https://about.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-messaging-partne...
Disclaimer: I work at Facebook but not on messaging or anything related to this article.
That's like asking permission to read and write your entire phone, just to provide the ability to write and read back a file.
By the way I'm not suggesting that it cant work this way, just that it doesn't. Facebook could have added a specific scope to allow an app to only read back messages related to itself. But that would have required anticipating the use case before these companies implemented it, or at least having better review policies to try to reduce the permissions apps are asking for.
But if the app wants to allow the user to have a back and forth with the other user, then that implies that Facebook Chat needs to have the ability to have app-specific conversation threads. It doesn't have that, though.
Netflix and Spotify requested read permission for DMs. Did they need it? Most assuredly they did not. But requesting read permissions for DMs in general has valid use cases, even if it should be treated sensitively by Facebook's authentication flow.
If there's any problem here, its that Facebook didn't seem to recognize that the apps (Netflix and Spotify) should not have been requesting read privileges at all, and should have revoked their ability to request that permission in a timely manner.
Netflix presumably had the same.
As long as that access is audited to ensure it really was being used only for the intended purpose, I'm fine with that.
Inspected 50 messages all from your test account: fine. Inspected messages from an account after that user contacted customer support citing a problem with messages: fine. Inspected messages from an account after that account fired off alerts to the devops team for causing segfaults: fine. Look at a random account: not fine. Dump messages from many accounts with a script: not fine, and rate limits should stop you after like 100 messages.
(That being said I have no clue why there would be such a thing, and why a user would prefer it? Maybe if Netflix were making set-top boxes)
...it occurs to me that this is in fact how most desktop apps work, and I do prefer it that way.
"E-dentity is a project that asks a participant to login to its Facebook account, then takes his/ her private data from their profile and automatically prints them in an understandable booklet that is handed to the user. This booklet seeks to raise awareness of the hidden data we are sharing which we are often not aware of."
> In order for you to write a message to a Facebook friend from within Spotify, for instance, we needed to give Spotify “write access.” For you to be able to read messages back, we needed Spotify to have “read access.” “Delete access” meant that if you deleted a message from within Spotify, it would also delete from Facebook. No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission.
The allegation that Arstechnica are pretty sever:
> By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes
> in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients).
NYTimes article from 2018 [1] has more details, but it is still unclear if user consent was explicitly obtained for Netflix to read messages. But an interesting quote from Steve Satterfield, Facebook’s director of privacy and public policy:
> With most of the partnerships, Mr. Satterfield said, the F.T.C. agreement did not require the social network to secure users’ consent before sharing data because Facebook considered the partners extensions of itself — service providers that allowed users to interact with their Facebook friends.
I guess the feature at issue here is that you could actually hold a conversation with a Facebook friend inside of Netflix or Spotify which does indeed necessitate the ability to read back messages from the other user.
Whether it was wise to allow that instead of the kind of sharing systems we use today in 2024 is another question.
Same as "Hey, Googler here. Let me tell you how I'm right and why you should think this way."
> Facebook didn't just randomly give Netflix access to everyone's messages.
That's not at all what the title alleges, nor what the article says. The article (1) provides evidence that Facebook monetized user private messages in a data-sharing project with Netflix and (2) cites court documents that litigate Facebook having Jedi-Blue-like monopoly-preserving interaction with Netflix.
It doesn't matter what the Facebook TOS says or how the tech works. Human users never provided informed consent that their private comms would be monetized as well as used for anti-competitive un-American purposes (un-American as in the Sherman Act, altho creating a monopoly is perhaps very American indeed). And Facebook has done that time and time again.
I dunno I’m surprised I’m still surprised these days
And really, as if this makes anything better, wow. Imagine having the feeling of obligation that you have to stick your neck out over this. Just take your over-sized salary and be happy knowing you work for one of the worst companies of our time. (despite my tone, at this point, I honestly say that without judgement, just ... own it.)
On Android, when you give a third party client permission to receive SMS, you don’t expect it to have access to your SMS?
God give me the power of some of y'all's utterly depraved self-serving self-delusion. I at least acknowledge the moral compromise of how my labor accrues in the system instead of burying my god damn head in the sand about it and offering poor incoherent defenses of my employee in public. And I make a third of what I could make at FB, and still probably don't contribute as negatively to the world.
So, it could work exactly as it sounds and you'd have no idea?
---
Although I'm not sure the complaint [1] (linked from articled) actually says that messages were given.
[1]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/compl...
1. "Does Facebook use info from your private messages to target you with ads?
No. Facebook says it might look at your private messages to determine if they violate the company's policies, but it doesn't use that information for ad targeting. Facebook won't use the contents of your private messages to target you with ads on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram either, according to a spokesperson."
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17177842/facebook-advertising-...
If the messages are encrypted "end-to-end" or whatever the chosen marketing buzzwords, so that Facebook cannot read them, then how is FB able to "use" messages for anything. One accustomed to normal communications services might think FB is storing and delivering messages and that's all. But in truth, it's "using" them. (For purposes other than complying with any request from a court of comptent jurisdiction.)
Exactly what they might be doing is of course highly confidential. You are free to take guesses. FB may answer yes or no. Answers cannot be verified, so their value outside of marketing is dubious.
NB. Meta _is_ a third party. It feels as if some people believe they can redefine terms like "end-to-end", "third party", etc. As if they know many readers will happily go along for the ride.
So they are not exactly lying. just being extremely dishonest.
Theyre sooooo dishonest.
