12 ms·

Meta now lets EU users unlink their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram accounts

483 points by pg_1234 3y ago

cnity 3y ago
This must have been a painful engineering effort that I bet absolutely consumed the backlogs of at least tens of teams. Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture and services that presumably many many years of code sits on top of.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  Could be that they have not been entirely consolidated yet as they all previously were individual products. From a user perspective is appears like the users have been relatively loosely coupled.
  - cnity 3y ago
    True, in which case it might be even more painful: imagine ending a year long epic to consolidate user account logic only to have to reverse it.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    Instagram might have been a separate product, but Messenger was just Facebook’s built in chat feature.
- ffpip 3y ago
  > presumably many many years of code sits on top of. Not so many, since they tried to link all 3 only few years ago https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253472/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-letter-privacy-encrypted-messaging https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253472/mark-zuckerberg-f...
  - LinAGKar 3y ago
    That may be the case for Instagram, which was developed separately and then acquired, and which still uses separate accounts that AFAIK can be created without a Facebook account, although they can be connected to one. Messenger though has always just been the chat function on Facebook, which can nowadays also be used via a dedicated website/app if you like. It doesn't even have separate account infrastructure on the backend, unlike Instagram. Looks like they're getting around that by essentially creating a second Facebook account, with social media features disabled.
    - wrboyce 3y ago
      Many years ago when I disabled my Facebook account I noticed that Messenger continued to work, so there was definitely some level of separation.
      - smashed 3y ago
        But can you really disable a Facebook account?
        TheRoque 3y ago
        Disabling merely means just making yourself invisible, and the Facebook profile unusable, but all the data stays there. If you delete it though, your messenger account is no more.
        eastbound 3y ago
        Even for EU citizen with GDPR?
        Sharlin 3y ago
        Disabling is what it says on the tin, giving you the chance to re-enable the account later. Nothing GDPR-violating with that. As long as you are also given an option to actually nuke all your PII.
- loceng 3y ago
  I guess part of karmic consequence of "move fast and break things" motto - especially when it comes to not caring to develop or have forethought on security-safety concerns for what such a system, a digital version of The Facebook, could have on society; Harvard was planning to launch a digital version of their print version of The Facebook - and part of Mark's history he's quoted as saying, along with lying to the ConnectU twins he was hired to develop, that he didn't understand why Harvard was taking so long to get it going - that he could do it way faster; the externalized costs/harms are practically incalculable - all for that sweet sweet cheap-shallow-manipulative advertising revenue.
- stavros 3y ago
  > Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture If their business assumptions are "users will never have a choice about how much we track them", they deserve what they got.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    "They" being Meta, yes. "They" being engineers, eh? It's a tough sell to justify greenfield dev effort when there's a BigCorp paved road laid out for you.
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      > "They" being engineers, eh? If you’re a volunteer Roman legionnaire don’t be surprised when you are ordered to march on Gaul.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        Fair! I took the original question in the vein of "Who is to blame?" I feel like IC latitude isn't usually sufficient to say "Do we really want to require the identity our platform is based around?"
        ryandrake 3y ago
        ICs (at least the people good enough to pass a Meta interview) have a choice of where they work though. I've quit a job where I had an ethical issue with what the company was doing with the code I wrote. When Company X does something naughty, the individual developers need to at least share blame with the managers making the decisions. After all, whose fingers are typing the code in and hitting submit?
        someotherperson 3y ago
        I haven't worked for a company as large as Meta but we encounter these issues on smaller projects too: should the unique identifier for an account be their email? Or a UUID? If your business only uses SSO, should you use the [Google/Microsoft/whatever] ID as the identifier for that user on your database? I personally wouldn't think that Facebook engineers would have had their hand forced on something like this.
- XghTk 3y ago
  Those are all acquired services, so the opposite is likely: they were linked together through the number of ugly hacks.
  - dewey 3y ago
    That was a very long time ago though, so I could imagine that there's not much left from the original code base after it was moved onto Meta's infrastructure.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > That was a very long time ago though, so I could imagine that there's not much left from the original code base after it was moved onto Meta's infrastructure. They only linked them a few years ago, in anticipation of an antitrust battle. They are now unliking them because they have lost/ceded that fight.
      - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
        Could you elaborate on that?
    - sitzkrieg 3y ago
      yea sf companies are definitely known to cleanup their hacks to go to market at any cost w a barely working thing later
      - dylan604 3y ago
        isn't that done naturally when they rewrite it the trendy language of the day?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mcmcmc 3y ago
  It’ll save them a good chunk of time when they eventually get split off like Baby Bells
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  And it’s good for consumers and Facebook can afford to do it, I wish the UK was still in the EU and I would be extremely happy about unlinking Instagram from Facebook just to avoid their notifications for it that pop up on Instagram never mind the ease of spying this creates.
  - _7c0c 3y ago
    Isn't the UK GDPR basically the same as the EU GDPR?
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      Different sized teeth.
      - davidwritesbugs 3y ago
        Same size teeth, different inclination to bite.
- waynesonfire 3y ago
  Probably not, if it was painful they would have done it everywhere. Since now they have to maintain two configurations, linked and unlinked. It also highlights how much revenue is tied to this bundling of service since it's probably very expensive to maintain this dual configuration.
- amelius 3y ago
  And I bet management asked: what can be so difficult about decoupling the accounts? Just set coupling=false somewhere or something, okay?
- summerlight 3y ago
  At least they have a choice to unlink accounts, which probably makes the overall DMA compliance much easier. For Google, it's just been an engineering nightmare, cross-cutting across the entire stack :D
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
