I mean, at one time you could build apps on Facebook that basically downloaded all of a user's data when they used it. The Obama campaign built an app that you could use to find your Facebook friends who hadn't been contacted by the campaign yet, so you could call them on the campaign's behalf. I heard of other political operations that built a "wish [famous person] happy birthday" app solely so they could grow their database.

Eventually Facebook closed all that access down and basically deprecated the concept of FB as an app platform entirely. That is a way more dramatic change than what Apple is doing to Facebook here.

This is a perfect example of the tradeoffs between openness and privacy.

If you give dangerous tools to users, you will have a few cool things and lots of tech-illiterate users screwed over.

Privacy advocates often preach solutions like the fediverse, without understanding that the fediverse is a privacy disaster for the tech illiterate. Cambridge Analytica wouldn't even be preventable on Mastodon, and it would have far worse consequences. Nevermind admins snooping on messages of their users, for i.e. romantic or financial reasons and poor people having to pay for their own services instead of seeing ads.

Yes, Facebook is horrible, but all currently known cures are worse than the disease.

It’s like the Drake equation - you will have to multiply with the risk that FB goes truly rogue. If they do, they have ALL dirt.

what's your opinion of Scuttlebutt and if poor, do you see any progress towards alternatives on the horizon?

I had an early fb app that let you track shows from a band you had been to and display this on your wall.

I was able to download tons of user data. I think the guide was to only take what you need and you were not supposed to store it longer than 48 hours.

But that was def an honor system thing and I’d be surprised if people were purging data back then. It was (still is?) the Wild West with consumer tracking.

Wasn’t this closed in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

The scandal in Cambridge Analytica was roughly that they were able do this stuff after FB made it officially against the rules.

"able" is bearing a lot of load.

FB never built technical countermeasures, merely asked app devs to pinky-swear not to siphon user data.

This type of FB app was gone long before the CA scandal broke. There were some really cool ones available, but plainly not worth the tradeoff in retrospect.

A person associated with Cambridge Analytica used a researcher access and shared the data with the company (which he wasn't supposed to do). Researchers have (had?) more access than developers do.

Not true, they didn't have any special research access. There was an app called "This is your digital life" that was just a personality quiz that they used to scrape data. At this point facebook would let you access data about a users friends in detail when the user would authorize it (via these apps).

Also facebook killed this long before the Cambridge Analytics scandal broke. It also enabled some really cool features like their graph search where you could run queries like "people in X town that like football", but it also let you run very creepy queries to stalk people, which is why it got canned.

At one point, I wrote a script to crawl developer documentation at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and compare vs. the previous day so we could know ahead of time about breaking API changes.

So yes, it's funny to me that Facebook is calling out Apple for changing their platform when Facebook does it all the time.

And they love to do so without much or any notice to developers.

Facebook's entire graph API significantly undermined what developers could do compared to the old API when it rolled out in 2011 or 2012. I was working for a social media advertising company at the time and it was certainly detrimental. They didn't consult with us, the industry using their API.

As a developer currently working for a faceless Corp that never seems to actually consult with it’s users (in a mostly unrelated industry) for any user impactful choice..I’m sorry.

I would say maybe you could take comfort in knowing that you essentially sponsored someone who wanted to help produce a world of clean, adaptable code, but the truth is I’m just another mid-rate dev producing immense value to an ironically named faceless org.

Anyway, no thanks for ads and surveillance tech but at the same time thanks for keeping me employed and thanks for keeping the viability of these pursuits going I think?

You used to be able to fetch public events (not for a user, not private events, just public events that you can easily browse to anonymously) and I had made a site that showed everything that was going on in my city. It was fantastic, you could see all concerts/gigs/plays for each day at a glance.

One day, Facebook just killed that endpoint for "privacy reasons". Anyone can still open a web browser and visit the event page, but accessing the data programmatically is now gone.

I guess they wanted to be the only event viewer, and since everyone only adds their events to Facebook and nowhere else, there is now no way to get event info.

When Facebook says "privacy" they mean "ad revenue".

You just need to look forward a few weeks to see a big one. The FaceBook and Instagram oEmbed changes that are going into effect at the end of October[1] are going to break all of the Facebook and Instagram embeds on WordPress sites (~1/3 of the internet) and the oEmbed functionality won't be available without a developer account[2].

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/oembed-legacy

[2] https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/50861

IFTTT used to be able to post to a Facebook user's wall by API. They disabled this API a couple years ago.

I'd say they shut down quite a few "partners" when they shuttered Parse.