Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

Re:Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy by White_Wolf on Sunday November 22, 2020 @08:16AM (#25177201)

Isn't(technically speaking) the addon taking data only from the users PC and not from facebook servers? At the end of the day it shouldn't be facebook's call what goes on the user's device.

One thing about these addons is that you can actually take them apart and see what is going on if you don't trust that the addon is built from their github code.

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Re:Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy by ankit219 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @09:33AM (#25177722)

I do think that users opting in is an insufficient response. A lot of users opt in for things they do not understand. (Terms and conditions of any site or app for example). For tech savvy users with the plug in, they will be smart enough to know what they are accepting, though that is not true for everyone.

I like the idea of open source code and that is helpful but there is got to be a better way. And I also believe that the research like this should be supported. All things aside, we can arrive at solutions without the need of an article like this which neither poses such questions, nor provides context.

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Re:Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy by CogitoCogito on Sunday November 22, 2020 @11:22AM (#25178657)

> I do think that users opting in is an insufficient response. A lot of users opt in for things they do not understand. (Terms and conditions of any site or app for example). For tech savvy users with the plug in, they will be smart enough to know what they are accepting, though that is not true for everyone.

Everything you just said here applies to Facebook themselves as much as the researchers. If we allow people to opt-in to sending data to Facebook (by creating an account), why would be against giving those same users the option to send the data somewhere else?

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