And more specifically, the tool is for learning what Facebook knows (or thinks it knows) about you.
... Which is what this tool does.
And while I take your point about aggregate value, I personally have a great deal of interest in data about me.
That being said, a less nefarious use could be lender has a std mortgage rate of 4.25%, but if you give us a FB data dump, you can quality for a 4.00% rate.
Or, with your FB, the bank realize you have an higher risk of defaulting/dying before paying the full mortgage, so they bump the rate to 5%
At least some are trying to counter all this privacy invasion (EU, Apple, etc.) Let's hope they will continue doing so.
Not so sure. While they may be doing more than FB obviously, both example parties you listed are more than happy to support privacy invasion when it furthers their ends. You don't need to lower your standards to find counter examples nor do you need praise those that are only a little less bad. In my view the word "all" in your statement is verifiably false. We should be more nuanced and call out bad when we see it no matter the org instead of giving out org-level labels.
Android phones are also effectively proprietary (especially phones from manufacturers such as Samsung and Xiaomi) and seemingly get slower over time. But yes, the apps are cheaper/free thanks to sideloading and a good community.
(RMS-Mode On) What I'm referring to as Android, is in fact, Google/Android, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Google plus Android. Android is not (really) a usable operating system unto itself (for most people), but rather another component of a fully functioning Google system made useful by the Google Apps, Google Play Services and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by the end user. (RMS-Mode Off)
If either way you're going to have a proprietary phone, you might as well pick the one that has less of an interest in data mining you.
Why the scare quotes?
Yes, being able to access your data is nice, but you also have to balance it with people trying to trick people into leaking their data for nefarious reasons. Obviously, here, it's an open source project and we can see that it's (probably) secure, but then where do you draw the line?
W:re CA. FB was touting and selling this service to any and all intetested parties. It’s only retroactively that FB and others are crying foul. I mean sure, FB should not have sold thet data or made it available to any interested party, but that’s their actual business model.
Where do you get that from? My understanding is that the API used was closed in 2014, and existing applications were given until 2015 to stop using it. That's when the data was gathered, and that data was used later in 2016 by CA.
In this case, this is another API that is closed, and this application is trying to get around that. Again, I understand that this application has good intentions, and is hopefully secure, but they are still breaking the rules. If anything happens, then it's Facebook who is on the line.
> Facebook is free to leech your phone of every last bit of personal data... but heavens forbid an end user or journalist tries to learn something about Facebook.
I'd argue the risk isn't that a journalist is learning about Facebook, but rather that it has access to all of the users information and username/password.
The tool was changed to redirect users to a Facebook sign-in page to log in, which is the proper way to sign in. They just found another reason to deny them access after.
It's also not collecting or centralizing data, this is just for the user that uses the tool to learn more about the tool, nothing is sent to Gizmodo.
“We don’t expose this information via our API and we don’t allow accessing or collecting data from Facebook using automated means"
Oh man what a world we live in. Facebook is free to leech your phone of every last bit of personal data... but heavens forbid an end user or journalist tries to learn something about Facebook.