6 ms·

The important thing to note here is that these endpoints were scheduled for retirement at future dates; some in July 2018, some in Dec 2018. Today, with no prio

The important thing to note here is that these endpoints were scheduled for retirement at future dates; some in July 2018, some in Dec 2018. Today, with no prior announcement, these endpoints were abruptly retired. Instagram had previously published a deprecation schedule for these endpoints, and threw that schedule out the window without notifying even Instagram Partners. Edit to add: these endpoints are all related to the profile data and behaviors of non-oauthed users. This is the exact data that ML researchers (myself included) would normally use to analyze social graph behavior, interests, and audiences of Instagram users, and also is exactly the type of processing activity that GDPR restricts by requiring explicit and revocable consent. I see the abrupt retirement of these endpoints as a reaction to the pressure FB is facing as of late. This is a positive for personal privacy and will reduce the potential for abuse, however many types of legitimate and responsible businesses will be affected as well.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hw 9y ago
It looks like Instagram is starting to feel the shockwaves of Facebook's issues. Here I was hoping that Instagram would not go down the same path as Facebook, but I guess that was only a matter of time. As a developer building and maintaining IG apps, it's extremely frustrating not just for me but also my clients who depend on apps we build to manage their Instagram. This also comes on the heels of IG dialing down their API limits from ~5000 per hour to 200 per hour [0], which is ridiculously low. If my app has 20 IG accounts connected to it, each account can only hit 10 per hour. Crippling. [0]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/03/instagram-api-limits/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/03/instagram-api-limits/
- charlesdm 9y ago
  I always thought these rate limits often to be ridiculous. Same applies to Twitter -- they have quite a restrictive API with few opportunities to get the query rate increased. Honestly, do they want people to build scrapers using sets of IP addresses?
  - hw 9y ago
    Rate limits aside, Twitter's APIs are horrendously unreliable. Plenty of timeouts, 500s, and over-capacity errors. Are all these big tech companies spending way too much money on employees and not enough on their actual product, infrastructure and security of such product?
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      > Are all these big tech companies spending way too much money on employees and not enough on their actual product, infrastructure and security of such product? No. They are allocating their money where their business is. The idea of "ecosystems" with 3rd party integrations has been shot down nearly everywhere - all the "big tech companies" have one thing in common: they want people to be locked in their environment as long as possible by any means neccessary and legal, as this is where the tasty ad revenue comes from. A 3rd party Twitter client, for example, cannot show ads (and, so, generate no revenue for Twitter). Therefore, it is perfectly logical that Twitter makes their API as bad as possible for 3rd party clients (e.g. no polls, images in DMs, group DMs).
      - adventured 9y ago
        On the upside, it's blatantly obvious there's a massive opportunity for new platforms with liberal APIs that stick to keeping them open. From my observation in the years since Twitter turned against their ecosystem, I think developers have grown increasingly desperate for this.
        mschuster91 9y ago
        > I think developers have grown increasingly desperate for this. Developers have. But unfortunately, most that the users (aka our customers) want is a place where they can share cat videos, have instant communication with friends and (distant) relatives and, depending on allegiance, Trump or Clinton memes in peace. There are only two things that can not be done on the social networks: gambling and porn. Everything other has been slowly absorbed, especially by Facebook. Also: when you're working 10+ hours a day or more, you most often don't have time to maintain your own blog, much less a full blown web server. There's the reason why Instagram, FB and Twitter are so damn successful: they're essentially frictionless after the sign-up process.
