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The locking down of the API is done to prevent competition, while being publicly framed as a privacy enhancing scheme. > The Switcharoo Plan turned out to be a

The locking down of the API is done to prevent competition, while being publicly framed as a privacy enhancing scheme. > The Switcharoo Plan turned out to be an idea whereby Facebook executives would deprecate various APIs that its developer partners depended on for fear that those developers would one day compete with Facebook directly, while publicly announcing that the changes were intended to promote privacy. https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/11/8/20953623/facebook-leaked-court-documents-nbc-paranoia-switcharoo https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/11/8/20953623/facebo... Nothing Facebook says publicly should be trusted.

fossuser 7y ago
It can be both - the Reuters link in that verge article is a little better: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebook-executives-planned-switcharoo-on-data-policy-change-court-filings-idUSKBN1XG1QP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebo... FB can be concerned about apps like Pikini that damage their brand and concerned about other companies trying to leverage their data in order to build a competitor. This is a little hard to reason about fairly given the context that the document leak was targeted to make FB look bad by lawyers that had an agenda around a current anti-trust lawsuit from a client that used FB user data to make a bikini photo finding app (not the most ethical bunch). That said, I'd argue there's no reason FB should have to allow API access to a company that directly conflicts with FB's interests, particularly when they're trying to take FB's data to build a replacement (and it looks like it would trigger some sort of contract discussion initially anyway). A lot of companies remove third party API access for a number of reasons and this ability is typically explicitly specified in the terms of the API access agreement. Framing it around a privacy narrative to avoid media backlash around API deprecation is trying to get a handle on PR - I prefer when companies are just direct, but given the risk around bad media coverage I can see why they did it. This entire issue is somewhat distinct from what I was talking about in the Cambridge Analytica case which I think was a bug in the social graph (they were not supposed to be able to crawl as much of it as they could) and this bug was fixed prior (I think years prior?) to the whistleblower from CA releasing details. My understanding was that accessing the data, while technically possible due to the bug, was still in violation of TOS.

fossuser 7y ago

It can be both - the Reuters link in that verge article is a little better: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebook-executives-planned-switcharoo-on-data-policy-change-court-filings-idUSKBN1XG1QP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebo... FB can be concerned about apps like Pikini that damage their brand and concerned about other companies trying to leverage their data in order to build a competitor. This is a little hard to reason about fairly given the context that the document leak was targeted to make FB look bad by lawyers that had an agenda around a current anti-trust lawsuit from a client that used FB user data to make a bikini photo finding app (not the most ethical bunch). That said, I'd argue there's no reason FB should have to allow API access to a company that directly conflicts with FB's interests, particularly when they're trying to take FB's data to build a replacement (and it looks like it would trigger some sort of contract discussion initially anyway). A lot of companies remove third party API access for a number of reasons and this ability is typically explicitly specified in the terms of the API access agreement. Framing it around a privacy narrative to avoid media backlash around API deprecation is trying to get a handle on PR - I prefer when companies are just direct, but given the risk around bad media coverage I can see why they did it. This entire issue is somewhat distinct from what I was talking about in the Cambridge Analytica case which I think was a bug in the social graph (they were not supposed to be able to crawl as much of it as they could) and this bug was fixed prior (I think years prior?) to the whistleblower from CA releasing details. My understanding was that accessing the data, while technically possible due to the bug, was still in violation of TOS.