Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
socialfixer.com
socialfixer.com
If I understood that correctly then Facebook has absolutely no say about that piece of software. Because if they had, they could also tell us not to distribute a browser that displays Facebook "badly". Or an operating system that does that. Or blueprints for hardware that does that. They could forbid using such a software in the account terms for each individual user but that would be highly unenforceable (as in as soon as the data gets to my computer, I can and will mangle the bits whichever way I happen to like).
What Facebook can do is to terminate the author's Facebook account: I assume he might have broken some legal terms regarding his own account. However, writing and distributing a piece of software is absolutely out of their limits. It's sad and disappointing to see Facebook use the legal card, a multibillion company threatening a one-man party with costly lawsuits.
But yes, I don't see how they could expect to win in court if they decided to go further than that, but in losing they could ruin his life.
This is completely false.
Facebook is a business. That means they have the legal right to do a lot more than transmit data.
This is such a basic, obvious, fact that I find it difficult that so many people seem to not understand it.
Facebook is not a data transmission service. They're a business. They have a product that they offer. If you want to use that product, they ask that you agree to a set of rules. This is very, very, normal. It is the foundation of society: The ability to make agreements.
Whether or not this software violates the agreement Facebook asks of its users is another question.
But, they absolutely DO have the right to do more than "push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers."
On top of that, there is a reason contracts of adhesion are treated specially. An agreement between a billion dollar corporation and someone that wants to post cat photos isn't a true meeting of the minds. It can only make demands that are sufficiently ordinary* Requiring a website to be browsed in a specific way is rather out of the ordinary.
* As defined by libraryfulls of precedent.
The recipient is free to enlarge the font if they have poor vision, they're free to pass the content it through a text-to-speech engine if they're blind, they're free to strip out all the Q's and J's, they're free to turn down the volume on videos, etc.
Facebook can try to impose their will, but all they'll end up doing is looking like a bunch of empathy-deficient, user-deaf nincompoops.
Chrome makes it really difficult to install a non app store extension, so your normal user will not do it.
On the other hand, google and facebook have a more competitive relationship so maybe there is less to worry about.
Plus there's the whole issue with your app sidestepping reddit's "delete", "remove", "edit", and "private subreddit" functionality. Those things exist for very good reasons and are nothing like what Social Fixer did.
But I'm really curious about what you said regarding sidestepping delete functionality. How do you view search engines indexing and caching of reddit and other sites? Does the Barbara Streisand effect apply? I think that the issue is way more nuanced than no "sidesteppping" allowed.
One of my main motivations for creating unedditreddit was noticing that there was a lot of baloney moderation going on. Cabals of power users can censor quite a bit and it is completely opaque as to who deleted something and for what. I think it could damage the community in the same way digg vote rings used to.
If you can't, please stop releasing idiotic extensions that bring individual human beings more suffering than benefit.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/etd52/lets_have_...
2. There is nothing wrong with charging for something you have built, but you can check out a free version of similar tool here http://uneddit.com/faq.php it also does a good job of raising some points from my line of thinking.
... and Facebook is about freedom... how??
I'm not on Facebook, but just this weekend I needed a Facebook account, so I tried to create a (fake) one.
I entered a perfectly real (French) name (not my own but a real one) and was told it was incorrect. I was directed to this "help" page:
https://www.facebook.com/help/212848065405122
that dares say "Make sure your name meets our name standards".
"Make sure your name meets our name standards"?? What does that even mean? Is Facebook in charge of naming people? What do they know about names?
(And of course I changed the fake name to another one (more fake by French standards) and they accepted it).
How over 1.2 billion people accept that kind of control/arrogance/stupidity is beyond me; but if you expect Facebook to ever care about "freedom" you're delusional, at best.
Because it's too popular and too many of their users have it.
> I asked about both of these cases, as examples, and I was told by the person at Facebook that she was not aware of these apps or Pages, but would check into them.
Yeah, right. I'm sure they've got top men working on it right now. Top men.
Why not just lose the page on Facebook and keep developing Social Fixer? If they threaten legal action, throw the code on Github and stop development on it under your own name. Or put it in an LLC or equivalent and just liquidate if they sue. Why does capitulation seem to be the most appealing option?
My microwave has been broken for 4 weeks and I haven't had time to even replace it. There are only 24 hours in a day.
However, yes, why not open source the code on Github and let others try?
every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users
Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt.
Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, not users. So benefiting users only helps them if it increases their ad revenue. That might happen indirectly if an improvement to the FB user interface gets them more users or keeps existing users on the site longer so they see more ads. But FB already has a billion users, and many of them already seem to spend most of their available free time on FB, so the relative benefit to FB from improving the UI is going to be pretty small.