  Sounds like a them problem not an us problem. Nothing they couldn’t afford „tens of teams”. It’s a nice moment living in the EU, knowing that common sense policies like GDPR and anti-trust can be enacted and enforced.
- jarjoura 3y ago
  The challenge isn't unlinking accounts in the database, that's just a simple copy command. The challenge is in all the metadata that is used for account A (Facebook), and account B (IG) that can no longer share any downstream metadata. So when you have to split the two apart, it's likely a hard legal requirement that there's no way account A can know anything about account B anymore. This means, countless metrics and logs and whatever has to be thrown away. So I imagine, there's lots of auditing of systems and every single property that is stored somewhere was scrutinized in long meetings. Less an engineering burden than a policy and legal burden.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    A burden that is proportional to the amount of personal data the corporation collects sounds excellent.
    - closeparen 3y ago
      The compliance burden is proportional to the complexity of the architecture. You could have vast quantities of highly invasive personal data written to a monolithic RDBMS, and it would be simple matter of following foreign key relationships. Or you could have a very minimal set of entities & transactions actually collected from the customer via the edge, but propagated through so many microservices, queues, logs, warehouses, pipelines, and derived tables that it's infeasible to comprehensively trace all the scraps. The latter is more typical of a consumer internet company AFAICT.
  - dmix 3y ago
    I have a feeling a lot of HN devs overvalue the value of old data... probably because they have adblockers and dont know what ads they are targeted for. Youtube's algorithm seems to forget my interests after a year (or less), I often have totally new feeds than I did 6 months ago. When I got back into music production and also watched some airplane crash videos my entire feed became music + "dark stories" related content bringing non-stop music gear + engineering related education sites. Almost all ads I see on my phone via Google properties are related to the current thing I care about. Beyond biographic details which are 99% disconnected from my old individual instagram/fb data (FB can just buy some correlation between email/phone/IP from my credit card or private postage company or whatever) they probably only profile IRL off the last 1-2yrs of your browsing behaviour in most cases. The classic privacy invading ads usecase is a woman who is pregnant suddenly getting ads for kid stuff before other people they know they are pregnant. They probably won't be getting those ads a year later. At most they are now labelled as potential mother in some macro profile, but for day-to-day targetting it's all about the current thing she's looking at online. I'm not defending this stuff and macro details matter for privacy at the nation-state and higher level, but my general point is that it's a living machine, constantly adapting with a short timeframe of data to maximize utility, not one that cares much about what you googled a few yrs ago 99% of the time.
- rodgerd 3y ago
  > This must have been a painful engineering effort It would be less painful if it were a universal option, and they didn't have to test with a bunch of geo-linked options.
- j45 3y ago
  Could the limited EU accessibility to this engineering feat be broadened by users identifying as living out of Europe?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  Given that the people on these teams are reaping stock from the efforts of mining personal data for people over decades I have a very strong “not sorry” feeling about any sort of negative anything that employees of Meta might experience. I would even go so far as to say, fuck these people, I have no empathy for you. You decided to be a part of the problem, and sucks to suck
AlexandrB 3y ago
It's constantly frustrating to read about European users getting cool new features to help manage their digital life that the rest of the world doesn't get. The expected cost in lost ad revenue per user must be pretty significant to justify the complexity of keeping this stuff limited to Europe.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  It's just politics. Ask your legislators to give you the cool stuff as well.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Eh, can't be that excited about anything involving the data hole that is Meta Platforms products, even if they make some EU concessions. Maybe when we get that EU-only iOS sideloading support I can finally be more smug about it.
- cnity 3y ago
  FWIW, we also get non-stop cookie permission banners and often just straight-up denied access to certain services that don't want to have to jump through the hoops.
  - zht 3y ago
    that's propagated to the rest of the world lol
  - patrickmcnamara 3y ago
    The only things I've been denied as an EU citizen on the web so far have been US local news websites. And tbh I assume that is just one company that has a blanken policy of sorts. So I don't think "often" is accurate here.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      That's just the secret program to get Europeans to stop making fun of us.
superjan 3y ago
If that’s what it takes to get them compliant with EU’s GDPR, shouldn’t the same apply to youtube and gmail? Or the rest of google services, for that matter?
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  I got a popup today after opening google play, which let me decide if I want these services linked together or not.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    This is the information they provided: About linked services Google currently shares data across its services for the purposes described in its Privacy Policy at g.co/privacypolicy, and depending on the previous choices that you've made about your privacy settings, such as Web and App Activity, YouTube History and personalised ads. As of 6 March 2024, new laws in Europe will require Google to get your consent to link certain services if you want them to continue to share data with each other and other Google services as they do today. For example, linked Google services might work together to help personalise your content and ads, depending on your settings. Services you can choose to link You can choose which services to link from this list of Google services: Search YouTube Google Play Ad services Chrome Google Shopping Google Maps All other Google services that are not listed here are always linked and therefore able to share data with each other for the purposes described in our Privacy Policy, depending on your privacy settings What data is used Personal data that is collected about your interaction with Google services can be shared across any linked services. This includes: Searches Videos you watch on YouTube Apps you install from Google Play Associated info, such as your device info All the other types of info described in our Privacy Policy How Google uses this data Google uses data shared across linked services for all the purposes that are set out in our privacy policy: Providing personalised services, including content and ads, depending on your privacy settings Maintaining and improving our services Developing new services Understanding how people use our services to ensure and improve the performance of our services Performing other purposes described in our privacy policy What won’t be affected The choices