- charlieegan3 9y ago
  The sandbox limits are what bother me. They make the API basically useless for side-project type experiments. I really enjoy Instagram the app to post photos of my travels but as the years go by it's feeling more and more locked down. I'm not really sure what the alternatives are, Flickr?
  - JasonFruit 9y ago
    You could put up a website.
    - charlieegan3 9y ago
      I have! https://photos.charlieegan3.com/ https://photos.charlieegan3.com/ The I just need an app to make it easy to post. Instagram is the best I've found for that.
      - ElFitz 9y ago
        Well, if you have an iOS device, maybe Workflow (the app) can help you with that ?
      - JasonFruit 9y ago
        You're quite a photographer - some really striking work there!
        charlieegan3 9y ago
        Thank you! I get a lot of fun out of it.
    - bobthepanda 9y ago
      Even better, put up a platform. That's how Youtube started.
slowmovintarget 9y ago
Good grief. When did we forget the meaning of "deprecate"? Deprecation and retirement are two drastically different things. Their change log reads "deprecated immediately" which is silly, but should be read as "we don't know what 'deprecated' means and are retiring these APIs immediately."
- bkanber 9y ago
  Yes -- the headline of this post does not accurately convey how extreme this move was. It should have read "abruptly shut down".
- neffy 9y ago
  Deprecated with extreme prejudice, perhaps?
- hw 9y ago
  We've been scrambling to get migrated to the Instagram Graph API, as we have a lot of paying businesses using our app to manage their Instagram presence, and that's now not possible with the 'deprecation' of the API. What's worse is, we can't even migrate to the Instagram Graph API, as Facebook has: 1. Temporarily stopped app reviews, so there's no way for us to go live with our Instagram Permissions on FB Graph API. 2. Blocked access to the Instagram Graph API, even for our development and staging apps. So they expect us to migrate to the new Graph API, but there's no way to do it since we can't even develop and test the API given that access is blocked.
seattle_spring 9y ago
I think it's kind of hilarious that the users of HN are outraged that FB and Instagram are even a thing, while simultaneously outraged that they're taking steps to close potential leaks of the personal information of their users.
- dikaiosune 9y ago
  One might assume that not every user of HN has the same beliefs and motivations as the others.
- patrickaljord 9y ago
  > I think it's kind of hilarious that the users of HN are outraged that FB and Instagram are even a thing, while simultaneously outraged that they're taking steps to close potential leaks of the personal information of their users. Yeah, it's almost as if HN was a plurality of diverse individuals with different needs and opinions and not a single entity with a single opinion on everything. Who would have thought?
  - seattle_spring 9y ago
    Look, this is a cute response and all, but downvotes and upvotes expose the posts that the "group" (in this case, the larger HN community) tend to believe in the most. If 2 posts rise to the top, it suggests to me that there's an overlap in people that are upvoting those 2 posts.
- p5k 9y ago
  I think HN users are outraged at everything.
bobthepanda 9y ago
> This is a positive for personal privacy and will reduce the potential for abuse, however many types of legitimate and responsible businesses will be affected as well. I mean, sure. But every day these are open is another day that something dangerous could happen. Letting people use these APIs would only be responsible if there was a guarantee that everyone using the APIs was acting in good faith and could adequately defend against data breaches at Facebook's level, on their own. The latter was never really true and the former has been blown apart by the CA scandal, so good riddance.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  Can Instagram graph data (on a public account) really have a data breach if the info is publicly available metadata in the first place?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hw 9y ago

