not sure that merely creating a tool qualifies, especially for the latter. The user is not coerced or compelled by the developer to violate his agreement with FB.
Again, IANAL. Just thinking back to legal counsel I've received (and quite possibly misapplied here). Definitely plenty of gray area in civil law.
EDIT: Thinking back to this specific extension, it may be even harder for FB to prevail on tortious interference. The tool merely automates actions that FB makes freely available to its users. And to some extent all access to a site is "programmatic". So, I wonder how this compares to ad blockers or even other built-in browser capabilities that could "programmatically" alter the user experience when accessing FB's site. Really interesting.
Thus I guess one legal argument would be that the ability of the extension to work proves the developer's use of Facebook the service even though they have been banned. So maybe there is something from that they can build up an argument, although it starts to sound far-fetched enough I might expect a judge to not buy it.
Arrogance and entitlement on Facebook's part though, that I agree with.
So sure there might be a moral argument on what is right or wrong, but the law in practice does not work like that. Unless a judge sets an example by nipping this behaviour in the bud with excessive fees, but good luck seeing that ever happen.
The only way I’d see the neighbour win is if a whale of an activist Party would side with him and make it clear that any legal fight will be taken up with the biggest defence possible, but this is equally unlikely to happen unfortunately.
Through it all though, the fact that the other party demanded something of you instead of politely asked" or humbly requested is not really relevant. What matters is that you got notice. That's it.
Even if they are enforcing their demand by way of banning users that don't comply, that may indeed be illegal. For instance, if Facebook made a demand that gay people may not declare themselves so on the platform or they will be banned, I'm sure they'd pretty quickly find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
But really, right now, something like this just gives Congress new things to grill Zuckerberg on, next time they bring him in. (which is inevitable, I think)
The threat of a lawsuit counts as "teeth," to me. But only if it is significant likelihood that the lawsuit will be successful.
So the way I tend to interpret things is a bit less pedantic: "can they demand?" means (to me) "do they have a way of forcing compliance that is likely be backed by a court?"
This does have the effect of making the word "demand" less of a binary and more of a gray scale.
> How is this legal in any shape or form?
And the answer is, any person or corporation has the power to make an offer not to sue. Consider this post a legally binding offer from me to you, not to sue you for any matter arising out of your reply to my comment. I demand thirty thousand US dollars for the covenant not to sue. You don't have to accept, but if you don't, or you agree but do not pay within 60 days, I reserve the right to sue.
You don't need any more authority or legal power than the power to contract. There is zero legal difference between what Facebook did, and what I just did. If you don't want to accept, I cannot make you. Facebook's negotiating position is only better because they have better lawyers, more money to waste on frivolous lawsuits, and the developer maybe felt they might have done something wrong.
Yeah. They put a server on the internet but we're not supposed to talk to it. We can only do it on their terms. Gotta control those users so they don't hurt a billion dollar company's business interests.
I remember the pirate bay's responses to legal threats. That's exactly the kind of reply Facebook deserves.
Here is an old archive link to some: https://web.archive.org/web/20111223101839/http://thepirateb...
The problem here seems to be that the material is unreleased? If that is the case, you can easily fix the problem by releasing it. We'll be more than glad to help you distribute it - free of charge! - to our users.
Thank you for the link. Their responses are hilarious, haha
If I modify the DOM with an extension to hide content I don't like am I running afoul of the law? How about using Lynx instead of Chrome?
What constitutes "talking to" a service? Is it data I send to that server, or is it how my computer processes the data I receive and how I interact with it?
Different people are going to have wildly different opinions, and some of them are very troubling to me. Committing fraud is one thing, but simply using a service without exceeding your authority in a way the service provider doesn't prefer seems like something the service provider should handle without the force of law behind them.
There are limits to both tools, and legislatures can enact new restrictions in response to public demand. But none of that is in play in this story.
If the argument upthread was "we should demand laws that prevent Facebook from locking out extensions to their platform", I wouldn't have a rebuttal (I might or might not support those restrictions). But the sarcastic dunk that was actually made, that it was somehow ridiculous that Facebook would have some say over the terms of how their platform was used, was weird and worth commenting on. It's not only not ridiculous, but actually the world as it exists today.
It's less about FB's right to set boundaries, and more about what FB does when they feel the boundaries have been violated. In this case, they've perma-banned the guy and initiated threatening legal action. That action's extreme demands are NOT in FB's TOS, and reflect on FB's attitude of entitlement.
One argument against this is that FB is just doing the "standard legal thing" of demanding everything up-front, and then negotiating. That is true, but I don't think that just because every lawyer tries to bully their clients enemy means they should. And in this case FB is Goliath, swinging hard and fast at David.
And you know what? Fuck Goliath.
It's quite likely that Facebook sent the person an email asking him to stop violating their Terms of Service and he refused.
I could set up some technical mechanism to stop it, such as blocking their phone number. But, if it's easy for them to switch phone numbers, then that won't work well. And I may not be able to just block a whole area code, because there may be people I want to let fax me coming from that area code as well.
