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All of this sounds really familiar. Isn't this exactly what Facebook used to do ~15 years ago with their "friends collector"? I remember that at one time, Face
by xg15 5y ago
All of this sounds really familiar. Isn't this exactly what Facebook used to do ~15 years ago with their "friends collector"?
I remember that at one time, Facebook had a big screen where you could enter your credentials for a variety of email providers. Facebook would then login with your credentials via IMAP, scrape all email addresses in your mailbox and match them with Facebook contacts. (Note that this was an official feature back then).
Apparently people were perfectly fine with giving Facebook all their contacts and also the full credentials to their mailbox.
Who wasn't fine with it though were the mail providers - which in the end led to the creation of OAuth, I believe.
- bin_bash 5y ago> Facebook had a big screen where you could enter your credentials for a variety of email providers Are people just making up wild conspiracy theories about Facebook now? They read your contacts but I’m virtually certain they never released any kind of email scanner like you described. I searched for this and came up with nothing. EDIT: if I’m wrong please show me a source and I’ll happily retract this statement. EDIT 2: I was wrong. See e1g’s comment below that displays this functionality.
- xg15 5y ago"Screen" as in "a page you could pull up in Facebook's UI", not some secret war room in Facebook's HQ. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
- bin_bash 5y agoThere has not been a misunderstanding. Show me a source for this “friends collector” that reads email via IMAP.
- e1g 5y agoThis “howto” from 2011 seems relevant https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1821514&seqNum=4 https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1821514&seq...
- bin_bash 5y agoFair enough! That fits the description well enough and I apologize to xg15. I thought I was well versed in classic Facebook features but I was wrong.
- akerl_ 5y agohttps://www.oreilly.com/library/view/facebook-the-missing/9781449303600/ch04.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/facebook-the-missing/97... Seems the closest to what’s being described. You’d give it your instant messenger credentials and it would log in as you and scoop up your contact lists.
- xg15 5y agoOk, then I have to backpedal. I indeed can't say for sure that they also scraped emails. Sorry for that. However, they did collect your address book - that was an openly advertised feature. My point that Facebook already back then was asking people for passwords for third-party services (not banks though) and apparently they were quite successful with it.
- 3np 5y agoI remember this. LinkedIn did the same (though I don’t recall if it was generic IMAP or specifically gmail and hotmail)
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoWeird company to reflexively defend, honestly.