Data harvesting is moral for me, but not for thee.
I appreciate that 'system authenticated person' is a smaller set than those who can access anything publicly accessible, and that the former is a subset of the latter.
The tool lets you download the contact info of your friends, which you should be able to do anyway. In fact Facebook tries to trick its users into thinking they can do this with their data takeout option, but the downloaded files don't actually include any of the contact info for your contacts. Which makes zero sense, considering the entire point of Facebook is that it's a digital rolodex for storing your friends' contact info.
This has never realistically been the case. An illusion of control is provided by facebook, but they've never really put much effort into it. For a really simple example, look at how long content remained available to the entire internet after "deletion". Sometimes it took years.
Expecting any semblance of privacy from a company who profits from using and selling your data is, if I'm being blunt, lunacy.
In other news: your partner may also leak your most intimate secrets. I hope they do, to teach you a lesson?
Every trust can be betrayed. Why do you believe a world without trust would be better? Only because you cannot handle the nuance of different levels of trust?
That is, quite honestly, one of the oddest definitions of freedom I've come across.
The reality of the situation is that Facebook is a walled garden built on the labor of it's users and it is objecting to those users reclaiming the fruits of their labor by scraping.
Indeed, and that's why it's important to choose the right partner. Likewise, it's important to choose the right friends on instagram to share your photos with. Because as you noted, they can always screenshot away and there's nothing Facebook can do.
What's dangerous is thinking that Facebook/Meta is the keyholder. That's a false perception, perpetrated by Facebook because they want to monopolize everyone's data. It was and always will be about the people who you share your information with. Don't want your profile scraped and leaked? Don't share it with sketchy people.
Scripts are tools, and like any tool they're extensions of the self. If it's morally okay to do it by hand, it's morally okay to do it with a script, so long as my script is respectful of server resources.
At the same time, I don't think all of Instagram's users care if their images are hidden, or not.
It's quite unfortunate Facebook/Meta is using hostile language and the word "scraping" together in this case. Scraping is a legitimate process used by various business models to gather information from the Web, which itself was originally intended to be an open forum for people to share content.
Hostile business models have corrupted that intent and turned it into a competitive environment that is harming users and legitimate models which may not have the funding larger corporations can muster.
I have a "scraper" I've built that will either snapshot a page from a user's browser or crawl it remotely with Selinium/Firefox, on the user's behalf, to save the content in an index for searching later, by that user. It's not automated, nor does it parse and crawl URLs in the pages saved. It doesn't use page content in a wider context, either.
I've spent a significant amount of time trying to "work around" anti-scraping efforts by various companies and it's frustrating to see hostility instead of cooperation in certain types of use.
1) It was public when the content was posted by its authors. Facebook locked it down retroactively, regardless of the author's intent.
2) A login requirement doesn't make it non-public, if making an account is trivial, and there are already hundreds of millions of accounts. Is the plot of Avengers: Endgame also not public, because it's locked behind a ticket purchase or subscription?
Sharing photos on Instagram, there is no such understanding, news outlets have been logging in to view and publish your instagram photos so.
"Just Facebook" has made the web shittier; entire realms of essentially public, often great content hidden behind a login wall.
Thought experiment: if you want to keep control over your data, try something radical: don't hand it to Meta/FB/IG at all
(Full disclosure, I'm neither on FB nor IG)
“You” only exist in numerous empty statements about “privacy”, “respect”, etc. If you are feeling artsy, you can make that hyped NFT thing out of those, and see whether those kilobytes of text really worth anything.
There is a relationship involved because ultimately as a FB user, if I don't like what they are doing, I can ask them to remove my data permanently and they must legally do that. If someone has "scraped" that data (if it is considered PID), without my permission or a legal basis to do so, they are in breach of the GDPR and can have enforcement taken against them.
I think some of these "aggregation" businesses will fall foul of this in Europe but I don't know what will realistically happen if that business does not exist in Europe and breaches the GDPR.
Facebook breaches the GDPR all the time and manages to stay in business. GDPR enforcement is barely existent, and when it does happen, it's insufficient.
I remember that about a decade ago some IT guys have paid for the common Facebook advertiser access, then targeted the ad campaigns using filters in such a way that their intersection only resulted in a single user, or just a couple of them, and were able to match those “anonymized” accounts to real ones. You didn't have to be a genius to do that. Facebook certainly knew it could be used like that. Everyone who made money on that simply agreed to use “anonymization” as a smokescreen. Later, with all the scandals, those routine operations were presented as something exceptional done by a small number of bad actors.