Finally, I think it's worth mentioning a historical parallel that seems relevant to me. I believe pg mentioned in one of his essays that many companies who made third-party Windows software ended up basically doing market research for Microsoft: MS just took all the popular features from third-party apps and added them to their own apps. Developers of FB apps like SocialFixer seem to me to be in a similar position. Caveat programmer. :-)
[Edit: I see that the "End of the Power User" article that was linked to hits some of these same points.]
I wish the meme that this is the only thing a public company can do would die. It's not true in any way.
As I understand it these companies do in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to make every move be one that benefits their shareholders. Can you please voice your thoughts on how that is not true?
Now, for a public company, lots of investors base their decisions on the GAAP numbers companies are forced to report, so there are incentives to improve those numbers each quarter if you want to boost stock price. But if you communicate a long-term strategy to investors and seem competent enough to pull it off, you're Amazon and your stock price does well anyway, even if you lose money.
There are many things Amazon could do to transfer cash from their customers to their shareholders. Bezos justifies not doing these things because he claims there is more value in long term customer loyalty and trust. Because it's a good faith business decision, I don't see Bezos being ousted or sued by shareholders.
Likewise, it would be easy for Facebook to say "we think there's long term value in delivering the best possible experience to users, and if for some users that means using an extension that's fine with us" - it's a good faith business decision, why would they get ousted or sued where Bezos hasn't?
[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...
It would be easy for them to say it, but first they would have to believe it, and second they would have to believe they could convince investors of it.
it's a good faith business decision, why would they get ousted or sued where Bezos hasn't?
It's not a question of being sued, it's a question of having the stock price go down. Investors don't have to sue to do that; they just have to sell.
You're moving goalposts. That's a completely different statement. Whatever it is they truly believe is totally different than "they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt".
> It's not a question of being sued, it's a question of having the stock price go down. Investors don't have to sue to do that; they just have to sell.
Again, this has nothing to do with fiduciary duty, which was the topic that the original comment was responding to. The fact remains that for-profit companies do not have some kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over them, waiting for them to make a decision that costs stockholders value.
How is this relevant to what I said in the particular statement you were responding to here? I wasn't saying anything in that statement about what FB does believe; all I was saying is that, judging by their behavior, they don't believe that "there's long term value in delivering the best possible experience to users, and if for some users that means using an extension that's fine with us".
As for what I think they do believe, see below.
this has nothing to do with fiduciary duty
Which was exactly my point: saying that FB won't get sued if it lets third-party developers change its UI is not at all the same as saying that FB thinks its stockholders will benefit if it lets third-party developers change its UI.
for-profit companies do not have some kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over them, waiting for them to make a decision that costs stockholders value.
I wasn't saying they do; nothing in what I said requires that a single decision is all it takes. I didn't specify any time frame in which FB has to benefit stockholders or go bankrupt. If you read other posts of mine in this sub-thread, you'll see that the strategy I think FB is following is not one aimed at maximizing short-term return on capital, but that doesn't change the fact that they have to benefit stockholders on some time horizon that is relevant for the stockholders.
Can this meme die too?
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...
Care to elaborate? This is pretty fundamental to almost every single business I have ever heard of...
The "maximize shareholder value" chant is a piece of MBA dogma that, although accepted by many as an immutable law of the universe, is a relatively recent American invention. It's not a law, managers don't go to jail if they don't do it, other countries do it differently, and we used to do it differently as well.
Many make good arguments that it doesn't even work very well. American car companies are a good example. Thomas Murphy, a president of General Motors said, "GM is not in the business of making cars; GM is in the business of making money." Carmakers like Toyota, on the other hand, focused on making cars very well (and making customers happy), and kicked Detroit's ass. (The book Toyota Kata and the TAL episode NUMMI give good intros to why, and why it was the philosophy of American carmakers that prevented them from adapting.)
The problem with focusing on maximizing return on capital is that there are a zillion ways to make those numbers look great in the short term while screwing the company in the long. But hey, by then, everybody has cashed out. Except the suckers, and who cares about them? As an example, see what the MBA dogma did to Simmons Mattress: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons...
I didn't say "maximize shareholder value". I said FB has to make decisions that benefit their stockholders; that's not quite the same thing.
Also, as I pointed out in another subthread, there's a big difference between a company that gets revenue from users directly (like Amazon, the example brought up in that subthread--or like a car company) and a company whose users only generate revenue indirectly, as FB's users do (through ads). The latter kind of company has a much weaker link between benefiting users and benefiting shareholders than the former does. I've outlined in other posts in this thread the strategy I think FB is following, and it's not a strategy that's focused on maximizing their short-term return on capital, but it still makes them act in ways that make at least some subset of their current users dissatisfied.