My other recourse, then, is threaten to sue them, and, if they continue, to actually sue them. And I would argue that I should be able to do that. Sending me faxes costs me financial resources and ties up my fax machine, so it's hardly zero cost to me, and it makes sense to have some third party to sort out the dispute and decide where the line should be drawn.
I can imagine other worlds with gentler, more even-handed approaches to sorting out these kinds of issues. Unfortunately, most those approaches fall under the general category of "regulation", and the country I reside in, the USA, decided a long time ago to eschew that kind of approach in favor of one that relies heavily on lawyering up and lawsuits.
or say you have to listen to robocalls or els you cant use some unrelated monopolistic service or product?
i like the analogy but the real story is who would use such a tool. if someone feels they need such extreme measures i wouldnt dare deny them this. who in there right mind?
Facebook has a public service and one of the options is to Unfollow; someone wrote a browser extension to do this automatically for all items.
Fundamentally, what is the difference between automating this process and doing it manually?
In your example of a fax machine, arguably fax numbers are a private entity; there is no requirement for publishing fax numbers nor is fax automatically publicly listed for everyone to see. A malicious spammer would need to either obtain the fax number from a listing somewhere or brute-force the number, and similarly, the only way to __know__ that a fax has gone is ambiguous. obtain the fax number from a listing somewhere or brute-force the number, and neither is really analogous to what a browser offers.
I think your analogy conflates a few concepts incorrectly, namely that there is some unexpected or undue financial consequence to Facebook for publicly allowing users to Unfollow Groups; if the extension __needlessly__ generated traffic, this is closer to your analogy. But as I can see how the extension works (based on archived copies found on shady sites), it's not undue traffic, it's just expediting the process of manually Unfollowing groups.
Facebook shouldn't have a recourse here as I see it; the automation causes no undue burden on facebook that isn't possible by manually clicking, an arbitrary review of the extension suggests there is no undue stress on the servers that differs in any way from the traffic one might generate if they manually unfollowed groups. Automating the process indeed might be undesirable for Facebook in some way, but fundamentally the same result is achievable with manually clicking, and I think a more substantial evidence of damage is required from Facebook to justify such a threat.
If we take it to a logical comparison, should Facebook have the right to block a mouse + keyboard automation tool that I script to react at human speeds but is pixel-perfect to unfollow groups?
If the answer to this from Facebook is "yes", then the natural question is "what is the similarity between these processes?"; if the answer is "automation", then the natural question is "why is this damaging to Facebook as opposed to me just manually unfollowing??", and I'm not confident Facebook has a reasonable/strong answer to this.
If Facebook is fine with the slower method, then the question becomes "what is the real concern with the faster method? I will skip the logical follow-ups here as the response is already long.
Facebook should __not__ have the right to sue just because they don't like an activity; no one benefits from this; quite the opposite, smaller parties are actively harmed by such behavior as they lack the financial resources or confidence (or both) to respond to such a legal challenge, and this was never the intent of law. One should not need heavy financing to secure their natural rights; if Facebook wants to position that the extension is somehow illegal as per terms of service, I think the duty is on them to demonstrate how it's significantly damaging and how it differs from a dedicated person armed with a cup of coffee and an hour of free time; if Facebook cannot make a significant distinction outside of convenience for the person, then I don't see a basis for legal recourse.
I haven't seen a fax machine in 20 years. I'd be surprised if anyone under 40 knows what they looked like.
I understand certain terms (such as saying you can't hit the server more often than a reasonable amount), but much beyond that I push back. If the laws allow them to make such all encompassing demands of how I use their product, well, laws can be changed, and I vote.
One: Facebook is currently being accused of damaging democracy via misinformation and their "anger promoting" algorithm. That affects me, and my leaving Facebook doesn't solve that. Two: there is the monopoly issue (if that is the right word.... the issue I am concerned about lies on a spectrum, unlike many people's usage of "monopoly"). Prior to Facebook having dominance, I used to be in the loop of what my friends are doing, because they used phone, email, etc. Now they all use Facebook and my choice to not use it (which I don't, actually) results in my not being included in a huge number of things. In that sense, I think Facebook has become like a utility, like the phone company of old. I can't just find a social network product that I prefer, and use it instead.... my friends are not on it and other social networks are not interoperable with Facebook. (as phone providers and email providers are interoperable with one another)
Teens who use Facebook products are known to be harmed. Maybe you think they should just not use these products. That will cause even greater harm to their social lives than it causes to mine, since all their friends are using it and being connected with friends is very important to teens. Again, their simply not using the product doesn't address the problem. (and MY not using it especially doesn't help)
I think your comment is like saying "if you don't like constant robocalls, just cancel your phone plan rather than encourage laws to curtail them." Kind of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
So yeah, I'll exercise my right to vote by actually voting. Luckily, many representatives are in agreement with my perspective on this.
There is nothing special about Facebook products that make them harmful.
It's a glorified message board which facilitates the exact same harmful social interaction that is prevalent on other sites e.g. TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat.
This idea that you can ban Facebook and Instagram and suddenly the internet is safe for kids is just ridiculous.
