Re:Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing A...
by ashtonkem on Sunday December 13, 2020 @07:46PM
(#25412081)
> Another example is the recent FB lawsuit threat against researchers. [1] Facebook will squawk about user privacy to justify this, but I have a hard time thinking Mark "privacy is dead" Zuckerberg is particularly worried about that.
I think you're flattening a lot of complexity here. Yes, I agree that Mark Zuckerberg is probably not terribly interested in our privacy. But one of the biggest outrages in FB privacy history, the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, was driven entirely by a researcher inappropriately accessing and sharing user data. While you might not trust Zuckerberg, and maybe you shouldn't, there is definitely some "there there" when it comes to how researchers handle our data too.
Re:Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing A...
by wpietri on Monday December 14, 2020 @12:40AM
(#25413945)
If you're saying Facebook shouldn't blindly trust anybody who claims to be a researcher, I agree, but that seems pretty far afield from what they're doing with the NYU researchers. Indeed, I think the fact that Facebook creates all sorts of real privacy concerns makes it especially bad that they're using that as a smokescreen to avoid accountability.
Re:Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing A...
by heyoni on Sunday December 13, 2020 @01:31PM
(#25408831)
They did the same thing with IMDb a few years ago. Their data dumps now are absolutely useless and they don’t generate any of the information themselves.
Re:Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing A...
by banana_giraffe on Sunday December 13, 2020 @04:02PM
(#25410248)
And the real data is now behind AWS Data Exchange at $150k/yr.
Oh, and the old IMDB API you could pay for is gone (or, gone soon), and some of the features it provided are gone permanently.
What I think all off these large companies are doing is pulling up the open-web ladder after they've climbed it to dominant positions. The problem with anti-trust action is that it's reactive; we wait until a company has gotten too big, and then hope we can cut it down to size. I'd love to see moves toward proactive open-data and open-algorithm requirements, so that we guarantee a level playing field. That won't be easy, but neither is trying to rein in companies with annual profits in the tens of billions.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/24/tech/facebook-nyu-political-a...