Last I checked, FB actively banned using their APIs to build a competing product. I wish the government would make it mandatory to offer federation if you had, say, more than a million customers. But alas, governments rarely do what's convenient for customers.
- Make a telefone-book style listing, or searching for "all metalheads < 25 near Chicago" where people entered that into their profiles -> OK
- Tracking users on your site -> OK
- Tracking users on third party sites, and then aggregating this data, so you can see "people who searched for baby carrages" or "people who bought diapers with their credit card" -> not OK
- Having some kind of database where people could concievably look up what user tqi purchased, searched, what their political affiliation is (when not made public) -> not OK (unless you have extreme auditibility, four-eye principle, and so on)
I think the data captured by CA was also entered for the purposes of sharing, (often) limited to friends and friends of friends. I think the crux of this all is that as a society we haven't really established how those rights are transferred. If I share my email address with a friend, can they share it with their contact management app? I'm not sure how you create a consistent policy in a federated model.
I'm well aware of "more is different" aka the dialectic transform of quantity in quality. Lots of data that in individually innocent can be problematic if somebody amasses it. But especially for this reason I think it is not good to have these kind of semi-public spaces where the data is public and the only protection is it is cumbersome to collect. Public data should be clearly public, and private data should be clearly private, and the UX should be really clear so people know what is happening.
(By the way, I'm not even sure CA was a "scandal" or that it was bad for FB. I think the only effect was that FB used it to justify locking down their API more.)
Google isn’t remotely comparable, and I believe Amazon has APIs for their store fronts / merchants (still can’t access reviews you leave)
Why do we treat government services and certain large private services separately? Why are government publications public domain, private publications not? Why does free speach apply to the government, but not to corporations? Why can't we treat amazon like a utility?
I believe the difference is because in the past people fought for these concessions from the state. They decided for example it would be sensible that the government should not restrict free speach. And before, they decided not to take feudalism as a given but to democratically elect their government. I know I'm being a bit dramatic, but there's no reason people couldn't get together and demand these kind of concessions from powerful corporations, too. Access to Amazon's product API is really the least example of what would change.
or what's in the long term best interest of their citizens let alone the rest of the world. Silly humans.
Any positives that come out of this for the author are just a Facebook PR move. If they did care about users, their support system wouldn't be so anti-user.
The sad thing is that this person actually is a customer because they bought a product and pay for things on it, but Facebook still doesn't realize that, or more likely these customers are such a small amount of their revenue they just don't care (and don't think it matters for growth of this area or don't care about that growth).
That's the reason the "you're not the customer" line is just a distraction.
It totally misses the point that Facebook doesn't have customers any more than any other first world power has. Facebook has treaties with governments and follow laws when it's less costly than breaking them.
FTC actions are like one country taking another to the WTO -- not something to ignore, but not really threatening either.
I don't think it is. If Facebook wasn't coming from a place such as that, then we wouldn't necessarily see them act like this. It's not just about size.
> Facebook has treaties with governments and follow laws when it's less costly than breaking them.
So do most large companies, but they don't all act the same to their customers. Apple may be guilty of other ways of mistreating their customers, but to my knowledge they're mostly innocent of this specific brand of it, and anything you want to attribute to Facebook's size that you can't attribute to any of the other tech big 5[1] should be examined for whether that's really the relevant underlying cause.
1: https://www.fastcompany.com/90651160/facebook-is-now-the-fif...
FB is super annoying when you want to separate the business from any form of a personal account. Eventually you need to have some sort of personal FB account linked to a business to manage some key ad buy things AFAIK, at the small business scale at the very least.
It's part of the business model - each FB user generates so little revenue for the company that you can't afford to offer anything resembling "real" support channels. The company is massively profitable by sheer scale - by making a small amount of money per year off of a vast number of users.
This applies to Google as well - or really any ad-based engagement-centric business. Your individual users aren't worth enough to have human-intensive labor assigned to them, hence heavily automated support channels and little to no ability to ever have something processed by a human.
One of many reasons I pay Google to host my email rather than use a free Gmail - when you are generating a non-negligible revenue stream suddenly companies' willingness to answer emails and pick up phones increases.
When it comes to FB there's often the pithy "when you're not paying for a service you're not the customer, you're the product" - which is a simplistic take. In this case though at the very least this is true: "when you're not paying for a service your support needs are dead weight".
If you think that does any difference, I hope you good luck. Google is unreachable for support, even if you are a paying user.
...They accidentally CC'd in a public mailing list into our discussion and leaked enough information that someone would be able to use the automated support system to change the company AdWords password. There was basically no way of contacting anyone further, the engineer couldn't contact anyone that could help us. We ended up making a new adwords account.
"Live chat, email or call us".
I guess they have data that shows this particular kind of user will almost never buy ads ever again, so at least let a scammer do it.
You're right, this is weird, but if you look at the profit model, it makes sense, and there are no laws that would really protect the user.
People valuing it sufficiently to choose an alternative (and most likely paying for an alternative) over the benefits of free access to an established network.