you make about linked services will not change: The purposes for which Google uses data Your privacy settings, such as choices you have made about personalising Google services Aspects of a service that don’t involve sharing data The following can always be shared across Google services: Info that’s associated with your Google Account and not specific to any service, such as your profile picture or the info used to verify your identity Content or info you’ve chosen to make publicly available on Google services, such as comments you’ve posted on YouTube Your data from all Google services, regardless of whether they are linked, may still be shared across all services for certain purposes, like preventing fraud, protecting against spam and abuse, and complying with the law. Your data may also be shared across Google services to effectively help you complete tasks when two services are offered together. For example, if you make a purchase on Google Play, Play and Google Payments will share related info so that you can complete your purchase. Things you should know Other settings let you control whether you see personalised content or ads. Linking Google services is not about sharing your data with third-party services. If services aren’t linked, some features that involve sharing data across Google services will be limited. For example, if you have personalisation on for a service in your privacy settings but don’t link that service, you won’t get personalisation based on data from other services, but can still get personalisation based on data from that service. You won’t be signed out of any Google services if you choose not to link services. How to manage linked services You can manage your choices, including selecting other Google services to keep linked or withdrawing your consent, in your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/linked-services. You can also manage your other settings, like Web & App Activity, YouTube History and personalised ads, in your Google Account.
josephcsible 3y ago
It annoys me every time a company makes a long-requested change, but only for EU users. Since the technical work required for it had to be done anyway, it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone.
- baliex 3y ago
  Not just malice, profit too
- judge2020 3y ago
  > it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone. Only if you consider malice ~= profit.
  - guerrilla 3y ago
    Why would you not? What is malice if not intentionally harming people out of greed? Is it only malice if the intention is explicitly and strictly sadistic?
    - LightBug1 3y ago
      Some woeful 'giving the benefit of the doubt' in some of these comments. No disrespect.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  isn't this the "free market" that many in the US brag about?
  - altairTF 3y ago
    Kinda, but this is also how the free market dies—happens little by little. A change here, a law there that helps the people, oops, now the law makes it harder for competition to get in, and so on and so forth.
    - 3y ago
pfdietz 3y ago
I already unlinked myself from all those.
- plussed_reader 3y ago
  How?
  - dewey 3y ago
    Probably by not using them in the first place.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Bingo!
      - moffkalast 3y ago
        Galaxy brain move.
  - xyst 3y ago
    Not using them, or deleting accounts
    - plussed_reader 3y ago
      Neither of those are unhooking the services from each other.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        > I already unlinked myself from all those.
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  Me too, but unfortunately the Quest 2 and Quest 3 are really good if you like to use VR. So now somewhere I have a Facebook account that does nothing except report on what VR games I am playing. Hopefully no one is friending me! If so, sorry for the spam of useless information.
anticensor 3y ago
This unlink would just be a formality, as they would still be able to correlate those users anyway.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  That's a great way to route 4% of their global earnings into the EU's bank account.
xyst 3y ago
What about “threads” accounts? I believe these are directly tied to IG accounts.
Euphorbium 3y ago
Google also let me unlink youtube and other services. Probably forced by EU.
- bandergirl 3y ago
  Source? What do you mean by “unlinking”? There is no YouTube login, are you saying it will spin off a new gmail/google account?
  - copirate 3y ago
    YouTube also asked me if I wanted to unlink my YouTube account from other Google services. I can change this setting at https://myactivity.google.com/linked-services https://myactivity.google.com/linked-services and it says: > Google currently shares data across its services for the purposes described in its Privacy Policy at g.co/privacypolicy and depending on the previous choices you’ve made about your privacy settings, such as Web & App Activity, YouTube History, and Personalized ads > As of March 6, 2024, new laws in Europe will require Google to get your consent to link certain services if you want them to continue to share data with each other and other Google services as they do today. For example, linked Google services might work together to help personalize your content and ads, depending on your settings. The whole text is here: https://pastebin.com/iSmeJ5WB https://pastebin.com/iSmeJ5WB
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      This is going to be interesting if I do it to my account. I remember having to somehow contact support back in the day when google made me merge my youtube account and my gmail email, since they had the same name and email address. Lots of strange buggy behaviour.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Same with google with youtube. Good. People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it. But I welcome this kind of restrictions.
- sofixa 3y ago
  The EU doesn't make innovation hard, it just puts rules in place to ensure that your "innovation" cannot be abusing users' data. Nothing is stopping any of the thousands of EU companies innovating in all sorts of fields.
  - dataking 3y ago
    While I agree that there is lots of innovation and talent in the EU, I think there is also an "innovation gap" with other developed economies. Here's a take from the Economist [0] but you can find similar articles from the Financial Times, Blomberg, and other similar outlets. [0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-free-rider-continent https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...
    - danielscrubs 3y ago
      It is a hit piece here for example they compare a whole group to a subset: “western Europeans were a quarter poorer than Americans in 1990, and remain a quarter poorer today. ” And when they say they do less research Id argue the research is done in universities for the benefit of mankind instead of something corporations do. Latest example is Stable Diffusion developed by the CompVis group at LMU Munich. But if you ask the common man he will say it is something by OpenAI. There are really no good institutions left, only good people.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it. If you consider the GDPR or DMA limitations on "innovation", then I don't want you innovating.
- 3y ago
gevz 3y ago
Is there a criteria to be qualified as a EU user? I assume there must be more than just geo-ip location. What will happen if I pretend I moved to EU for the sake of decoupling all Facebook accounts.
- calmoo 3y ago
