Facebook Wanted Gizmodo to Kill Investigative Tool

Re:Facebook Wanted Gizmodo to Kill Investigative Tool by zaroth on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @01:50PM (#17708838)

> Facebook disagreed and escalated the conversation to their head of policy for Facebook’s Platform, who said they didn’t want users entering their Facebook credentials anywhere that wasn’t an official Facebook site—because anything else is bad security hygiene and could open users up to phishing attacks. She said we needed to take our tool off Github within a week.

I mean, this is a fair point. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Github tool was forked to surreptitiously send information to a 3rd party.

So they updated the tool to let users login to Facebook.com through the browser and just hijacked the session cookie to gain access to the pages.

Since this is a program which runs on the users machine, and downloads standard Facebook pages over their standard HTTP interface, I don’t see how Terms of Service can differentiate between accessing Facebook services through this program versus Chrome.exe or Edge.exe.

What makes one thing a user agent and another thing not a user agent?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook Wanted Gizmodo to Kill Investigative Tool by throwaway427 on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @01:59PM (#17708922)

I think the difference in intent and purpose between PYMK Inspector and Edge/Chrome is pretty obvious.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook Wanted Gizmodo to Kill Investigative Tool by BLKNSLVR on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @08:39PM (#17712236)

Yes, Edge/Chrome is for the drone users that are Facebook's bread and butter whilst PYMK Inspector users have some semblance of awareness of user privacy and the asymmetry of the situation.

Putting on my 'big business c*nt' hat I can totally understand why Facebook wouldn't want PYMK users.

[ Parent | on HN ]