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This is not old news and the examples you provided are not proof that they were doing it prior. It is perfectly possible to crawl pages to get titles and FavIc
by dudus 9y ago
This is not old news and the examples you provided are not proof that they were doing it prior.
It is perfectly possible to crawl pages to get titles and FavIcons client side or using a web service that don't necessarily keep a log of these requests.
Same thing for censoring links. You can have a static list of disallowed domains and do all the filtering client side or have a web service that given a link returns true or false if it should be censored. It doesn't necessarily means it needs to be logged, kept, associated with a user or manually analyzed.
What we're seeing now is that facebook is actively looking at whole messages, that's a step up from the previous instances. It's still unclear if this is all automated or if some are manually reviewed. It's also unclear if these are associated with a user, or anonymized when analyzing them. Are these logged? How long are they kept for? Facebook should be more clear on how this all works. Otherwise we're just left guessing.
- tristanj 9y agoI have much better links. Here's one from 2012: Facebook scans chats and posts for criminal activity https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-criminal-activity/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for... The program probably started a year earlier than that, since in 2011, Facebook announced they were using a tool called PhotoDNA to scan every image shared for underage content. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-safety/meet-the-safety-team/248332788520844/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-safety/meet-the-safe... Regarding how Facebook crawls links shared in Messenger, there's this medium story I saw on HN a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875419 In that medium story, the Facebook devs claim accessing privately shared messenger links is a publicly documented behavior, citing the Facebook Crawler Docs. They quote: "The first time someone shares a link, the Facebook crawler will scrape the HTML at that URL to gather, cache and display info about the content on Facebook like a title, description, and thumbnail image." https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/craw... I would update my original comment if I could, however the edit period has passed.