  These days most accounts are geolocated by your phone number, in my experience anyway.
  - gevz 3y ago
    It seems that Facebook proper does not require you to have a phone number. I just tried signing up and there is an option to use email.
- reincoder 3y ago
  I work for IPinfo. I often see IP geolocation data being used for compliance purposes, so I will share some insights. This question relates to algorithms and the definition Facebook has set up for "EU User". What parameters have Facebook's legal team considered adequate to label an account belonging to an EU user? It is difficult to say. They will probably look into multiple factors like phone number location and GPS-backed data to identify the true location of an EU user. Now, the interesting part is that if you use a VPN quite frequently, you will notice that IP geolocation data is treated as a universal truth on cookieless interactions. Facebook will likely have a significant amount of data beyond IP geolocation data to infer the location information of their user. But they are likely not going to do that as they launch this new feature. So, it all comes down to how seriously Facebook wants or is required to identify an EU user.
- rconti 3y ago
  Same question. EU IP address? For how long? EU citizenship? But EU citizens shouldn't have to send their passport info to Facebook in order to unlink accounts.
black_puppydog 3y ago
I'll hold out on whatsapp until I can unlink "send this text to that number" from "here's a copy of my entire phone book"
- Timshel 3y ago
  Not to encourage you to use whatsapp but on android an empty work profile is nice for this use case.
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    I just use OpenContacts from F-Droid and leave my phone contacts empty. OpenContacts has a extra button to open a contact in Whatsapp.
    - yepguy 3y ago
      GrapheneOS has a feature called contact scopes[1] that lets you pick which contacts apps have access to. It's great! [1]: https://grapheneos.org/usage#contact-scopes https://grapheneos.org/usage#contact-scopes
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > "here's a copy of my entire phone book" I don't know how or why that was ever legal in the first place, and why Facebook and LinkedIn haven't been sued to death over it. The contacts-matching system is how Facebook and LinkedIn'ss ultra-creepy "People you might know" list works, and I have no-doubt this will have led to things like journalists' confidential sources being discovered and harmful outing of closeted people, and worse.
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    I’ve never uploaded my contacts to FB but it still recommends people I worked with or met 20 years ago because they uploaded theirs. Extra evil because you can be triangulated from the uploads of many naive people, so essentially they win in the end.
ryandrake 3y ago
This is great, now do Oculus. I shouldn't need to have an "account" to use my O.G. Rift offline. It's like needing an account to use a monitor.
- Handprint4469 3y ago
  > It's like needing an account to use a monitor Given the current enshittification trends, I would not be surprised if in the next few years Samsung, Acer, LG, et al decide that a subscription model for monitors is exactly what they need to pump those share prices up.
  - wepple 3y ago
    IIRC I required a Samsung account to use my TV. Won’t buy anything from them again.
    - tacocataco 3y ago
      Definitely don't get samsungs refrigerators. I've heard similar things about their other appliances but I've only ever owned the fridge.
- colordrops 3y ago
  I tried using John Carmack's instructions to unlock my old Oculus Go, which involved your Facebook account for some reason, and got banned from my account twice.
- str3wer 3y ago
  https://github.com/basti564/Oculess https://github.com/basti564/Oculess
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  They moved it away from facebook accounts to more generic ones at least. The EU isn't going to force them (with this law) because they don't have more than 10% of EU residents using their headsets. (based on a quick search, they're at about half the threshold if you count worldwide sales)
pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
I’ll believe it when each service is operated by an independent company.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
My facebook sits abandoned for the better part of a decade and I never got messenger or instagram. Since they're all under the same umbrella I question the actual benefit. Seems like it would be placebo more than anything.
exabrial 3y ago
What would have been better is if the three things were just split up into separate businesses. Monopolies are annoying. But I'll take progress over perfection, glad to see the move.
diebeforei485 3y ago
Can they do YouTube next?
- ozyschmozy 3y ago
  They already did, the news of Google doing the same on hn last week iirc.
1oooqooq 3y ago
because it's all linked in WhatsApp, which is the only thing anybody still actively uses anyway
gerash 3y ago
can someone ELI5 what unlinking a "Facebook account" from a "Messenger account" accomplishes? IMHO we should strive to remove moats around digital services so new competitor can pop up and provide competing services in a short amount of time but somehow EU thinks creating busy-work for the engineers of incumbents is the right approach. I already despise the "accept cookies" noise on all websites and don't tell me "Oh, it's bad compliance, blah blah". If so, then write a new more useful law instead.
its_ethan 3y ago
If I used a VPN to place myself in Europe, could I unlink my accounts?
jscheel 3y ago
Their ham-fisted linking of facebook and instagram accounts has been an absolute nightmare for those of us that use their messenger apis. It has never fully worked correctly, and has led to more lost dev time than I care to count. I can't even begin to imagine how much worse this is going to make it.
Havoc 3y ago
Guessing UK isn’t getting this. Hashtag brexit benefit sigh
thegrizzlyking 3y ago
This should be the default for all mergers above a certain threshold number of users and part of FTC consent decree.
Zuiii 3y ago
So how does a non-eu user get this privilege? Is using VPN in EU enough?
barnabyjones 3y ago
Shoutout to Max Schrems and Noyb, even if they weren't apparently involved in this decision. That organization seems to be the main driving force behind serious GDPR enforcement by submitting regular legal complaints, the data authorities occasionally take up a case on their own but usually seem content to stick to small violations. It really shows that having laws on the books isn't enough, and even public awareness is not very helpful, what really matters is having lawyers pushing hard for enforcement.
boppo1 3y ago
If I reside in the US but am a dual US-EU citizen, does this apply to me?
vodkapump 3y ago
> Users can continue using Messenger with their Facebook account or create a new account completely independent of Facebook So you can't unlink your facebook and messenger, just create a new messenger account without a facebook account. That's sad.
Suppafly 3y ago
Can't you already sign up for all of the services independently? I know I can login to instagram with my fb login, but I still had to 'create' the account the first time I did. I could have just created a standalone account if I hadn't had an fb account to start with. Messenger is essentially facebook chat pushed into a separate client, which I had thought they were talking about reincorporating back into the main client, I don't really see why should allow a separate login for that.

