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Ehh, sending user data to a third party would be bad, but from my reading of the article it's not sending user data, just anonymous metrics: > Participants agr

Ehh, sending user data to a third party would be bad, but from my reading of the article it's not sending user data, just anonymous metrics: > Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information—specifically, the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups, and pages they were following and not following, both in total and broken down by category. (For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.)

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I don’t think it matters. Writing a plug-in that scrapes content, however trivial or anonymized the author thinks it might be, is cause for concern for a company like Facebook. Likewise, automating API requests is a problem for any platform. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect these platforms to sift through the source code and intentions of every automation tool that violates these policies and sort them into good and evil categories or decide which 3rd-party data collection is allowable.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  And what grounds the company has for suing I ask you? What's next ad networks can sue us for using adblockers (or the people writing the ad blockers)? It's not that he was banned from Facebook, they demanded he remove his extension from the chrome app store and never write a Facebook extension again.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  > Likewise, automating API requests is a problem for any platform. I agree, and it shouldn't be necessary. There should simply be a single 'unfollowAll' endpoint you can hit once for this operation.
- henry700 5y ago
  Automating API requests is what APIs were made for in the first place
- ImPostingOnHN 5y ago
  >Writing a plug-in that scrapes content, however trivial or anonymized the author thinks it might be, is cause for concern for a company like Facebook yes, I think it is this idea of Facebook's which is being criticized a more nuanced approach would be better -- for example, if the issue is indeed a data violation, then the policy could be more nuanced to allow this sort of data collection, and that wouldn't require any additional code review of 3rd party apps but of course, given the recent testimony of Facebook putting engagement before user safety, it seems obvious that the motivating factor was the disengagement the tool helped enable, not any sort of metrics the user agreed to send indeed, TFA even links to this post which lays bare facebook's bogus "privacy" pretext for limiting interactions that promote social good: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/once-again-facebook-using-privacy-sword-kill-independent-innovation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/once-again-facebook-us...

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I don’t think it matters. Writing a plug-in that scrapes content, however trivial or anonymized the author thinks it might be, is cause for concern for a company like Facebook. Likewise, automating API requests is a problem for any platform. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect these platforms to sift through the source code and intentions of every automation tool that violates these policies and sort them into good and evil categories or decide which 3rd-party data collection is allowable.

cycomanic 5y ago
And what grounds the company has for suing I ask you? What's next ad networks can sue us for using adblockers (or the people writing the ad blockers)? It's not that he was banned from Facebook, they demanded he remove his extension from the chrome app store and never write a Facebook extension again.
mullingitover 5y ago
> Likewise, automating API requests is a problem for any platform. I agree, and it shouldn't be necessary. There should simply be a single 'unfollowAll' endpoint you can hit once for this operation.
henry700 5y ago
Automating API requests is what APIs were made for in the first place
ImPostingOnHN 5y ago
>Writing a plug-in that scrapes content, however trivial or anonymized the author thinks it might be, is cause for concern for a company like Facebook yes, I think it is this idea of Facebook's which is being criticized a more nuanced approach would be better -- for example, if the issue is indeed a data violation, then the policy could be more nuanced to allow this sort of data collection, and that wouldn't require any additional code review of 3rd party apps but of course, given the recent testimony of Facebook putting engagement before user safety, it seems obvious that the motivating factor was the disengagement the tool helped enable, not any sort of metrics the user agreed to send indeed, TFA even links to this post which lays bare facebook's bogus "privacy" pretext for limiting interactions that promote social good: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/once-again-facebook-using-privacy-sword-kill-independent-innovation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/once-again-facebook-us...