Sure, there is. Addiction. People are addicted to this stuff. They're addicted to likes, reactions, seeing their follower numbers increase. They're addicted to the algorithmic content feeds. Facebook is actively working towards keeping it that way. They probably want to make it even more addictive. They want people using their software at all times in order to collect data and serve ads.
Why else would they C&D an unfollow extension developer? They want people to keep following so they get addicted to the infinite content plus ads feed.
Also, nobody is excusing any of the other sites you mentioned. There's plenty of things wrong with them as well and we'll condemn them for it. We're just focusing on Facebook right now because it's the subject of this particular thread.
> This idea that you can ban Facebook and Instagram and suddenly the internet is safe for kids is just ridiculous.
Who said that? I don't think they should be banned, but I do think they should be regulated or otherwise held accountable. A big part of it might be being more transparent with their algorithm, and giving tools to users to control it more.
I think where we are is akin to back in the days where people realized that, no, we aren't going to ban buildings, but we are going to have building codes. We aren't going to ban food, but we are going to have an FDA. Etc. The free market doesn't address all problems.
Web site may merely suggest how it is best served.
Really, the user should have all the power. These companies already have what, billions of dollars? That's power enough for them.
Facebook bans you? You still have all your data intact.
I wonder if Facebook is legally still obliged to provide all its information to the user in the EU even after banning the user, and if they comply.
If they aren't, they should be. Facebook's contracts aren't above the law which says people have a right to their data. Does the law care that the user was banned? I don't think so. Nor should a banishment somehow invalidate someone's rights.
Browser history?
In a lot of cases it's also not their client in any sense of the word. Firefox, Chromium, Safari are not Facebook's.
I don't think so. Users simply don't have the power to negotiate these contracts. These "take it or leave it" deals are abusive. Especially since many times these platforms have network effects so strong you need to be part of them in order to not fail at life. Under these conditions, nobody can truly consent to anything. These "terms" should not even apply. Nobody even reads them, it doesn't matter what they say because it won't change the fact they need to be on Facebook because of family, work, school, whatever. They click "agree" not because they agree but because the sign up form won't submit if they don't.
So technology that lets us alter the deal is very much welcome indeed. They don't want us using this stuff but their permission is not necessary. Software is gonna interoperate with their site whether they want it or not. They should not even be able to find out that we're doing anything out of the ordinary. From their perspective, they should simply see a normal user agent issuing normal HTTP requests.
Adversarial interoperability. If they refuse to make the site work like we want it to, we'll do the work for them. This should be considered a form of legitimate self defense against their abuse.
Srsly? "Failing at life" would appear to mean dying.
I don't think a social media account is a matter of life and death. FB is basically a kind of entertainment, so if you don't like the T&C you can always join a sports team or a choir, or whatever.
In my country it's simply not possible to communicate effectively without WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. If I refuse to use these things, I might as well simply ostracize myself from society. For some people, it could cost them their jobs, actually putting them at risk of dying.
> FB is basically a kind of entertainment
No. Facebook is communication, jobs, local information, even a market place with local groups where people sell their stuff. It's hard to describe just how thoroughly this company has managed to infiltrate my society and its way of life. People write pop songs about getting blocked on Instagram.
The fact that the extensions helps automate some tasks if a different matter. If it were an industrial level scraper that scraped anything public... that could be considered malicious and can cause tangible financial losses.
This extension on the other hand... You can't really justify sending a threat like that. You can come up with excuses but that is it.
It's like Facebook wants people to hate them.
You don't get a say in how I'm using my computer. If you're exposing your HTTP server to the world and letting users access it using their web browsers, you don't get to tell me my choice of web browser (that is, HTTP agent) is not to your liking.
You can do whatever you want with your computer.
But when you use your computer to access a remote service you need to comply with their terms of service.
In other words, either the action is disallowed completely or it's allowed regardless of my choice of user agent.
If I attempt XSS or SQL Injection against a website it is still illegal regardless of whether the HTTP request uses the same user-agent or is similar to other requests.
In this case, we are dealing with the same requests with the same intent, just made with a different browser. As stated previously, you cannot force my choice of browser.
Now please tell me which (real or imaginary) ToS clause this violates and how it could possibly violate it, even hypothetically.
So I never read them. I don't consider them to mean anything. If you operate a public website, that's like erecting a billboard. You can attach ToS to your billboard, but nobody's going to read your ToS; they'll just read your billboard.
I'd like a plugin that can auto-click ToS popups. Like, click any button that says "Accept" (or "So sue me, sucker!")
¹: Technically, I think “ignored” is more accurate; if you're prohibited from reverse-engineering in general, the general prohibition would still apply even though it has a specific exemption. I'm not a lawyer, though.
Apparently it's a thing in the US. People can sign their rights away to these companies. Needless to say, those counter-rights clauses have become standard in every contract. Read one of these abusive contracts and you've read them all. "We reserve all possible rights while you promise not use any of yours" summarizes every terms of service out there.
And in this case, I would argue that this is a case where they should not have the ability to restrict this kind of interaction. If the law disagrees, then the law needs to be changed (and in the meantime, ignored to the extent possible).