They have many people who have invested their lives creating this company. They want their payout. If they have to create a bubble to get it, that's what they are going to do. They'll get their cash, you can bet on that.
This is a very short-sighted view, common to many companies. The BEST way to satisfy the stockholders is to create a fantastic product that users love, long-term. Example: Amazon.
Unless your primary interest is creating a short-term bubble and profiting before it pops, which seems to be the mentality of many investors and companies these days.
I don't like that attitude. I'm not looking to get rich quick. I'm looking to do cool and interesting things. And if I get richer in the long term, all the better.
In other words, you agree with me that a publicly traded company must make decisions that benefit the stockholders. You just think that "benefit the stockholders" should be evaluated on a long-term basis, not a short-term basis. But there are two key points that you have not mentioned:
(1) Creating a fantastic product that users love benefits the stockholders to the extent that users are a source of revenue. In Amazon's case, they are, directly; revenue comes from users coming to the site and buying stuff. (And from buying services like Amazon Prime.) In FB's case, users are, at best, an indirect revenue source: more users spending more time on FB means more ad revenue. That's a much weaker link between a good user experience and stockholder benefit.
(2) How long-term the calculation of "stockholder benefit" should be depends on the stockholder's time horizon. If I'm investing in a company as a means of giving myself retirement income in 30 years, obviously I'm interested in the company's long-term health, not the next quarter's returns. But if I'm investing on a shorter time horizon, I'm going to want benefits to show up more quickly.
Half a century ago, most stock ownership was by individuals, so the scenario of someone buying shares in, say, IBM and holding them until retirement was actually common enough to have a significant effect. But now most stock ownership is by mutual funds; my 30-year retirement income doesn't depend on how any single stock does for 30 years, only on how my mutual fund does over that time horizon. Mutual funds trade individual stocks all the time based on short-term performance, so to the companies, it looks like everyone's time horizon is a lot shorter, and they act accordingly.
I'm not looking to get rich quick. I'm looking to do cool and interesting things.
Just to be clear, I am not saying you are wrong at all in having this attitude. I am only commenting on the difference between what you want to do and what Facebook wants to do.
I would buy into this model. Not everyone would, no. But I imagine enough would that it could change their focus. Maybe.
Exactly.
I don't think that's FB's primary interest, exactly: I think FB's primary interest is in capturing an overwhelming market share in social media during the window of opportunity when that market, worldwide, is not yet saturated. But that ends up making them do many of the same things they would do if their primary interest were creating a short-term bubble and then profiting before it pops.
It is interesting to think about today's big tech companies and how they make a majority of their money.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter = advertising. Microsoft = software. Apple = hardware.
Of the three companies who make most of their money from advertising, Twitter seems to be the most ethical, although going public might change that (Facebook is creating profiles of non-Facebook users and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that Google is creating profiles of people who email Gmail users but don't have Google accounts).
Citation needed.
Also, this is a false dichotomy. Nobody is splashing patchouli on their tie-dyes before marching on Menlo Park to demand that Facebook's servers be liberated for the masses.
The only dispute here is whether Facebook's short-term fixation on control is bad for the long-term health of their ecosystem, which is by far the company's largest asset.
But what is FB's "ecosystem"? Is it just their current users? Or is it all their potential users, including those who do not yet use FB at all? I think FB believes that it's the latter, and that it can capture the most value from all those potential users by exerting tight control over the FB user experience.
More precisely, I think FB believes that the costs of exerting tight control over the FB user experience (i.e., the discontent it causes among some fraction of existing users) are far outweighed by the benefits of capturing as many potential users as possible and making them stay within the FB walled garden. To capture new users, the UI doesn't have to be good; it just has to be good enough, and "good enough" to someone who hasn't yet used FB at all is a low bar.
The real test will come when the market saturates and the above reasoning no longer applies. Based on what other companies in similar positions have done in the past (with Microsoft being the #1 example), I don't expect FB to loosen control very much, and to the extent they do, it will be, as I said in another post in this thread, more to allow third party developers to do market research for them than anything else. But we'll see.
The thing that makes the FB legal threats against Social Fixer different, and more troubling than when 3rd party services are shut down, is that Fixer is a "first party" piece of software. It's not helping users syndicate information, or reselling it, or letting anyone else even look at it or use it. I'm just organizing the data that I do have into a format that is more useful to me.
If you accept that there are limits on what we do with our data, where does it stop? Am I allowed to download pictures of my friends and view them in programs that do not display ads? Am I allowed to store and search my own messages, or my friends' messages, in a program that does not notify Facebook or display their ads? If I have an Excel Spreadsheet with friends addresses and phone numbers gleaned from Facebook profiles, have I broken the law?