The point of e2e is to block any third party to to see your conversations by sniffing packets. Not to stop Meta themselves.
Whether or not Facebook actually implements it this way is a great question.
The point of end to end is to to ensure that only me and the person I'm sending a message to can read it and that none of the systems in-between us can read the plain text of it.
The problem is that this requires users to do things like use one device to authenticate another or restart key exchange with all of their peers. If a user loses their phone, then they will need to redo their security exchange process, which nobody wants to do or even understands. Thus companies often store key material in an insecure way to allow new devices to be silently added to the account.
Plus, even if E2E is well implemented, there are still problems when the endpoint software can be remotely updated to a version that exfiltrates keys or messages.
No... the point of end to end encryption is to be encrypted end to end. Its literally the name. If meta can read your encrypted messages, that is just normal encryption not end to end encryption.
For one, this would remove companies' ability to support lawful interception, which puts them afoul of American law.
If substantiated, such accusations would be among the most damning in the history of technology.
If substantiated? Just search Onavo on HN search - I thought this was widely known for years.
You're putting this up there with IBM in the holocaust?
This is the original NYT article from 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva... "Internal documents show that the social network gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and others far greater access to people’s data than it has disclosed."
Facebook promised E2E at the end of 2023.
To be honest I found I got much better grasp on the whole debacle by just reading the court papers themselves.
Wait, seriously? Like 4-6 months ago? Like, yesterday in terms of how long they haven't had it? Sheesh, a day doesn't go by that I'm not reminded of how happy I am to have dropped FB so long ago.
The netflix deal starts in 2013. Even after 2016, e2e would just mean netflix would get slightly fewer messages.
So I don't see anything that would necessarily indicate FB is lying about e2e.
'granted programmatic access to FB user's inboxes' could mean a lot of things. What privileges? I read the article and still can't tell.
I don't believe that Meta allowed Netflix to read messages that a user sent or received, but that seems to be what they're implying.
> And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."
2018-12-18 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/report-facebook-...
2018-12-18 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva...
Who cares if it was for ads, giving third party companies access should be a huge problem with or without ads.
I always try to convince people I know to ditch Messanger/WA/etc. in favor of Signal, and in many cases I've succeeded.
In sense, things like Apple Mail is a problem for them because it uses full access to GMail account to extract private data over API.
This is a case of possible “collusion” not anti trust
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/collusion#:~:text=Collusion%....
The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."
Very scary what can be done with that information.
There doesn't have to be a backdoor into E2E encryption at all per say, a simple UI property check would give full access to message contents directly in the frontend code. Throw that into a private API and Bob's your uncle, decrypted messages that were transmitted with 100% secure E2E encryption.
I should have been more clear there. Its interesting to me that I often see concerns over whether Facebook has encryption backdoors when the UI can do all the work.
They don't do creepy things on occasion by accident, they do them intentionally by default.
Same old story for the last 20 years. Zuck is creepy AF, everything he touches is creepy AF.
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
just how great of a moat do yt/netflix have? is Disney the only one mounting a decent fight?
Tiktok is probably the biggest competitor to YT. But it had to come in from short form video angle, because the moat of YT in long form video is probably insurmountable. Its fate remains to be seen.
Hacker News is literally constantly claiming that there are too many competitors to Netflix and there needs to be some kind of compulsory licensing to reduce competition. Like there are hundreds of posts on the front page every week to that effect.
Meta never took Watch very seriously, just because it requires literally billions of dollars of investment and they clearly never wanted to spend that much.
They licensed Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the US, clearly saw it didn't move the needle much and they'd need to spend $5 billion+ to get there, and scrapped the whole idea.
I have a Gmail account because everyone needs email these days, and an iPhone with Gmail and banking and little else “online”
Sorry not sorry tech people but I never really asked to be born or have your existence specifically but on me specifically.
You’re society’s problem, not mine. It can deal with it without knowing I exist.
This story seems very overblown. Are we arguing that Facebook should not ever allow any third party app to ask permission to read the user's Facebook DMs? There are valid use cases for this permission, and every case where an app asks for it is not a "privacy violation". Sure, did Netflix or Spotify actually need the ability to read back DMs instead of just write them so that they could send recommendations? No, they shouldn't have needed that. If Facebook's API required that they have read access just to send a message, then that's crap design. But is it nefarious? No.
As long as the user is appropriately briefed on what they are granting (and it appears that they were), and as long as Facebook addresses over-scoped permissions requested by third party apps in a timely manner, then this should not be an issue.
I for one believe that we need to mandate that FAANG companies have these sorts of permission-driven systems to avoid the vendor lock in we're all too commonly stuck with today.
Because these things are needed for competition to thrive and to avoid the big companies from creating moats that prevent us, the startups out there, trying to dethrone them, its all the more important that these companies invest in better UIs that help a user understand the implications of what they are doing, and better review processes to stop bad actors from exploiting users' ignorance on an ongoing basis.
I despise Meta, but come on. Don't throw the baby (interoperability) out with the bathwater (interoperability can enable exploitation).
From Zuck:
Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . . Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.
From Danny Ferrante (FB Data Scientist):
- We developed "kits" that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage (i.e., specific actions that people are performing in the app, rather than just overall app visitation). This is a "man-in-the-middle" approach.
- Our plan is to work with a third party—like GFK, SSI, YouGov, uTest, etc.—who will recruit panelists and distribute the kits under their own branding. We already have proposals from several of these providers.
- The panelist won't see Onavo in the NUX or in the phone settings. They could see Onavo using specialized tools (like Wireshark).