Additionally, some apps are only monetized through advertisement, and 3rd party apps don't display them. How do you expect the 1st party to stay in business?
I don't align with Meta on a lot of issues, but they should be able to control what apps interact with their platform. Don't like it, don't use it.
Many 3rd party twitter clients have expressed a willingness to display ads if provided an API to do so.
As someone who has lost precious accessibility capabilities because of restrictions on 3rd party clients, I unfortunately have to point out that I don't really have a choice of what platforms I do or don't interact with in a lot of cases. I wouldn't stay at my job for very long if I didn't tolerate Slack's BS, for instance.
Like in this scenario to Facebook it is in theory effectively you. Not the app operating on behalf of you with a limited set of permissions.
I don't follow what you mean by this. The API endpoints that a company provides ought to be secured properly. In practice they might or might not be but obviously they ought to be.
I don't see what that has to do with third party clients though. A third party client is stuck interacting with whatever API the company provides, however secure or insecure it might be.
Have you done much work with authorization? To put it in another way let's say there was a website that said it authorized with Steam. It asked you to put in your steam username and password. Is this secure?
Now let's say that same website instead redirected you back to Steam (properly) and requested authorization on behalf of you. Is this secure?
Now which bucket does this app fall under?
"Is this secure?" fully depends on what the attack vectors you're considering are. Breach of the server's database? Make it an app instead of a website and make requests directly. Malicious code in the client itself? Make it open source. Now it's even more secure than the official client.
But regardless of all of this, how is it any of the service provider' s business what I do with my login details? It's my data on my account. If I use it in an insecure fashion, that's my problem. I am free to post my login details on Twitter for everyone to see, so why can't I put them in a database on some russian dude's basement server?
Unauthorized? Hasn't the user explicitly authorized this layer by installing the app?
Like this is a security problem, straight up. I would hope that you can agree on this and that not securing your API is bad.
I only got a few posts into the thread before Twitter booted me out for not having an account, so maybe there's some context I'm missing, but what kind of "not securing your API" are you talking about? The fact that a thir party, explicitly authorized the the user, was able to make actions on the user's behalf, doesn't make it secure, it makes it functional.
Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
FB gave them data about friends, when it was supposed to only give them data about respondents. Totally different situation.
If I approve an access request for a low level engineer to get a single repo from github, and github lets them access every repo on our orgs account, that's a huge fuckup by github, not me.
This logic really bends over backwards to support FB's and similar business models.
This is of course ripe for abuse, but that's just synonymous for digital advertising in general. I don't consider it any different than me hitting mute on the TV during ad breaks or getting up and going to another room during that break.
If you don't think sites have a fundamental right to push ads to sustain themselves (as I don't), then blocking the request is the best place to do it for performance reasons.
But even if you do believe in that right - the site and advertiser care about a single thing: a human being seeing the ad. Serving the Ad request is not just useless for their purpose, it is actively costing them money, and potentially muddling their data.
I disagree. The site just wants the advertiser's money. The advertiser wants the human to see an ad.
Why not have the browser /dev/null them, and click a few for the heck of it? It would be in the user's interest.
Most people sometimes leave the room while ads play on TV. The advertisers know that and work the percentage of pepole that do that into their pricing, etc.
Also, non-organic click fraud is rampant already (and maybe even the majority of clicks). /dev/null + click would at least route ad income to reputable sites that at least have some human readers to view future ad impressions.
If you found out Netflix actually streams their content from a public endpoint. You would not be legally allowed to take advantage of that.
I disagree with calling the question ridiculous. If we’re involving legality like the poster up thread implied with making this illegal then there needs to be some sort of test or rule put in place on what constitutes illegal activity. We currently don’t have one and whenever a new rule is put in place you quickly find out that there is a significant chunk of people who would find anything you think is obviously wrong to be obviously right and vice versa
Arguably third-party apps that are scrapers are somewhere in between these two in acceptability, but that's a question of "are scrapers morally fine and should they be legally allowed", not a question of whether third party clients are to be allowed at all.
The distinction is about whether you should be able to offer something publicly, taking advantage of public infrastructure to do so, and then make demands about what the public do with that.
Companies want to do the electronic equivalent of putting copyrighted media on a billboard in a public square then claiming you need to sign a contract to look at it and then only through special glasses they provide.
When a platform's primary purpose is communication, certain legal rights should be invoked immediately. In my opinion, one of those rights should be the ability to access those communications by any 3rd party client that doesn't intentionally function maliciously. How "proper 3rd-party client behaviour" is evaluated can be a problem for the industry to solve. They have the $trillions to figure something out. I think they'll survive.