I can understand Facebook's concern. If it suddenly became common to run programs like this over Facebook's site, then the "user experience" will suddenly get completely out of FB's control. People might not become immune to tracking, but neither would they no longer be manipulated by feed algorithms.
FB has about as much right to control what I do with the messages my friends send to me on Facebook as Google has to control what I do with my email. It doesn't matter if the "messaging protocol" is screen-scraped from the DOM.
The key over-reaching provision is this gem: "You will not do anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of Facebook, such as a denial of service attack or interference with page rendering or other Facebook functionality."[1]
Does changing my browser window size "interfere with page rendering"? What about changing font? Or user styles? Or Ad Blocker? What if I switch browsers? What if that browser renders Facebook poorly or not at all, am I in violation? If I edit the DOM in Firebug or Inspector should I get sued?
Going after people who make tools that help me organize, manage, and control my consumption of the Internet firehose is absolutely wrong. If the Justice system supports Facebook's claim (which very well could happen) then the only alternative is to stop using Facebook, and any other 3rd party that claims not only ownership of the data you disseminate on it, but claims the right to limit your ability to organize and read your own inbox.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms Section 3.11
[Er, oops. Ignore this part. Reading fail] I mean, seriously. FBI? What do they have to do with this?
I think you might've misread "FB"...
Also, this is not a question of rights, so I think that's a red herring here.
Doesn't Comcast have the "right" to decide what content it wants to scan, alter or otherwise mangle on the way to and from the Internet? Well, we know Comcast doesn't have the right to just mangle your Internet. But Facebook represents this weird gray area. The content published on Facebook isn't Facebook's content but "our" content, a wide variety of users' content. Facebook has become something like a social public utility - for good or ill, possibly for ill. Facebook rose by willingly hosting "just about anything" and it's users count on it not for its contents but for posts from their friends.
And yeah, maybe FB just throwing monopolistic weight around 'cause it can is perfectly legal and it might be morally Ok in your world but I consider your point of view evil, twisted and despicable.
The only alternative is to "stop using Facebook."
The Facebook Terms of Service are an agreement that you can simply choose not to accept.
You have every right.
My life is definitely no worse not having a facebook account.
I agree. At first, I got shocked when sites like FB and Twitter would reverse course from a developer friendly environment to a locked down one but now it's just an extension of the same story. FB doesn't care about your business, it cares about it's own business.
Usually, I still follow those agreements - for fear of legal actions or them deleting my accounts. But that doesn't mean that I recognize, accept, or internalize those terms.
And "stop using Facebook" is just not a realistic option for me and many others, because it has become so important for me socially.
The real solution IMHO is to regulate Facebook, and to either have its terms put under some form of democratic control, or to force them to do federation with third party services.
Actually, no. That is one alternative. The other alternative (and the preferred one) would be for the courts to strike down as illegal Facebook's claim that they can limit what you do with your inbox on your computer for your personal use.
the only way to win this game is not playing.
I think this is too broad to be meaningful. I sort of get what they're getting at ("don't post broken Javascript that fucks up the page for everyone"), but it's not what they wrote. What they wrote is laughable.
All I can say is: I hope you prevail in your battle. Content creators have absolutely no right to tell users how to render the HTML they deliver; the HTML is advisory, not mandatory. If you want to control rendering, buy a billboard.
It seems very clear to me that a page that promotes the removal of Facebook ads, via its software, fits squarely in violation of the agreement.
Facebook seems very reasonable in this -- they're giving him a second chance, after blatantly violating the terms of service. And yes, it is blatant. Anyone who thinks that removing Facebook's ads are compliant with the Terms of Service is living in the world they wish exists, and not the one that actually does.
And if they have a problem with that, surely they would have sued AdBlock Plus by now. Right?
Personally, I think they're full of it. I'd at least wait until you get an actual letter from their lawyers before making any decisions.
If they apply this rule to individuals who alter the way the site appears to them, they are opening a can of worms. There is no way they consistently enforce this.
Refusing to do so risks bankruptcy, even if you're in the right, if the deep-pocketed company decides to sue.
Btw, do you still use Facebook?
That is seriously disappointing to see. I understand that, like Google and others, they have a right to filter on behalf of their users (and in some cases may be legally obliged to do so), but they're clearly in a position of power and trust in doing so. If they want to tell a user they can't post a site, and that site is neither illegal, risky or spammy, but simply something they dislike, they shouldn't suggest it is. Abuse of user's trust sucks, especially when the reason is this pathetic.
company formation in the UK costs around £20 and then you're personally immune to this sort of legal bullying
bullyco decides they don't like this and sues smallco.
what's the most the owners (shareholders) of the smallco can lose? their share capital (likely £1).
Problem solved.