483 points by pg_1234 3y ago

This must have been a painful engineering effort that I bet absolutely consumed the backlogs of at least tens of teams. Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture and services that presumably many many years of code sits on top of.

madsbuch 3y ago
Could be that they have not been entirely consolidated yet as they all previously were individual products. From a user perspective is appears like the users have been relatively loosely coupled.
- cnity 3y ago
  True, in which case it might be even more painful: imagine ending a year long epic to consolidate user account logic only to have to reverse it.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  Instagram might have been a separate product, but Messenger was just Facebook’s built in chat feature.
ffpip 3y ago
> presumably many many years of code sits on top of. Not so many, since they tried to link all 3 only few years ago https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253472/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-letter-privacy-encrypted-messaging https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253472/mark-zuckerberg-f...
- LinAGKar 3y ago
  That may be the case for Instagram, which was developed separately and then acquired, and which still uses separate accounts that AFAIK can be created without a Facebook account, although they can be connected to one. Messenger though has always just been the chat function on Facebook, which can nowadays also be used via a dedicated website/app if you like. It doesn't even have separate account infrastructure on the backend, unlike Instagram. Looks like they're getting around that by essentially creating a second Facebook account, with social media features disabled.
  - wrboyce 3y ago
    Many years ago when I disabled my Facebook account I noticed that Messenger continued to work, so there was definitely some level of separation.
    - smashed 3y ago
      But can you really disable a Facebook account?
      - TheRoque 3y ago
        Disabling merely means just making yourself invisible, and the Facebook profile unusable, but all the data stays there. If you delete it though, your messenger account is no more.
        eastbound 3y ago
        Even for EU citizen with GDPR?
        Sharlin 3y ago
        Disabling is what it says on the tin, giving you the chance to re-enable the account later. Nothing GDPR-violating with that. As long as you are also given an option to actually nuke all your PII.
loceng 3y ago
I guess part of karmic consequence of "move fast and break things" motto - especially when it comes to not caring to develop or have forethought on security-safety concerns for what such a system, a digital version of The Facebook, could have on society; Harvard was planning to launch a digital version of their print version of The Facebook - and part of Mark's history he's quoted as saying, along with lying to the ConnectU twins he was hired to develop, that he didn't understand why Harvard was taking so long to get it going - that he could do it way faster; the externalized costs/harms are practically incalculable - all for that sweet sweet cheap-shallow-manipulative advertising revenue.
stavros 3y ago
> Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture If their business assumptions are "users will never have a choice about how much we track them", they deserve what they got.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  "They" being Meta, yes. "They" being engineers, eh? It's a tough sell to justify greenfield dev effort when there's a BigCorp paved road laid out for you.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    > "They" being engineers, eh? If you’re a volunteer Roman legionnaire don’t be surprised when you are ordered to march on Gaul.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Fair! I took the original question in the vein of "Who is to blame?" I feel like IC latitude isn't usually sufficient to say "Do we really want to require the identity our platform is based around?"
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        ICs (at least the people good enough to pass a Meta interview) have a choice of where they work though. I've quit a job where I had an ethical issue with what the company was doing with the code I wrote. When Company X does something naughty, the individual developers need to at least share blame with the managers making the decisions. After all, whose fingers are typing the code in and hitting submit?
      - someotherperson 3y ago
        I haven't worked for a company as large as Meta but we encounter these issues on smaller projects too: should the unique identifier for an account be their email? Or a UUID? If your business only uses SSO, should you use the [Google/Microsoft/whatever] ID as the identifier for that user on your database? I personally wouldn't think that Facebook engineers would have had their hand forced on something like this.
XghTk 3y ago
Those are all acquired services, so the opposite is likely: they were linked together through the number of ugly hacks.
- dewey 3y ago
  That was a very long time ago though, so I could imagine that there's not much left from the original code base after it was moved onto Meta's infrastructure.
  - chimeracoder 3y ago
    > That was a very long time ago though, so I could imagine that there's not much left from the original code base after it was moved onto Meta's infrastructure. They only linked them a few years ago, in anticipation of an antitrust battle. They are now unliking them because they have lost/ceded that fight.
    - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
      Could you elaborate on that?
  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    yea sf companies are definitely known to cleanup their hacks to go to market at any cost w a barely working thing later
    - dylan604 3y ago
      isn't that done naturally when they rewrite it the trendy language of the day?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mcmcmc 3y ago
It’ll save them a good chunk of time when they eventually get split off like Baby Bells
andy_ppp 3y ago
And it’s good for consumers and Facebook can afford to do it, I wish the UK was still in the EU and I would be extremely happy about unlinking Instagram from Facebook just to avoid their notifications for it that pop up on Instagram never mind the ease of spying this creates.
- _7c0c 3y ago
  Isn't the UK GDPR basically the same as the EU GDPR?
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Different sized teeth.
    - davidwritesbugs 3y ago
      Same size teeth, different inclination to bite.
waynesonfire 3y ago
Probably not, if it was painful they would have done it everywhere. Since now they have to maintain two configurations, linked and unlinked. It also highlights how much revenue is tied to this bundling of service since it's probably very expensive to maintain this dual configuration.
amelius 3y ago
And I bet management asked: what can be so difficult about decoupling the accounts? Just set coupling=false somewhere or something, okay?
summerlight 3y ago
At least they have a choice to unlink accounts, which probably makes the overall DMA compliance much easier. For Google, it's just been an engineering nightmare, cross-cutting across the entire stack :D
scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
Sounds like a them problem not an us problem. Nothing they couldn’t afford „tens of teams”. It’s a nice moment living in the EU, knowing that common sense policies like GDPR and anti-trust can be enacted and enforced.
jarjoura 3y ago
The challenge isn't unlinking accounts in the database, that's just a simple copy command. The challenge is in all the metadata that is used for account A (Facebook), and account B (IG) that can no longer share any downstream metadata. So when you have to split the two apart, it's likely a hard legal requirement that there's no way account A can know anything about account B anymore. This means, countless metrics and logs and whatever has to be thrown away. So I imagine, there's lots of auditing of systems and every single property that is stored somewhere was scrutinized in long meetings. Less an engineering burden than a policy and legal burden.
- klabb3 3y ago
  A burden that is proportional to the amount of personal data the corporation collects sounds excellent.
  - closeparen 3y ago
    The compliance burden is proportional to the complexity of the architecture. You could have vast quantities of highly invasive personal data written to a monolithic RDBMS, and it would be simple matter of following foreign key relationships. Or you could have a very minimal set of entities & transactions actually collected from the customer via the edge, but propagated through so many microservices, queues, logs, warehouses, pipelines, and derived tables that it's infeasible to comprehensively trace all the scraps. The latter is more typical of a consumer internet company AFAICT.
- dmix 3y ago
  I have a feeling a lot of HN devs overvalue the value of old data... probably because they have adblockers and dont know what ads they are targeted for. Youtube's algorithm seems to forget my interests after a year (or less), I often have totally new feeds than I did 6 months ago. When I got back into music production and also watched some airplane crash videos my entire feed became music + "dark stories" related content bringing non-stop music gear + engineering related education sites. Almost all ads I see on my phone via Google properties are related to the current thing I care about. Beyond biographic details which are 99% disconnected from my old individual instagram/fb data (FB can just buy some correlation between email/phone/IP from my credit card or private postage company or whatever) they probably only profile IRL off the last 1-2yrs of your browsing behaviour in most cases. The classic privacy invading ads usecase is a woman who is pregnant suddenly getting ads for kid stuff before other people they know they are pregnant. They probably won't be getting those ads a year later. At most they are now labelled as potential mother in some macro profile, but for day-to-day targetting it's all about the current thing she's looking at online. I'm not defending this stuff and macro details matter for privacy at the nation-state and higher level, but my general point is that it's a living machine, constantly adapting with a short timeframe of data to maximize utility, not one that cares much about what you googled a few yrs ago 99% of the time.
rodgerd 3y ago
> This must have been a painful engineering effort It would be less painful if it were a universal option, and they didn't have to test with a bunch of geo-linked options.
j45 3y ago
Could the limited EU accessibility to this engineering feat be broadened by users identifying as living out of Europe?
SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
Given that the people on these teams are reaping stock from the efforts of mining personal data for people over decades I have a very strong “not sorry” feeling about any sort of negative anything that employees of Meta might experience. I would even go so far as to say, fuck these people, I have no empathy for you. You decided to be a part of the problem, and sucks to suck