The only moral obligation is to not crack the server and take control of it. We won't make the server's processor execute our code. That's the line. Your computer runs your code, my computer runs my code.
Anything else is fair game. Server responds to my HTTP requests, so obviously anything I can do with HTTP requests is allowed. It doesn't matter what I use as user agent since it's the company's own code that's handling those requests.
Ironically, taking over control is exactly what big tech is doing with our computers. They take control away from us and give it to the copyright industry, to the advertisers, to everyone who would very much prefer that we users remain mere passive consumers just like in the days of television. Our computers are slowly becoming appliances.
Just because a company offers a service doesn't give you the right to (ab)use it any way you want.
If that were the case hacking would be considered legal.
Didn't the US Supreme Court say it did, actually? I know that GDPR and the UK's Copyright Act have something to say about the matter.
It's always subject to the conditions the service provider sets.
Otherwise again it would legalise hacking.
Sending an HTTP request to the Facebook server is not a crime. Facebook code is still in control. It can ignore my request.
Are you asking how it's legal that you can demand someone to do something?
How is anything legal? Because there's no law against it. There's no law against demanding something. You can demand (almost) anything of anyone you want.
Google banned the Chrome extension "bypass paywalls" for doing nothing bad except annoying Google's friends.
This is why walled gardens are bad. It's not Google's place or Facebook's place or Apple's place or anyone's place to tell me what programs I can run on my own computer.
In theory, legality is the Judge's opinion of the law applied to circumstance. To even approach this state is extremely expensive and takes a great deal of time - on the order of years.
So, for the most part we're all on our own. And in that context, legality doesn't matter. At all. What does matter is leverage. The justice system itself is, ironically, most often used as leverage, not as a service for determining legality, but as a threat of the expense and time of getting to that determination.
It's sickening, but that's how it is.
Note that depending on the country, you might still need authorization to build any structure on your own property.
My plan is to wait until February 2022, and build the ugliest golden Trump mailbox I can slap together. Then, when they ask me to take it down, request an appeal, and film the ensuing meeting. Then, send said video to Fox News et al. Then, run for HOA on a platform of abolishing the HOA.
... I really don't like neighbors telling me what I can and can't do.
The neighborhood has an HOA but the HOA actually had no actual rules because they were not properly registering with the county when they made bylaws (where my mom is all HOA rules have to be submitted to the state, otherwise they are not enforceable). Gotta love HOAs.
> The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else.
Convincing people that America is the land of the free, is the biggest trick the devil has ever pulled.
I think a lot of people in the software bubble don't realize what a huge sum even $100 is for the average person, the law only affords power and protection to the rich and already powerful.
There is no certainty in the legal system, they could very well win even if they are in the wrong. More so when they can employ an army of lawyers and put economic pressure on the system.
Meh. Just show up. Don't hire lawyers. File motions all day to see more evidence.
I wonder how much pride they take in users saying the experience is enhanced by orders of magntiude when they unsubscribe from their feeds...
Actions > Words.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo...
Ironically enough I was thinking recently about how, content aside, Facebook’s UI is as bad now as it was in 2010.
A cease and desist for making a browser extension that automates a process that any user could themselves do with no special "hacking" required? Absolutely absurd, I hope there is no legal basis for this threat.
Edit: to clarify confusion, author of the extension worked with university to collect user data to use for study: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
As an example of automated user interactions: It's clearly not allowed to use an extension that will automatically follow on Instagram in order to increase your follower count.
Sadly, although this extension should morally be categorized differently, it falls into the same category per their rules — automatically following is treated the same as automatically unfollowing. (In fact, a common feature of automatic follower bots is to automatically unfollow afterwards).
It would certainly read far more charitably toward FB on HN, in US Senate and House hearings, and at the FTC, FCC, and DoJ.
But that's just me.
A few months after I published Unfollow Everything, academics at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, expressed interest in using it to study the News Feed’s impact on the amount of time spent on Facebook and the happiness of the platform’s users. We began working together. The university recruited people to join two study groups: one where participants deleted their News Feeds using Unfollow Everything and a control group where participants left their feeds intact. Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information—specifically, the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups, and pages they were following and not following, both in total and broken down by category. (For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.)
Again: For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
The "data sharing" claim, which you've repeated several times in this thread, is as bogus as any other FB have proposed.
When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".
Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?
Somehow now this is bad... Ridiculous.
hardly.
This can't happen to utility monopolies:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/06/telegram-says-...
If your claim were true, everyone would just be stuck suffering and beholden to Facebook's ability to fix their service for lack of options.
Let me ask you this: do you think Apple should be allowed to ban whoever they want from their platform justified by them being a private company? If you say no, then you should also say no to Facebook being allowed to do so. Otherwise you're just twisting the facts to support your political position.
Not to mention we're talking about them sending a pretty formal legal threat. Would you philosophy in this case not be "if you don't like their browser extension, don't use it?"
If you're building a new social network today, it makes sense to tap into an existing social graph so you can bootstrap your network with an existing ecosystem. Michelle Lim made a great case for this in her post here:
https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/
These protocols exist today. This is a W3C recommendation as of 2018-01-23:
Speak for yourself. Not everything needs to be 'planet scale', I run a few social networks and they do just fine.
