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It's interesting that this is getting upvotes. I remember on 2016 the overnight shift from companies having open APIs being considered good to it being consider

It's interesting that this is getting upvotes. I remember on 2016 the overnight shift from companies having open APIs being considered good to it being considered "dangerous".

kstrauser 5y ago
This is more about apps being able to link to each other, and I see no downside to that.
- friedman23 5y ago
  It's exactly the same thing.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  There is no downside as long as the apps are not malicious.
dane-pgp 5y ago
In 2016 the concern was about accessing other people's data through open APIs, not accessing your own data in your own apps. Moreover, the problem in 2016 was that a disingenuous company could exploit one user's account, under false pretences, to access their friends' data without any consent at all. Having an open API doesn't mean you can't require authentication and authorization for requests, and having a link to something doesn't mean you have permission to access what's at the other end of that link.
PeterisP 5y ago
"Dangerous" to what? I don't recall a specific relevant discussion, was it about danger to customer lock-in moats or about security or about something else ?
- firexcy 5y ago
  I think Parent was referring to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal [1], where personal data belonging to fb users was collected without consent by a third party through API and then used for political advertising for the 2016 US election. However, I don't think it's a fair comparison. In the CA case, users were deceived into a research and had their social graph being accessed without being told such implication. Here, the user has the control over the generation of links and the resource being linked; the user must manually generate and invoke the link to cross-access resource between apps. [1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...)

It's interesting that this is getting upvotes. I remember on 2016 the overnight shift from companies having open APIs being considered good to it being considered "dangerous".

kstrauser 5y ago

This is more about apps being able to link to each other, and I see no downside to that.

friedman23 5y ago
It's exactly the same thing.
GuB-42 5y ago
There is no downside as long as the apps are not malicious.

dane-pgp 5y ago

In 2016 the concern was about accessing other people's data through open APIs, not accessing your own data in your own apps. Moreover, the problem in 2016 was that a disingenuous company could exploit one user's account, under false pretences, to access their friends' data without any consent at all. Having an open API doesn't mean you can't require authentication and authorization for requests, and having a link to something doesn't mean you have permission to access what's at the other end of that link.

PeterisP 5y ago

"Dangerous" to what? I don't recall a specific relevant discussion, was it about danger to customer lock-in moats or about security or about something else ?

firexcy 5y ago
I think Parent was referring to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal [1], where personal data belonging to fb users was collected without consent by a third party through API and then used for political advertising for the 2016 US election. However, I don't think it's a fair comparison. In the CA case, users were deceived into a research and had their social graph being accessed without being told such implication. Here, the user has the control over the generation of links and the resource being linked; the user must manually generate and invoke the link to cross-access resource between apps. [1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...)