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0 pointssnowwrestler5y ago0 comments

I mean, at one time you could build apps on Facebook that basically downloaded all of a user's data when they used it. The Obama campaign built an app that you could use to find your Facebook friends who hadn't been contacted by the campaign yet, so you could call them on the campaign's behalf. I heard of other political operations that built a "wish [famous person] happy birthday" app solely so they could grow their database.

Eventually Facebook closed all that access down and basically deprecated the concept of FB as an app platform entirely. That is a way more dramatic change than what Apple is doing to Facebook here.

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miki1232115y ago

This is a perfect example of the tradeoffs between openness and privacy.

If you give dangerous tools to users, you will have a few cool things and lots of tech-illiterate users screwed over.

Privacy advocates often preach solutions like the fediverse, without understanding that the fediverse is a privacy disaster for the tech illiterate. Cambridge Analytica wouldn't even be preventable on Mastodon, and it would have far worse consequences. Nevermind admins snooping on messages of their users, for i.e. romantic or financial reasons and poor people having to pay for their own services instead of seeing ads.

Yes, Facebook is horrible, but all currently known cures are worse than the disease.

jacobush5y ago

It’s like the Drake equation - you will have to multiply with the risk that FB goes truly rogue. If they do, they have ALL dirt.

WoohDang5y ago

what's your opinion of Scuttlebutt and if poor, do you see any progress towards alternatives on the horizon?

bredren5y ago

I had an early fb app that let you track shows from a band you had been to and display this on your wall.

I was able to download tons of user data. I think the guide was to only take what you need and you were not supposed to store it longer than 48 hours.

But that was def an honor system thing and I’d be surprised if people were purging data back then. It was (still is?) the Wild West with consumer tracking.

webkike5y ago

Wasn’t this closed in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

shajznnckfke5y ago

The scandal in Cambridge Analytica was roughly that they were able do this stuff after FB made it officially against the rules.

gowld5y ago

"able" is bearing a lot of load.

FB never built technical countermeasures, merely asked app devs to pinky-swear not to siphon user data.

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asdfasgasdgasdg5y ago

This type of FB app was gone long before the CA scandal broke. There were some really cool ones available, but plainly not worth the tradeoff in retrospect.

input_sh5y ago

A person associated with Cambridge Analytica used a researcher access and shared the data with the company (which he wasn't supposed to do). Researchers have (had?) more access than developers do.

minhazm5y ago

Not true, they didn't have any special research access. There was an app called "This is your digital life" that was just a personality quiz that they used to scrape data. At this point facebook would let you access data about a users friends in detail when the user would authorize it (via these apps).

Also facebook killed this long before the Cambridge Analytics scandal broke. It also enabled some really cool features like their graph search where you could run queries like "people in X town that like football", but it also let you run very creepy queries to stalk people, which is why it got canned.

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