The argument "don't like it, don't use it" isn't a very reasonable argument when, socially speaking, you "have" to use a given service (usually the regionally-omnipresent service) to be included in society. Communication is the foundation of society and of human existence. I miss out on a shocking and honestly depressing amount of social activity because of my boycotting of FB, IG, WhatsApp and other similar services.
I expect that our ability to communicate is carefully protected and treated as something crucially important. There's a reason there are SO MANY commercial services around communication and they are largely the most lucrative, because everyone NEEDS to communicate. People will subject themselves to extremely disadvantageous conditions to enable communication with others. Think about it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, the internet, cellular phone service. These things are fundamental to communication in global society, and a TON of laws are written to govern their employment/usage. Internet communication just happens to still be pretty early in the stages of its effect on humanity, and as usual the legal world is well behind what those effects are. The effects are finally being felt. I believe my feelings on this subject will become more widespread as people realize how deeply they have been exploited by industry (once again).
And, actually, have you tried just not using Facebook for a year? Don't even log in whatsoever? Try it, seriously. I have missed parties, concerts, family gatherings (seriously), news of births, marriages, new homes, major life events (including deaths). I found out my cousin had a kid like 6 months later. I found out a friend died months after it happened. I miss out on the opportunity to partake in things that would have greatly enriched my life. This is the cost to me, personally, by opting out of THE platform that EVERYONE uses. I can't just constantly SMS and call everyone I know asking them every detail of their life, because they exclusively share it all on Facebook. You simply cannot invalidate this very real cost as "yeah well, just use something else".
These huge costs of exclusion are exactly why I believe that I should have the right to access de-facto-standard communication services with software that respects my psychological stability, privacy, accessibility needs (including cognitive), of my choice -- again, as long as that software conforms with proper API usage behaviour. Right now, I'm in a pretty coercive position where I either subject to the objectively-harmful design of the Facebook platform, or face pretty adverse effects to my socialization. That's one reason case where governments enact laws, to protect individuals from these sort of extremely skewed power imbalances.
BTW, I get what you're saying. All these services are tecnically optional. I kinda used to feel that way, until I actually started not using the services that I felt were manipulating and coercing me. Then I realized just how much power these services have over us. I realized these services are optional in just the same way as the telephone and the automobile used to be. Totally still optional. Just mail a letter instead. To me it's like, at this point, as a society, we need to decide whether we care if someone can be seriously cut off from modern society because they don't agree to have advertising shoved in their face, manipulative "algorithmic feeds" selectively shown to them to "drive engagement", and unprecedented surveillance cataloguing their every action 24/7/365.
They're welcome to find a different business model. Why should we sacrifice interoperability for everyone for their sake?
Or require an API key that's tied to a particular account that pays for access.
The problem here is that Meta wants to plug things into the internet and then control who gets to ask for those things. This is not how the internet works, at all. If you don't want third parties accessing your APIs, lock them down.
> unauthorized api requests
The word "unauthorized" has two meanings here:
One is authorized by the user, another is authorized by the vendor.
That should be forbidden too.
An equivalent one is a company not allowing Google employees to use their services for whatever reason. That's fine and acceptable.
Absolutely the best reason why businesses should move to Signal. Imagine if your business gets cut off from Meta products, or if at any moment some of your customers get cut off.
Facebook is an extremely limited and poor platform for representing a business, and it too should be avoided for the same reasons (and for being such a garbage fire in general).
You can't reasonably make the "go elsewhere" argument with the monopoly hold FB has on much social data. We need to choose yo regulate them and others to force interoperability, or at the very least allow comcom explicitly (competitive compatibility).
If FB blocked any requests from Firefox Focus they'd likely be in hot water from government agencies.
Do they have the right to block any other app?
Taking aside advertisement for a moment, what you're suggesting is that the level of control should go as far as which clients are allowed to speak a given protocol. This would be similar to the landline system during the monopoly days, where you were only allowed to connect an officially-approved phone (with a correspondingly high ongoing rental cost) to the copper lines.
From my perspective, there is no 3rd party involved here: there is an API surface which is developed and supported, and there is a client/customer who is interacting with the service through that API. Advertising either needs to be implemented into the API (good luck--see the demise of RSS), or the 1st party needs another business model.
Ad blockers are already a thing. Should they be forbidden?