And I agree with Facebook in this case, if you have someone come into your house with the sole intent of burning it down, of course you're going to kick them out. It's no different than dealing with trolls or other bad actors.
They are important because they contain a significant portion of many people's address books. When Facebook was offline a few days ago, I had no way of reaching about two thirds of my contacts. And I'm someone who's made a significant effort to move off of Facebook. There were people I wanted to contact that day that the only way to reach them would have been to ask mutual friends for other contact details. And there were a few people that I either don't have mutual friends with or who our mutual friends were also only reachable via Facebook. If legislation aims for some form of "interoperability" the main condition should be that, if Facebook were to disappear again, I would still have the ability to reach all of my Facebook contacts via another network.
No, because we're different people. Some people are drawn to Facebook's firehose feed, and there's not really anything you can do to stop them in a free world. It's a disgusting, albeit perfectly legal exchange of goods and services. Microsoft and Apple fought long and hard to make sure consumer protection laws like that never saw the light of day.
This wasn't particularly related to this specific case, and visions and missions of companies should still be respected, but society does have a very warped concept of "property" when it involves their work or ideas.
Yes, actually. It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network. If you wanted to use an answering machine not sold by Bell, you had to get it custom rewired by Bell and pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege:
> AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'"
> Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service.
It was challenged and the seller of the amplifier device ultimately won in federal court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... (Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.)
It wasn’t an arbitrary choice by a private company. That’s a big difference.
A stupid rule by a highly regulated monopoly is very different from a stupid rule by an unregulated monopoly (maybe member of oligopoly).
Right, but IIRC Bell was considered a common carrier.
That means Bell could enforce this because they already had to give equal play on their network. Facebook is not and does not.
But what they don't address is that HBOMax is already the worst streaming app on my TV, and therefore it doesn't matter how much money AT&T throws at politics. Their stuff sucks because they're AT&T, not because of some political misfortune.
edit: sources
* Current AT&T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T
* Old AT&T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation
In the late 90s, I remember watching the scenes in WarGames (which came out in 1983) where Matthew Broderick's character is using a modem where you had to place the phone cradle on top of it and thinking why would you ever design a modem that way?
And of course the reason was to work around this stupidity.
From [1]
> It was not until a landmark U.S. court ruling regarding the Hush-A-Phone in 1956 that the use of a phone attachment (by a third party vendor) was allowed for the first time; though AT&T's right to regulate any device connected to the telephone system was upheld by the courts, they were instructed to cease interference towards Hush-A-Phone users. A second court decision in 1968 regarding the Carterfone further allowed any device not harmful to the system to be connected directly to the AT&T network. This decision enabled the proliferation of later innovations like answering machines, fax machines, and modems.
From [2]:
> After the ruling, it was still illegal to connect some equipment to the AT&T network. For example, modems could not electronically connect to the phone system. Instead, Americans had to connect their modems mechanically by attaching a phone receiver to an acoustic coupler via suction cups.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...
Which is the exact thing which gave rise to phone phreaking and getting around the limitations on Bell Systems.
"Exploding The Phone" by Phil Lapsley is a great book that examines these early hackers:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-invisible-playground...
I too can imagine that. But the restraints the law allowed to be imposed on our freedom sound absurd, sound outlandish to me now. We were in a situation that de-legitimizes the law & the legal system, and eventually we fixed that.
> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?
Also, it was illegal to sell connecting equipment, sure, but AT&T didn't go nearly as far as what we see today. They didn't do anything this bad. The question posed wasn't about the legality or ability to interoperate, to make devices.
The question was about the reprecussion. Hush-A-Phone & other companies did not have their corporate phone numbers dropped, did not lose their ability to make phone calls when the started making a device AT&T didn't like. AT&T took them to court & tried to get them to stop making devices, but they didn't retaliate by kicking their corporate entity off the network. AT&T also didn't search for people using the phone system to talk about using other means of communication & kick them off the phone network (something we've seen repeatedly, recently with Mastodon, although those policies may/may not have been improved recently). Facebook is acting far more like a bully than AT&T did, in my view.
Independent inventor convicted and gaoled by AT&T for "misdemeanor attachment", the crime of attaching non-AT&T equipment to AT&T's phone network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_L._Shaw
More on this in the first bit of "The Inventor and the Thief" on Snap Judgement:
https://snapjudgment.org/episode/the-inventor-and-the-thief-...
Directly-connected modems were an obvious threat to AT&T as this would enable high-bandwidth packet-based distribution over AT&T's network, including ultimately what we know as VOIP. AT&T fought packet-switched networks from the start:
Paul Baran: The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense.
Clarence Thomas on treating social media as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p...
Eugene Volokh on treating social media as common carriers: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media...
Even so, as others have pointed out, the telcos did have arguably reasonable restrictions placed on what one could connect to the network.
But to put glorified web sites in the same class as government-sanctioned monopolies utilities tend to necessarily be is asinine. Your telco had to run physical wires across the land, gas company physical pipes everywhere, there was no practical means of a free competitive market, it's a completely different situation.
