2 ms·
This appears to be an API to integrate Facebook chrome and functionality into a mobile OS UI; > “An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access t
by zaroth 8y ago
This appears to be an API to integrate Facebook chrome and functionality into a mobile OS UI;
> “An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.
...
> Usher Lieberman, a BlackBerry spokesman, said in a statement that the company used Facebook data only to give its own customers access to their Facebook networks and messages. Mr. Lieberman said that the company “did not collect or mine the Facebook data of our customers,” adding that “BlackBerry has always been in the business of protecting, not monetizing, customer data.”
> Microsoft entered a partnership with Facebook in 2008 that allowed Microsoft-powered devices to do things like add contacts and friends and receive notifications, according to a spokesman. He added that the data was stored locally on the phone and was not synced to Microsoft’s servers.”
The story recounts how the BlackBerry Facebook view could... not surprisingly in any way... render your Facebook friends’ information which you are supposed to be able to access.
But the NYT apparently thinks this is nefarious in some way.
> “The Hub also requested — and received — data that Facebook’s policy appears to prohibit. Since 2015, Facebook has said that apps can request only the names of friends using the same app. But the BlackBerry app had access to all of the reporter’s Facebook friends and, for most of them, returned information such as user ID, birthday, work and education history and whether they were currently online.
> The BlackBerry device was also able to retrieve identifying information for nearly 295,000 Facebook users. Most of them were second-degree Facebook friends of the reporter, or friends of friends.”
...How the hell else do you suppose the UI was rendering your Facebook Feed?! Maybe they thought BlackBerry used magic unicorns to render the Facebook UI components on their Hub view.
If only there was a term to describe when media sites write a non-story to stir up fake controversy by smearing a popular target...
- cryptoz 8y agoYour entire post boils down to, "just trust the billionaires!" No, we won't. They are liars and cheaters, the lot of them, and we aren't going to trust them any more. They said in court "we didn't do that" so then you post it here that everything is okay, but I don't trust it. Not one bit. None of us do, or should, trust what those companies say. Mark Zuckerberg is a liar. The whole concept of, "We're doing the right thing with your data, just trust us" is ridiculous. He already called you and I and every single one of us a literal "dumb fuck" for trusting Facebook with the data. Mark Zuckerberg would be banned from HN for vile language if he were here. Clearly, we are not meant to trust him or any of them at their word. They lie and they know it. NO, zaroth, I do not believe a single part of any of the quotes you wrote. I don't believe them. We also know that Zuckerberg was intentionally misleading or lying in recent EU appearances. > How else was the UI rendering your Facebook Feed?! This kind of incredulous, "we must have Facebook on our phones, what else were we supposed to do?!" is silly. Facebook and these partners clearly overstepped their bounds. > But the NYT apparently thinks this is nefarious in some way. What? You then quoted the NYT listing a series of facts. Nowhere does the NYT say anything like nefarious or anything like that. You are making things up. > ... fake controversy ... Did you just call this whole thing fake? Like, the controversy itself? It's not fake..... This HN thread's existence proves the controversy is real. This stuff is not fake.
- zaroth 8y agoI get it that you are channeling Stallman and that you think your device is spying on you. And by all means lets fight that fight and write those stories. But that’s not the story that the NYT has published here. I’m incredulous that programmers and hackers would feign surprise that a UI rendering a Facebook feed would necessarily use an API which returned a data structure with... your fucking Facebook feed. If device manufactures or OS developers (Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, Google, etc.) are exfiltrating personal data off of your device — and BTW my Facebook feed would be the least of my concerns in that case — prove it, and the point your pitchforks at them.
- detaro 8y agoThe article cites Facebook as the source for partners having that data on their servers. Is that evidence enough?
- zaroth 8y agoWhich partners? In what form? For what purpose? Are we talking about cache data like Amazon Silk? Encrypted backups? It doesn’t help the discussion to conflate user agents with third party applications. But user agents do sometimes push our private data to their own servers — like Chrome’s Omnibar — and if and where that is happening, and how that data is used, absolutely should be disclosed by the device manufacturer.
- detaro 8y agoIf the bit about "on their servers" didn't refer to device partners I would have expected Facebooks response[1] to the article to call that out as misleading, but it didn't. I hope too we'll see details somewhere to get a better judgement of how bad/not bad it is. [1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/why-we-disagree-with-the-nyt/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/why-we-disagree-with-th...
- zaroth 8y ago