It's interesting to see the difference in attitude on HN towards Google and Facebook. Many readers on HN shared the media's outcry when it was "revealed" that Netflix and Spotify were given read/write access to users' messages if they had authorized those Messenger plugins/platforms. I'm not attacking your position--I wholeheartedly agree with it--it just seems like there's a double standard on HN when it comes to certain tech companies.

If I connect my Facebook to my Spotify so that I can log in with one account and maybe share music with friends, I don't expect Spotify to have access to my private messages.

Obviously context is important, but I'm not seeing the double standard.

What’s more, users explicitly opted in, giving Spotify permission to do so. [1] No reasonable person would use Spotify to send and receive messages after explicitly granting the client permissions and then claim “but I don’t expect Spotify to have access to my private messages”

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17561784/django-social-a...

Of course as a technician with knowledge of how OAuth and web APIs work, the implication that it really needs access to all messages seems a lot more reasonable - but I don't think this view is necessarily valid in a larger context.

Implementing more fine-grained permissions is absolutely possible. See e.g. Telegram: Even though Telegram bots appear as mostly ordinary users, they by default cannot access the messages of the channels they joined - they can only access commands that users were explicitly sending to them. You need a special permission to have a bot actually be able to access a channel like a human user would.

Or is your claim that you gave only permission for profile and friends but the Spotify client had messaging permission as well?

I disagree. I have perused various trials for Spotify and other services over the years and never once had to resort to using a Federated ID/login.

Which they have been shown to about a dozen times over this month.

1) if you use their Messenger app plugin

2) if you had connected to Messenger through Spotify's desktop app. I believe this feature has been deprecated for a few years now, though.

Even if you sign up for Spotify using your Facebook account or connect your Facebook account to Spotify that does not give them access to your Messenger messages. It is my understanding that it required the user to opt into specifically connecting Messenger for that circumstance to occur.

If I download a calculator, it has no business reading location, call logs, messages, contacts, full filesystem. That would make me outraged, even if I did technically click through permissions.

FB never did anything but being at the right place at the right time and were pretty nefarious from the very start. If any innovation can be claimed to have come out of FB, it's new ways of large scale psychological manipulation.

I suspect it's the memory of those early Google years that make some more lenient towards Google, although at this point, they really shouldn't be.

Facebook has had to pull off their own feats of engineering. It is a fact whether you like their product or not.

I work for FB. I am leaving for my own personal reasons. It is not a perfect company. Your comment, however, is wrong and I am calling it out as such.

Because as things appear, FB was a myspace for grown-ups at a time when there was a need for such a service, that is, the right time and the right place, and technology-wise there was nothing extraordinary about the service itself.

> It is a fact whether you like their product or not.

I like their product just fine. I just wish more of them held their privacy in higher regard.

Maybe there's a daily cycle of various worldviews prevailing in the comments―I guess here's a toy project for data scientists.

> The assessment fee is paid by the developer and may range from $15,000 to $75,000 (or more) depending on the size and complexity of the application. This fee is due whether or not your app passes the assessment

Bad news for smaller players.

This is simply what professional security assessment costs. There's a lot of competition and a diversity of firms, and this is the range the rates float in.

It doesn't make sense that small companies should be allowed to circumvent the requirement when what they're doing is just as sensitive as apps from large companies.

* professional security is needed, and this is what it costs

* the cost is more of a barrier to smaller companies (and hence provides an advantage to larger companies)

It seems like an inherent tension; I'm not sure how to get around it.

We talk about two different data sets here: * The actual User data. * Data from third persons, including, but not limited to their e-mail address.

While a user can agree that their own data should be processed by a third party, the problem is that he cannot consent for other people.

And in my understanding (INAL), every part of the software where those third person information is transferred or processed needs to be part of that full assessment.

A limited API that does not give out any third persons data would have to somehow filter out all the information of all third partys.

If they really are small companies then (in most cases) what they're doing isn't as sensitive, because the value of the assets under protection is lower. It would be completely reasonable to say that companies with less than 5,000 users only need to be assessed for vulnerability to automated attacks and not targeted attacks.

If you're a company the size of Facebook and you're accidentally sending password reset tokens to your analytics partners then that's a disaster. But I don't know that it's worth shutting down hundreds of startups with a couple dozen users each over the sort of potential security weaknesses that, while not ideal, realistically aren't going to result in anyone having their private data exposed.

Where I disagree is that for a small company that doesn't use SQL, being forced to pay someone $10,000 to spend an extra week testing every single endpoint for SQL injections isn't going to mitigate any potential vulnerabilities, nor would being allowed to opt out of that requirement externalize any risk.

And if we're going going to say that companies shouldn't be allowed to externalize risk then that requires some baseline understanding of what risk actually is. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to separate risk from the value of the assets under protection, as Bruce Schneier has been saying for 20+ years.

Most small startups won't think that's worth it.

Yah, and we know that 99% of folks just next - next - next when installing everything on their phone, laptop, console.

So many apps want access to stuff that isn't obvious (e.g. games that want to access your photos, emails, and msgs) though most people skip the alerts when installing.

Not sure if this is meant ironically… but no, they definitely should not.