Facebook is nowhere near the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, as evidenced by the fact that the world didn't crash to a halt when it went down a few days ago. It's merely popular, but being popular doesn't mean it controls society or dictates its rules.
>Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?
That would be a valid comparison of Facebook owned the infrastructure of the internet, but they don't. It's trivially easy to communicate without Facebook.
They could even potentially argue that the names of the "unfollow" buttons and associated URL's (which are in the code of the extension) are copyright facebook. The source code has things like:
getElementsByClassName("oi732d6d ik7dh3pa d2edcug0 qv66sw1b
Even a very weak legal argument is enough to win when you're fighting someone who doesn't have the budget or desire to even show up in the courtroom.
The contents of the page (including the source code) is the copyrighted work.
It’s not strictly about automating API requests. He was also using Facebook’s trademarks (easy target for valid C&D requests). He was also using the plugin to collect data from users, including some very detailed data for a subset that opted in to a study. Facebook doesn’t take kindly to people making extensions that use their trademarks and collect user data, no matter how trivial.
The hypocrisy here is absolutely hilarious.
Seems like the only potentially legally valid part of it. And even then, if he's not misrepresenting his product as made by Facebook (just "compatible with Facebook" or "use while you're on Facebook") I think it's still a stretch. Can a cottage industry survive without ever being allowed to even name the companion products for which the extension is designed?
But corporations have taken that and gone way too far on it. If I describe a product as being "compatible with X" or "fits on an X", that in no way makes a claim that it is manufactured by X. Like how tv manufacturers should be able to say "Perfect for watching the Super Bowl this weekend.", but avoid doing so for fear of being sued. There's no endorsement at all there, nor any dilution of the trademark, and yet it gets treated as though the words themselves are protected.
Rather overkill in practice for a legal doctrine. But I can see their concern, and why a company would dislike it over the sheer tech support call volume alone. Their first response being "stop it!" makes sense in that light.
Open standards are a good way to prevent issues while keeping both sides happy (notably it also keeps company names out of it except in deniablenways such as say listing GMail as an example of a POP3 user - it doesn't equate the two). Open standards aren't automatic or free though and there may easily be gaps because they never thought to specify a given portion for interoperability.
I have worked for places that have completely ignored C&D's with no repercussions.
That being said, Facebook can use this down the road as an example of them providing ample warning and notice to the developer – which, yes, is something that a judge would consider. There just aren't, say, specific legal outcomes to ignoring this C&D's (totally arbitrary) timeframe.
Couldn't one maliciously comply with this particular order? Especially 'used to interact with', which could be interpreted as 'used in the process of development to interact with'. I feel like if I were them, I would in this case send a whole copy of the Linux source code (seeing my PC runs it); Chromium (to 'interact' with Facebook); WebKit (or similar browser-side dependencies that your extension somehow interacts with) etc. Not forgetting to send every version of the aforementioned software!
Might be bending the rules just a bit (/s), but hey, at least I'm on the safe side by including absolutely everything!
There's a distinct difference between using a trademarked term descriptively vs. in trade. The phrase "for Facebook" is clearly the former.
I'll note that on the Mozilla Firefox Extensions site, there are presently 1,305 results for the term "Facebook", the first of which ... is from Mozilla itself, "Facebook Container", by Mozilla Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=facebook
The Facebook Container page doesn't even include the usual trademark-infringement-bane I was going to suggest, "'Facebook' is a trademark of Facebook, Inc. Any and all other trademarks are properties of their respective owners."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
Google Play's store doesn't provide the helpful results counts Mozilla's does (perhaps Mozilla could provide Google assistance with online search technology), but does reveal a wealth of third-party entries referencing Facebook.
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=facebook
FB's and P&C's action here doesn't pass muster as casual enforcement of trademark claims.
(The prospect of genericising "Facebook" on the basis of this fact ... would be interesting.)
The user-data collection was truly de minimis; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806696
Does that really matter? If a malicious company like Facebook wants to ruin your life and drown you in lawsuits, they are able to do so. By the time it is determined that the person under attack by Facebook is actually in the right, the damage will be done.
In the recent 2020 ruling for VAN BUREN v. UNITED STATES, Supreme Court states that:
> "An individual “exceeds authorized access” when he accesses a com- puter with authorization but then obtains information located in par- ticular areas of the computer—such as files, folders, or databases— that are off-limits to him."
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf
To me this means that as long as OP's extension is only doing stuff which their authorized cookie/token etc is authorized to do, they should be fine. Also it's not the OP who's doing these actions, it's the end user who's using the extension to achieve authorized activity. So I don't see how OP's extension is in the wrong.
Only valid claim FB might have is about using trademarked data and any data collection maybe. But the end user using the extension to perform authorized actions (even if automated) should be okay imo.
Btw, link to FB's letter for those curious:
https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...
> At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
This ban is the answer the rhetorical question in the last sentence: Yes, this is exactly something a company focused on profits over people would do. Whatever corporate-speak tweaks Facebook makes to the news feed, the one thing it can't abide is people actively choosing what they experience on the site.
>Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
This is like BP patting themselves on the back for barely cleaning up an oil spill they themselves caused, and saying "see, we aren't evil, we did the bare minimum necessary to get some puff pieces in the press for us"
UPDATE: I had to run it a few times, somehow even though it logged that it had unfollowed all of the items, there were still ~40 left the 2nd time, 3 the 3rd time, at which point i just unfollowed the remaining friends/pages manually.
Also how do they feel about Social Book Post Manager (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...), an extension that lets people delete their Facebook history selectively (like all your video views), in bulk? This seems like a basic feature any trustworthy social media platform or technology company in general should provide. But since Facebook doesn't, someone made an extension that helps users out. Unfortunately this extension is out of date and doesn't work in 2021 because it doesn't have '2021' as an option in their date filter, and because Facebook's continual UI changes to the activity log seem to be designed to break this extension, since they certainly provide no benefits to users.
Can some hacker here who has the skills please make a tool to help lay persons clear their posts/comments/likes/etc. one by one for Facebook, Instagram, and the rest?
Watch for a terms of service update from facebook.
I had a company fire this at me back in 2000 or so. It worked, in that it wasn't worth dealing with the issues and I stopped. It didn't work in the sense the company is long gone anyhow....
Having done this manually, I can attest to the increase in the quality of my feed. Every now and then, I need to do the manual work again.
I'm glad that Facebook has streisand effect this extension, I'll look into installing it.
Some of the posts Facebook shows to everyone and the ads.
The video widget list that shows what is pretty much embedded Instagram videos.
And quickly enough, the "you've reached the bottom" message and end of scroll. I can't remember its exact wording, but the way it's displayed makes it seem like a bug or glitch. It shows that they did not expect users to get there.
Basically to prevent Cambridge Analytica from happening again.
If I was this person I’d have done this as anonymously as possible.
What’s more sucky though is that at least with Twitter I was able to use the api for this. FB has locked down their APIs for personal use which resulted in having to script browser actions :-/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
So many users tell me they avoided deleting Facebook thanks to News Feed Eradicator, so killing it would really be shooting themselves in the foot for a short term gain, but it would not surprise me one bit.
What's the point of reading your Facebook feed if you don't want to follow anything? Just don't read your feed. I kind of like the fact that my feed is so terrible, it makes me want to leave quickly and not come back.
Facebook is good to get in touch with friends, it is excellent to organize events, mostly because of its popularity. But when it comes to the feed, for some reason, for me, it has a signal to noise ratio close to zero. Even content coming from real friends I hold in high regard is terrible, as if Facebook makes the worst out of people. The best I can hope for are moderately funny jokes and memes, beside that, nothing is salvageable.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfollow-everyone-...
It's called "Unfollow Everyone" though. Is it the same thing? The only clue about the developer identity is the email address, 'easwarismyname@gmail.com' and the developer is "TMP".
I'm curious -- if FB pressures Goog to delist the extension, would this open them up to anti-trust action?
Also I wonder if the Everyone -> Everything was a mistake, or an intentional misdirect to avoid a Streisand effect?
IANAL. I understand anti-trust regs to work at a market level. FB asking for an extension that interacts solely with their wholly-owned, private platform doesn't affect the larger social media market at all.
Spanish rap groups for example, then like every post by these people.
It worked really well, when ever I went on by habbit there was complete random stuff in a language I didn't understand.
Also try and follow only males for obvious reasons and disable people being able to find you and write to you wall.
This completely broke facebook and broke the habbit.
Over the years of going on once a month I starting getting to know these random people.
This male model from Pakistan who posted duck face photos, nice guy.
I would like something to delete all comments i have ever made, one by one if anyone knows the script.
Now, my FB feed is empty. It's pretty nice and now tamed. I don't see the usual inflammatory garbage Fb always tries to entice me with.
Now however when I just checked I can't seem to find a way to browse those "custom friend" feeds anymore. They're located under Friends -> Custom Lists but that only takes me to editing them (seemingly without a purpose). Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to actually use (browse using) those lists or if FB has discontinued the functionality?
Also, a wonderful tool is Stylebot. You can make CSS overrides to hide auto suggestions, "you might need this dopamine rush", "other addicts got addicted to this" and all that crap. Makes reddit actually usable.
I unfollowed everyone. Then I added a selective few to follow. I have tweaked who I follow and who I unfollow over the last two years to give me a balanced news feed that I enjoy. Basically twitter behavior but on FB.
What else can Facebook demand that its users use or don't use?
It isn't illegal. Facebook isn't a legislative body or a court, it can neither create nor adjudicate law.
And you can read Facebook's case via their cease and desist letter linked in the article.
> What else can Facebook demand that its users use or don't use?
Outside of their platform? Nothing, obviously. They're not going to break into your house and burn your books or anything.
If it were me, I'd be tempted to martyr myself just to show how fucked up Facebook really is. What is the worst that can happen? The guy goes bankrupt. Life goes on.
They can stop you from developing software for their platform or using their API or brand, which is what Facebook has done. They haven't demanded the developer of Unfollow Everything cease developing software altogether, only that they cease developing software for Facebook.