Now, one could argue that by displaying ads in the first place, using an adblock is circumventing something therefore it isn't okay (basically remove one layer of abstraction from the previous sentence). That's also a fair position, but not mine because of entirely selfish reasons (it's inconvenient to me and non-adblock users are subsidizing my use of those websites).
One could argue that allowing adblock users is a strategic decision in hopes they can spread the use of the website and payoff their "debt" that way. I operate web games and I allow adblock users for that reason.
That's fair - you are knowingly subsidising adblock users. If you don't want to subsidise adblock users, you're free to use a different site.
(That's your basic argument, right? Freedom?)
Why should the first party be serving content to people using third party apps that generate them no revenue? Just like websites are free to block adblock users, app apis should be free to block third party app users.
I currently have an Inbox of multiple messages from family members awaiting me, except I refuse to log into Facebook to view them. The only remaining notification email I have left enabled for Facebook is exactly that -- private messages. This way I can contact the relevant person elsewhere and ask them what the message was. This is the kind of "bending over backwards" I have to do to avoid the surveillance-capitalism crap I'm coerced towards by these platforms that can do essentially whatever they want AND demand exactly how we are _allowed_ to interact with them. Why can't I use an unofficial Facebook Messenger client and read the <100 bytes of communication my family member wanted to send me? Ahh yes I have to agree to a hundred-page ToS and subject myself to ads and privacy-invading user tracking to see those few bytes. This is fine.
It there was fraud invoved, one party may get damage/compensation.. But forcing someone to provide service is just not right.
(With the exception of monopolies of course. Let's regulate them.)
I can't come up with a good justification why a private company on the Internet cannot dictate how you interact with them. Facebook isn't infrastructure.
We should push for MORE of the above, not less. We should push for laws that HELP people use the things they have, instead of locking them out of their own property. If Facebook doesn't like people trying to access their own content, Facebook shouldn't have built a business on everyone else's content. Nobody forced them to do that.
I make no particular comment, here, on whether we should be defending that business model.
Additionally, phones are only monetized through leasing, and 3rd party phones aren’t leased. How do you expect the 1st party to stay in business?
I don’t align with AT&T on a lot of issues, but they should be able to control which phones connect to their network. Don’t like it, don’t use it.
Here is a different way to look at what is going on lately in the short history of the internetowrked computer. To me, there is no legitimate "business". Meta cannot charge IG users a fee. They will not pay. If they would pay, then why not charge them. Instead Meta exploits IG visitors by spying on them. Advertisers will pay. Third parties will be interested in the data Meta collects. What Meta is doing with FB, IG or WhatsApp is not legit "business" IMHO, because, IMO, a business generally produces something of value that people pay for. Generally, Meta does not do that.
Newspapers sold advertising, but people were willing to pay for newspapers. Because newpapers produced something of value. They employed people to produce a product that people paid for: journalism.
Meta does not employ people to produce something of value that people will pay for. The content on these apps comes from the people who use them, and from journalists emplyed by newspapers, but not Meta. Meta make people the product, access to and data on which they sell to paying customers. Websites and apps are not "products". In this "business" the people who use them, their behaviour and the details of their lives, are the product.
A kid's lemonade stand looks more legit as "business" to me than a "tech" company producing so-called "products" that are given away for free, as bait. These are not the product that customers pay for, that no one likes to talk about.
Billboards owners sell advertising. They own or lease real estate with high visibility to traffic. It is difficult to avoid billboards because we generally use the same paths to travel in physical space. As such, billboards are regulated. Not everyone with land adjacent to high traffic routes can erect billboards. See, e.g., Highway Beautification Act of 1965.
Perhaps Meta is like a billboard company in a world that has yet to regulate billboards. IMO, Meta is far more of a hazard to life than a billboard is to the beauty of a highway. Meta does more than display advertising to people who use their websites and apps. Meta's "business model" is a threatening the stability of society. If it is allowed to continue, it should be heavily regulated.
Imagine someone telling you, "If you don't like the billboards, don't look at them." Or "If you don't like the billboards, don't use the highway." It is not so simple. Now imagine Meta tells you, "If you don;t look at the billboards, you cannot use the highway".
Meta is obscuring the true potential of the internet. It has given the internet a bad rap. Meta is not the internet nor its potential to improve people's lives anymore than billboards are the scenery. If left unregulated, billboards can obscure the scenery and eventually they can destroy it.
Billboards are regulated because they’re inevitable. You’ll see them just walking around. On the other hand, no one is forcing you to use Facebook nor Instagram.
I don't like it and I don't use it, but unfortunately it's more complicated than that because of the network effect.