It looks like Instagram is starting to feel the shockwaves of Facebook's issues. Here I was hoping that Instagram would not go down the same path as Facebook, but I guess that was only a matter of time. As a developer building and maintaining IG apps, it's extremely frustrating not just for me but also my clients who depend on apps we build to manage their Instagram. This also comes on the heels of IG dialing down their API limits from ~5000 per hour to 200 per hour [0], which is ridiculously low. If my app has 20 IG accounts connected to it, each account can only hit 10 per hour. Crippling. [0]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/03/instagram-api-limits/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/03/instagram-api-limits/

charlesdm 9y ago
I always thought these rate limits often to be ridiculous. Same applies to Twitter -- they have quite a restrictive API with few opportunities to get the query rate increased. Honestly, do they want people to build scrapers using sets of IP addresses?
- hw 9y ago
  Rate limits aside, Twitter's APIs are horrendously unreliable. Plenty of timeouts, 500s, and over-capacity errors. Are all these big tech companies spending way too much money on employees and not enough on their actual product, infrastructure and security of such product?
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > Are all these big tech companies spending way too much money on employees and not enough on their actual product, infrastructure and security of such product? No. They are allocating their money where their business is. The idea of "ecosystems" with 3rd party integrations has been shot down nearly everywhere - all the "big tech companies" have one thing in common: they want people to be locked in their environment as long as possible by any means neccessary and legal, as this is where the tasty ad revenue comes from. A 3rd party Twitter client, for example, cannot show ads (and, so, generate no revenue for Twitter). Therefore, it is perfectly logical that Twitter makes their API as bad as possible for 3rd party clients (e.g. no polls, images in DMs, group DMs).
    - adventured 9y ago
      On the upside, it's blatantly obvious there's a massive opportunity for new platforms with liberal APIs that stick to keeping them open. From my observation in the years since Twitter turned against their ecosystem, I think developers have grown increasingly desperate for this.
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        > I think developers have grown increasingly desperate for this. Developers have. But unfortunately, most that the users (aka our customers) want is a place where they can share cat videos, have instant communication with friends and (distant) relatives and, depending on allegiance, Trump or Clinton memes in peace. There are only two things that can not be done on the social networks: gambling and porn. Everything other has been slowly absorbed, especially by Facebook. Also: when you're working 10+ hours a day or more, you most often don't have time to maintain your own blog, much less a full blown web server. There's the reason why Instagram, FB and Twitter are so damn successful: they're essentially frictionless after the sign-up process.
charlieegan3 9y ago
The sandbox limits are what bother me. They make the API basically useless for side-project type experiments. I really enjoy Instagram the app to post photos of my travels but as the years go by it's feeling more and more locked down. I'm not really sure what the alternatives are, Flickr?
- JasonFruit 9y ago
  You could put up a website.
  - charlieegan3 9y ago
    I have! https://photos.charlieegan3.com/ https://photos.charlieegan3.com/ The I just need an app to make it easy to post. Instagram is the best I've found for that.
    - ElFitz 9y ago
      Well, if you have an iOS device, maybe Workflow (the app) can help you with that ?
    - JasonFruit 9y ago
      You're quite a photographer - some really striking work there!
      - charlieegan3 9y ago
        Thank you! I get a lot of fun out of it.
  - bobthepanda 9y ago
    Even better, put up a platform. That's how Youtube started.

slowmovintarget 9y ago

Good grief. When did we forget the meaning of "deprecate"? Deprecation and retirement are two drastically different things. Their change log reads "deprecated immediately" which is silly, but should be read as "we don't know what 'deprecated' means and are retiring these APIs immediately."

bkanber 9y ago
Yes -- the headline of this post does not accurately convey how extreme this move was. It should have read "abruptly shut down".
neffy 9y ago
Deprecated with extreme prejudice, perhaps?
hw 9y ago
We've been scrambling to get migrated to the Instagram Graph API, as we have a lot of paying businesses using our app to manage their Instagram presence, and that's now not possible with the 'deprecation' of the API. What's worse is, we can't even migrate to the Instagram Graph API, as Facebook has: 1. Temporarily stopped app reviews, so there's no way for us to go live with our Instagram Permissions on FB Graph API. 2. Blocked access to the Instagram Graph API, even for our development and staging apps. So they expect us to migrate to the new Graph API, but there's no way to do it since we can't even develop and test the API given that access is blocked.

seattle_spring 9y ago

I think it's kind of hilarious that the users of HN are outraged that FB and Instagram are even a thing, while simultaneously outraged that they're taking steps to close potential leaks of the personal information of their users.

dikaiosune 9y ago
One might assume that not every user of HN has the same beliefs and motivations as the others.
patrickaljord 9y ago
> I think it's kind of hilarious that the users of HN are outraged that FB and Instagram are even a thing, while simultaneously outraged that they're taking steps to close potential leaks of the personal information of their users. Yeah, it's almost as if HN was a plurality of diverse individuals with different needs and opinions and not a single entity with a single opinion on everything. Who would have thought?
- seattle_spring 9y ago
  Look, this is a cute response and all, but downvotes and upvotes expose the posts that the "group" (in this case, the larger HN community) tend to believe in the most. If 2 posts rise to the top, it suggests to me that there's an overlap in people that are upvoting those 2 posts.
p5k 9y ago
I think HN users are outraged at everything.

bobthepanda 9y ago

> This is a positive for personal privacy and will reduce the potential for abuse, however many types of legitimate and responsible businesses will be affected as well. I mean, sure. But every day these are open is another day that something dangerous could happen. Letting people use these APIs would only be responsible if there was a guarantee that everyone using the APIs was acting in good faith and could adequately defend against data breaches at Facebook's level, on their own. The latter was never really true and the former has been blown apart by the CA scandal, so good riddance.

tedmiston 9y ago
Can Instagram graph data (on a public account) really have a data breach if the info is publicly available metadata in the first place?