Facebook Shuts Down “Newsfeed RSS” App for Publicly Exporting Your Facebook Stream | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Shuts Down “Newsfeed RSS” App for Publicly Exporting Your Facebook Stream

insidefacebook.com

The stream of recent news regarding "company XXX shutting down or not approving app YYY" makes me really wonder about our wonderful future of cloud computing, which makes our old Microsoft-owned days seem less and less bleak. At least Microsoft didn't try to "shut down" Windows apps it didn't like.

What will really freak me out is news about Amazon or Google shutting down applications deployed on AWS/AppEngine.

That will freak me out as well, but this latest stream of news isn't really related to cloud computing. Facebook apps don't even live on Facebook's servers; it's more about Facebook's users and data.

It is, albeit indirectly. Parent is contending that cloud-style services are deposing desktop (traditionally MS-dominated) technologies. It's expected that desktop apps be controlled fully by users, while web applications are controlled by the site administrator.

I applaud FB for this one. I do not want somebody exporting my status updates into their RSS feed with no controls whatsoever. I have Twitter if I want a public feed. :)

Why? If I want to read my facebook updates in my feedreader instead of hitting up facebook.com.. how does that affect you? Or your privacy? After all, you friended me.

Because -anyone- can read those updates, and as your friend, I have no idea or control over the fact that you've made my information public.

On the internet, you just have to publish stuff (even private stuff) with discretion. Noone (not even mighty Facebook) can stop someone/'friend' from doing a cut-and-paste of your stuff to a public place. Email has existed many years without any privacy policy, and its largely based on trust and human discretion.

The point is that it's Facebook's walled garden. Their policies are visibility, privacy, and opt-outability and they have every right to boot out an app that can't follow the rules.

The fact that you want to read updates in your feedreader doesn't affect me at all - I friended you/accepted your friend request, so I'm OK with you seeing what I'm up to on FB.

The problem is that in order to do that, what I've done on FB has to be put in an RSS file available somewhere, and if it's available somewhere, there's nothing to stop someone else (who I haven't consented to see my updates) from adding it to their feedreader. So while you (as someone who respects privacy) may create an RSS feed that's not linked to anywhere and has a name that you wouldn't find randomly, FB can't guarantee that you'd do that, and even if you did, can't guarantee that no one would find it somehow.

Put simply, if there's no authentication within the FB ecosystem to see that data (which there wouldn't be, since you can't create an RSS feed that requires a FB login to poll), they can't police the access controls set up by users.

Because that feed and its contents can be posted and shared publicly, while people are unlikely share their Facebook logins publicly.

If Facebook let this stand, soon people would be dumping those feeds into public-facing widgets: "What my friends are doing on Facebook right now."

> people are unlikely share their Facebook logins publicly.

So says you. And yet, people put their logins into random websites every day. Twitter logins especially!

Quote: many RSS feed readers make feed URLs public and indexable

Where can I read more about this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com