AlexandrB 3y ago

It's constantly frustrating to read about European users getting cool new features to help manage their digital life that the rest of the world doesn't get. The expected cost in lost ad revenue per user must be pretty significant to justify the complexity of keeping this stuff limited to Europe.

wizzwizz4 3y ago
It's just politics. Ask your legislators to give you the cool stuff as well.
Hamuko 3y ago
Eh, can't be that excited about anything involving the data hole that is Meta Platforms products, even if they make some EU concessions. Maybe when we get that EU-only iOS sideloading support I can finally be more smug about it.
cnity 3y ago
FWIW, we also get non-stop cookie permission banners and often just straight-up denied access to certain services that don't want to have to jump through the hoops.
- zht 3y ago
  that's propagated to the rest of the world lol
- patrickmcnamara 3y ago
  The only things I've been denied as an EU citizen on the web so far have been US local news websites. And tbh I assume that is just one company that has a blanken policy of sorts. So I don't think "often" is accurate here.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    That's just the secret program to get Europeans to stop making fun of us.

superjan 3y ago

If that’s what it takes to get them compliant with EU’s GDPR, shouldn’t the same apply to youtube and gmail? Or the rest of google services, for that matter?

SushiHippie 3y ago
I got a popup today after opening google play, which let me decide if I want these services linked together or not.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  This is the information they provided: About linked services Google currently shares data across its services for the purposes described in its Privacy Policy at g.co/privacypolicy, and depending on the previous choices that you've made about your privacy settings, such as Web and App Activity, YouTube History and personalised ads. As of 6 March 2024, new laws in Europe will require Google to get your consent to link certain services if you want them to continue to share data with each other and other Google services as they do today. For example, linked Google services might work together to help personalise your content and ads, depending on your settings. Services you can choose to link You can choose which services to link from this list of Google services: Search YouTube Google Play Ad services Chrome Google Shopping Google Maps All other Google services that are not listed here are always linked and therefore able to share data with each other for the purposes described in our Privacy Policy, depending on your privacy settings What data is used Personal data that is collected about your interaction with Google services can be shared across any linked services. This includes: Searches Videos you watch on YouTube Apps you install from Google Play Associated info, such as your device info All the other types of info described in our Privacy Policy How Google uses this data Google uses data shared across linked services for all the purposes that are set out in our privacy policy: Providing personalised services, including content and ads, depending on your privacy settings Maintaining and improving our services Developing new services Understanding how people use our services to ensure and improve the performance of our services Performing other purposes described in our privacy policy What won’t be affected The choices you make about linked services will not change: The purposes for which Google uses data Your privacy settings, such as choices you have made about personalising Google services Aspects of a service that don’t involve sharing data The following can always be shared across Google services: Info that’s associated with your Google Account and not specific to any service, such as your profile picture or the info used to verify your identity Content or info you’ve chosen to make publicly available on Google services, such as comments you’ve posted on YouTube Your data from all Google services, regardless of whether they are linked, may still be shared across all services for certain purposes, like preventing fraud, protecting against spam and abuse, and complying with the law. Your data may also be shared across Google services to effectively help you complete tasks when two services are offered together. For example, if you make a purchase on Google Play, Play and Google Payments will share related info so that you can complete your purchase. Things you should know Other settings let you control whether you see personalised content or ads. Linking Google services is not about sharing your data with third-party services. If services aren’t linked, some features that involve sharing data across Google services will be limited. For example, if you have personalisation on for a service in your privacy settings but don’t link that service, you won’t get personalisation based on data from other services, but can still get personalisation based on data from that service. You won’t be signed out of any Google services if you choose not to link services. How to manage linked services You can manage your choices, including selecting other Google services to keep linked or withdrawing your consent, in your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/linked-services. You can also manage your other settings, like Web & App Activity, YouTube History and personalised ads, in your Google Account.

