Facebook Timeline Remover: Works, but Malicious
barracudanetworks.com
barracudanetworks.com
The unnecessary cost and additional process (e.g. requiring screenshots) are all reasons LikeBuster (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/likebuster-fo...) is available on Mozilla's Firefox add-on site but needs to be manually installed (http://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster) for Chrome. Knowing that the extra b.s. doesn't actually accomplish anything for user security really grinds my gears as someone who would like to make it as easy as possible for people to download my extension.
It isn't for doing security screening, there's no way $5 would be worth the time of someone professional enough to look at your code for 20 or 30 minutes, God forbid if it's longer than that.
There is a way to make app review "for safety" scale at this price point: be ultra restrictive about what apps are allowed to do, and review them not as much for security as for compliance to API guidelines.
•Cough•.
In this case, this is a browser extension, and the goal is to edit the page: there are tons of such extensions; while a couple of these had obvious "talks to the wrong server" problems, various of them were correctly only editing pages on Facebook, but were doing so maliciously.
The price point we are talking about here is simply so low: $5 is only going to purchase 40 minutes of a minimum wage employee... we aren't even talking a junior supervisor at a fast food restaurant, we are talking about the entry-level "try to get the orders in the computer right" position.
At these prices, even just reading the description and figuring out "oh, this should only be able to edit pages on this one website" is already going to be expensive. Figuring out "should only be using DOM to remove nodes and not add script elements" is impossible.
Chrome does this on some level via host permissions (http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/manifest.html#permiss...) and a content security policy (http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/contentSecurityPolicy...) and is setting a more strict default security as manifest v2 gets phased in.
edit: On perusal, I see it's not even $5 per add-on or publish, it's a one-time fee to register as a developer.
Disclosure: barracuda pay me to do stuff
A | B
C | D
The actual construction of a timeline I haven't heard any of my friends really complain too much about.
Those who've recently divorced don't really want to look at their own timeline and see a bunch of stuff with their spouse 2 years ago. Those who have grown in maturity or changed religious/political views don't really want some stupid thing they said 5 years ago to be a mere one screen-length from the top of the page.
I personally am irritated with the "curated" experience. It ties in with sorting wall posts to "top stories" instead of by date. I know there was a discussion last month I want to get back to, but FB has decided it doesn't show up on my timeline or my friend's timeline, because it only gives a selection of posts from that month.
Against my better judgement I've been on Facebook for years and outside of the occasional look back on someone profile to see when their kid was born, got a new job, etc I never leave the newsfeed view.
But, agreed on the horrible reading experience though, the only thing worse is
A | C
B | D
style that academic papers still use.
Edit: the above style is worse when reading on a screen of any sort, on paper fine, but screen inevitably leads to scrolling around and doing quite a bit of context switching
I mean, you're not reading a book-- it's more likely you'll read a status update and then expand and read the comments directly below it rather than reading a large number of statuses in a row.
The news feed is still in a single-column format because you might actually read quite a few in a row of those.
At any rate these extensions seem like an exercise in futility as Facebook will surely completely remove the non-timeline functionality sooner or later.
"the first 3 plugins work well and do remove the Timeline after the user logins to Facebook. There is no suspicious activity."
that the final conclusion is:
"In conclusion, we would like to warn all Facebook users to not try any Facebook Timeline Remover apps or plugins."
Why take issue with an unsuspicious app that works as advertised? It's a little unfair to the people who built these apps.
Aside from the general privacy concern presented by every single FB / smartphone app which has access to some level of your personal data, it seems like this is being too specific in its claim that "Timeline removal apps are scams."
#include <closed_sw_boilerplate_warning.h>
Knowing how much of the average user's life is detailed on Facebook, it's one thing that deserves extra scrutiny when it comes to allowing randoms to have access to it.
Yesterday, there was a post on Hacker News about the Wolfram Alpha Facebook Analytics [1] with very little concern about privacy (3 comments out of 104 mention privacy). My issue with this post is that it needlessly targets Timeline removal apps when it just seems to be making a general statement about being careful when installing any app.
[1]http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/08/wolframalpha-personal...
Lazy developer or spyware?
Most users I know who dislike Timeline do so because they don't want you to see their timeline, they had no problem viewing other people's timelines.
Among (many) other things, it allows you to switch your timeline to show items in a single column. (Unfortunately, it will not disable timeline completely since the author feels the technique for doing that (pretending to be IE7 since timeline doesn't support it) is fragile.)
They've got a feature that removes timeline (from your view, other people will still see your profile as a timeline) that works fairly well. Also, I can change colors, so now my Facebook experience is Zenburned. I really can't recommend these guys enough, and it's too bad Barracuda didn't study them.