Also, Facebook is nowhere near unique in having similar terms for developers.
That demand is wrong. What if the developer makes an extension for some other web site and then FB buys that site? They'll go the legal route again. I don't think that is right.
What possible basis would Facebook have for preventing people from managing their own account in this way, improving their lives? Insanity.
So now I follow a handful of friends and a few pages of interest to me, it's quite interesting.
Just shows that tech is more scared of Facebook than massive established institutions.
There is no regulation or other government directives requiring social media companies to provide APIs open to all.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/teller-api?comment=483805
I support teller in this endeavour.
The algorithm then went crazy and proposed my country's "Melinda Gates/McKenzie Scott" as a friend.
The extension itself isn't such a public participation action. Facebook's C&D isn't a SLAPP.
Facebook and Perkins Coei's letter are simple intimidation. Quite arguably monopoly abuse as well, which might interest the US FCC, US FTC, and CA State AG.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
"What’s a Facebook shadow profile, and should you be worried about it?"
You can thank anyone who allowed Facebook to scan their mobile phone contacts through the “find friends” feature. When someone uses this feature, Facebook downloads all of a phone’s contact data to its own servers. This includes mostly emails and phone numbers. At the same time, Facebook is also collecting harder-to track data on how you and all your friends and friends of friends are connected to each other. That’s how it finds people to recommend for its “people you may know” feature.
The company’s mobile app even tells you it will do this...
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/facebook-shadow-profiles-pr...
Edit: I chucked elsewhere on social media and will slack it on Monday.
For any others as unobservant as me: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...
Especially, if you look at Facebook history, siphoning data from there (that this extension was also doing) brought them one of the biggest scandals (cambridge analytica).
Once Mr Barclay is no longer using Facebook, then whatever "browsewrap" agreement was created between Barclay and Facebook is arguably no longer in effect. Whatever provisions survive do not include a prohibition on using automation.
The Terms state
"If you delete or we disable your account, these Terms shall terminate as an agreement between you and us, but the following provisions will remain in place: 3, 4.2-4.5."
The prohibition on automation is provision #2.
Even if you believe that Facebook can bind non-users to these Terms, then you also have to consider that most courts have refused to enforce browserwrap agreements to begin with. For websites trying to enforce browserwrap, there is a recurring problem with the question of consent. Generally, the website has the burden of proving the user read and understood the Terms.
But let's assume Facebook can get past this hurdle. Let's consider the "automated means" provision. Is it enforceable. It is unlikely a provision like this one in a browsewrap agreement has ever been reviewed by any court. Facebook's provision is extremely vague and ambiguous. What is "automated means". It is the essence of a computer. If browser extensions are banned, why not state this explicitly. For example, Facebook-approved web browsers without any extensions all use automation to request image and JavaScript resources. Users do not manually request those resources.
The clause itself states
"You may not access or collect data from our Products using automated means (without our prior permission) or attempt to access data that you do not have permission to access."
But the UnfollowEverything extension does not access nor collect data.
It is arguable that (a) for any ordinary user, using UnfollowEbverything does not violate the Facebook Terms and (b) that it is only the usage of this extension by researchers who were otherwise gathering behavioural data that triggered the C&D letter. We already know that Facebook fears researchers studying the effects of its (scripted, automated) website on users.^1
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20210806191005/https://www.wired...
In the Facebook Terms, Facebook itself admits to using automation:
"And we develop automated systems to improve our ability to detect and remove abusive and dangerous activity that may harm our community and the integrity of our Products."
It is 2021, and courts in Northern California are well-aware that automation is useful, for everyone. They would also understand that unfollowing friends results in no loss to user privacy. Nor does it interfere with any ads.
But let's assume Facebook can overcome these hurdles and a court in Northern California agrees with the ridiculous arguments Facebook's lawyers would have to make. Imagine (a) Facebook manages to affirmatively prove Barclay consented to the browsewrap that no one ever reads and (b) he understood that using UnfollowEveryone was a violation of the Terms. What would Facebook claim as damage/loss for Barclay's alleged "breach".
As an aside, this bit in the Terms is amusing
"We do not control or direct what people and others do or say, and we are not responsible for their actions or conduct (whether online or offline) or any content that they share (including offensive, inappropriate, obscene, unlawful and other objectionable content)."
It is easily arguable that Facebook does seek to control/direct what users do as it forced Barclay to spend hours in order to unfollow each of his friends by pointing and clicking.
Facebook attempts to control and direct what users see and do when using the website, rather than allowing users to make their own choices. That seems beyond question.
If FB were retaliating to a lawsuit against it with actions of this sort, yes.
As it stands, no, this is simple intimidation and coersion on the part of FB.
Also HN: "automated facial recognition is bad"
- Average Facebook user
The existence of a company being scummy shouldn't lead to consumers being blamed. This is ridiculous. If anything it should be a GREATER cause for regulators to break them up immediately
Here is a direct link to the tool:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfollow-everyone-...
Why do news organisations resist linking users to the source of news so heavily?
Is there something wrong with the linked extension? Is its existence contingent on FB lawyers not identifying the developer?