josephcsible 3y ago

It annoys me every time a company makes a long-requested change, but only for EU users. Since the technical work required for it had to be done anyway, it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone.

baliex 3y ago
Not just malice, profit too
judge2020 3y ago
> it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone. Only if you consider malice ~= profit.
- guerrilla 3y ago
  Why would you not? What is malice if not intentionally harming people out of greed? Is it only malice if the intention is explicitly and strictly sadistic?
  - LightBug1 3y ago
    Some woeful 'giving the benefit of the doubt' in some of these comments. No disrespect.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
isn't this the "free market" that many in the US brag about?
- altairTF 3y ago
  Kinda, but this is also how the free market dies—happens little by little. A change here, a law there that helps the people, oops, now the law makes it harder for competition to get in, and so on and so forth.
  - 3y ago

pfdietz 3y ago

I already unlinked myself from all those.

plussed_reader 3y ago
How?
- dewey 3y ago
  Probably by not using them in the first place.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Bingo!
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Galaxy brain move.
- xyst 3y ago
  Not using them, or deleting accounts
  - plussed_reader 3y ago
    Neither of those are unhooking the services from each other.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      > I already unlinked myself from all those.
georgeecollins 3y ago
Me too, but unfortunately the Quest 2 and Quest 3 are really good if you like to use VR. So now somewhere I have a Facebook account that does nothing except report on what VR games I am playing. Hopefully no one is friending me! If so, sorry for the spam of useless information.

anticensor 3y ago

This unlink would just be a formality, as they would still be able to correlate those users anyway.

pgeorgi 3y ago
That's a great way to route 4% of their global earnings into the EU's bank account.

xyst 3y ago

What about “threads” accounts? I believe these are directly tied to IG accounts.

Euphorbium 3y ago

Google also let me unlink youtube and other services. Probably forced by EU.

bandergirl 3y ago
Source? What do you mean by “unlinking”? There is no YouTube login, are you saying it will spin off a new gmail/google account?
- copirate 3y ago
  YouTube also asked me if I wanted to unlink my YouTube account from other Google services. I can change this setting at https://myactivity.google.com/linked-services https://myactivity.google.com/linked-services and it says: > Google currently shares data across its services for the purposes described in its Privacy Policy at g.co/privacypolicy and depending on the previous choices you’ve made about your privacy settings, such as Web & App Activity, YouTube History, and Personalized ads > As of March 6, 2024, new laws in Europe will require Google to get your consent to link certain services if you want them to continue to share data with each other and other Google services as they do today. For example, linked Google services might work together to help personalize your content and ads, depending on your settings. The whole text is here: https://pastebin.com/iSmeJ5WB https://pastebin.com/iSmeJ5WB
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    This is going to be interesting if I do it to my account. I remember having to somehow contact support back in the day when google made me merge my youtube account and my gmail email, since they had the same name and email address. Lots of strange buggy behaviour.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

Same with google with youtube. Good. People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it. But I welcome this kind of restrictions.

sofixa 3y ago
The EU doesn't make innovation hard, it just puts rules in place to ensure that your "innovation" cannot be abusing users' data. Nothing is stopping any of the thousands of EU companies innovating in all sorts of fields.
- dataking 3y ago
  While I agree that there is lots of innovation and talent in the EU, I think there is also an "innovation gap" with other developed economies. Here's a take from the Economist [0] but you can find similar articles from the Financial Times, Blomberg, and other similar outlets. [0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-free-rider-continent https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...
  - danielscrubs 3y ago
    It is a hit piece here for example they compare a whole group to a subset: “western Europeans were a quarter poorer than Americans in 1990, and remain a quarter poorer today. ” And when they say they do less research Id argue the research is done in universities for the benefit of mankind instead of something corporations do. Latest example is Stable Diffusion developed by the CompVis group at LMU Munich. But if you ask the common man he will say it is something by OpenAI. There are really no good institutions left, only good people.
smoldesu 3y ago
> People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it. If you consider the GDPR or DMA limitations on "innovation", then I don't want you innovating.
3y ago

gevz 3y ago

Is there a criteria to be qualified as a EU user? I assume there must be more than just geo-ip location. What will happen if I pretend I moved to EU for the sake of decoupling all Facebook accounts.

