Facebook has a buggy UI that makes it hard to unfollow everything. Some dev created a plugin to fix this. Facebook banned him and lawyered up.
Is the plugin legal in europe or not? Is fixing a dark pattern a bugfix?
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
History will not look back well upon this charade.
In practice, the rich are not even as forbidden as the poor from that.
The UK currently replicates almost all the same provisions as the EU (because, it was part of the EU, and in leaving it was easier to just say, yes, we're keeping the rules the same).
It will inevitably diverge from the EU rules, but most of these are identical for now.
The case in the OP was against the Belgian Government, who do have the resources to fight silly lawsuits. Random individuals in most jurisdictions can't really entertain such things over something that doesn't make them any money against a trillion $ company.
1) browser extension (which I guess is kind of a client side JS modification?) vs decompilation 2) bug vs feature addition
My uninformed take is that Facebook's claim is weak to begin with, but that this judgment doesn't really influence anything
If they have a case it is against the individuals who use the plugin.
Why does this have to be explicitly allowed? Everything not prohibited is permitted.
> there probably ARE terms against scripting their API in an unauthorized way
The extension is not bound by any terms. It's the user's choice whether to violate these conditions by installing and using it.
In any case, users should have every right to do this. It's essentialy self-defense against corporate abuse. They can get us addicted to content feeds so we spend hours looking at ads but we can't script their site? That's abuse and we have every right to defend ourselves. These stupid terms are like a drug dealer that makes us promise not to go to a doctor and seek help for addiction before giving us our free sample.
It's basically 10,000 employee company against single consumer. No judge would think that is a fair way to go about these things.
in any case it was given willingly to me by Facebook