calmoo 3y ago
These days most accounts are geolocated by your phone number, in my experience anyway.
- gevz 3y ago
  It seems that Facebook proper does not require you to have a phone number. I just tried signing up and there is an option to use email.
reincoder 3y ago
I work for IPinfo. I often see IP geolocation data being used for compliance purposes, so I will share some insights. This question relates to algorithms and the definition Facebook has set up for "EU User". What parameters have Facebook's legal team considered adequate to label an account belonging to an EU user? It is difficult to say. They will probably look into multiple factors like phone number location and GPS-backed data to identify the true location of an EU user. Now, the interesting part is that if you use a VPN quite frequently, you will notice that IP geolocation data is treated as a universal truth on cookieless interactions. Facebook will likely have a significant amount of data beyond IP geolocation data to infer the location information of their user. But they are likely not going to do that as they launch this new feature. So, it all comes down to how seriously Facebook wants or is required to identify an EU user.
rconti 3y ago
Same question. EU IP address? For how long? EU citizenship? But EU citizens shouldn't have to send their passport info to Facebook in order to unlink accounts.

black_puppydog 3y ago

I'll hold out on whatsapp until I can unlink "send this text to that number" from "here's a copy of my entire phone book"

Timshel 3y ago
Not to encourage you to use whatsapp but on android an empty work profile is nice for this use case.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  I just use OpenContacts from F-Droid and leave my phone contacts empty. OpenContacts has a extra button to open a contact in Whatsapp.
  - yepguy 3y ago
    GrapheneOS has a feature called contact scopes[1] that lets you pick which contacts apps have access to. It's great! [1]: https://grapheneos.org/usage#contact-scopes https://grapheneos.org/usage#contact-scopes
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> "here's a copy of my entire phone book" I don't know how or why that was ever legal in the first place, and why Facebook and LinkedIn haven't been sued to death over it. The contacts-matching system is how Facebook and LinkedIn'ss ultra-creepy "People you might know" list works, and I have no-doubt this will have led to things like journalists' confidential sources being discovered and harmful outing of closeted people, and worse.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  I’ve never uploaded my contacts to FB but it still recommends people I worked with or met 20 years ago because they uploaded theirs. Extra evil because you can be triangulated from the uploads of many naive people, so essentially they win in the end.

ryandrake 3y ago

This is great, now do Oculus. I shouldn't need to have an "account" to use my O.G. Rift offline. It's like needing an account to use a monitor.

Handprint4469 3y ago
> It's like needing an account to use a monitor Given the current enshittification trends, I would not be surprised if in the next few years Samsung, Acer, LG, et al decide that a subscription model for monitors is exactly what they need to pump those share prices up.
- wepple 3y ago
  IIRC I required a Samsung account to use my TV. Won’t buy anything from them again.
  - tacocataco 3y ago
    Definitely don't get samsungs refrigerators. I've heard similar things about their other appliances but I've only ever owned the fridge.
colordrops 3y ago
I tried using John Carmack's instructions to unlock my old Oculus Go, which involved your Facebook account for some reason, and got banned from my account twice.
str3wer 3y ago
https://github.com/basti564/Oculess https://github.com/basti564/Oculess
extraduder_ire 3y ago
They moved it away from facebook accounts to more generic ones at least. The EU isn't going to force them (with this law) because they don't have more than 10% of EU residents using their headsets. (based on a quick search, they're at about half the threshold if you count worldwide sales)

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago

I’ll believe it when each service is operated by an independent company.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

My facebook sits abandoned for the better part of a decade and I never got messenger or instagram. Since they're all under the same umbrella I question the actual benefit. Seems like it would be placebo more than anything.

exabrial 3y ago

What would have been better is if the three things were just split up into separate businesses. Monopolies are annoying. But I'll take progress over perfection, glad to see the move.

diebeforei485 3y ago

Can they do YouTube next?

ozyschmozy 3y ago
They already did, the news of Google doing the same on hn last week iirc.

1oooqooq 3y ago

because it's all linked in WhatsApp, which is the only thing anybody still actively uses anyway

gerash 3y ago

can someone ELI5 what unlinking a "Facebook account" from a "Messenger account" accomplishes? IMHO we should strive to remove moats around digital services so new competitor can pop up and provide competing services in a short amount of time but somehow EU thinks creating busy-work for the engineers of incumbents is the right approach. I already despise the "accept cookies" noise on all websites and don't tell me "Oh, it's bad compliance, blah blah". If so, then write a new more useful law instead.

its_ethan 3y ago

If I used a VPN to place myself in Europe, could I unlink my accounts?

jscheel 3y ago

Their ham-fisted linking of facebook and instagram accounts has been an absolute nightmare for those of us that use their messenger apis. It has never fully worked correctly, and has led to more lost dev time than I care to count. I can't even begin to imagine how much worse this is going to make it.

Havoc 3y ago

Guessing UK isn’t getting this. Hashtag brexit benefit sigh

thegrizzlyking 3y ago

This should be the default for all mergers above a certain threshold number of users and part of FTC consent decree.

Zuiii 3y ago

So how does a non-eu user get this privilege? Is using VPN in EU enough?

barnabyjones 3y ago

Shoutout to Max Schrems and Noyb, even if they weren't apparently involved in this decision. That organization seems to be the main driving force behind serious GDPR enforcement by submitting regular legal complaints, the data authorities occasionally take up a case on their own but usually seem content to stick to small violations. It really shows that having laws on the books isn't enough, and even public awareness is not very helpful, what really matters is having lawyers pushing hard for enforcement.

boppo1 3y ago

If I reside in the US but am a dual US-EU citizen, does this apply to me?

vodkapump 3y ago

> Users can continue using Messenger with their Facebook account or create a new account completely independent of Facebook So you can't unlink your facebook and messenger, just create a new messenger account without a facebook account. That's sad.

Suppafly 3y ago

Can't you already sign up for all of the services independently? I know I can login to instagram with my fb login, but I still had to 'create' the account the first time I did. I could have just created a standalone account if I hadn't had an fb account to start with. Messenger is essentially facebook chat pushed into a separate client, which I had thought they were talking about reincorporating back into the main client, I don't really see why should allow a separate login for that.