
Court Rules Facebook Widgets Can Be Considered Wiretaps - iamacyborg
https://gizmodo.com/court-rules-facebook-widgets-can-be-considered-wiretaps-1844245159
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pintxo
Interesting take to interpret "Like" button widgets as wiretapping.

Also interesting that Facebook is the bad guy here instead of the actual side
owner including the widget. I mean without everyone including those scripts on
their side, Facebook did not have the opportunity to receive such information.

~~~
kd5bjo
The ostensible purpose of a “Like” button is to allow site visitors to more
easily like the publisher’s content on Facebook. Aside from loading the static
assets from their servers, there’s no reason for this to involve Facebook
until someone clicks on the button.

The contention here is that adding surreptitious tracking code to this utility
script amounts to illegal electronic surveillance (“wiretapping”), the same as
if you had given someone a painting with a secret microphone and transmitter
inside.

~~~
amelius
> The contention here is that adding surreptitious tracking code to this
> utility script amounts to illegal electronic surveillance (“wiretapping”),
> the same as if you had given someone a painting with a secret microphone and
> transmitter inside.

Isn't this true for most advertising code as well? And how about Google
Analytics? Or Stripe, which records mouse movements in order to fight fraud
[1]?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936818)

~~~
iamacyborg
"Isn't this true for most advertising code as well?"

Yes. Which is exactly why this ruling is interesting.

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AdrianB1
What is the point of starting the article with a very heavy loaded political
message? Is it about using any opportunity to make a political statement or
just bad journalism?

~~~
henriquez
> bad journalism

Calling this piece journalism is overly charitable.

Here’s the source article, minus the snark and misinterpreted facts:
[https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/353072/facebo...](https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/353072/facebook-
must-face-wiretap-claims-court-confirms.html)

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still_grokking
Already years ago the legal department of the Heise Verlag, publisher of
German's biggest IT news site (which is interestingly also one of the biggest
German internet sites in general), came to the conclusion that it's actually
legally not possible to embed "social widgets" on their site as those widgets
would send personal data to their US based "mother ships" without explicit
user consent.

To circumvent this problem they developed a kind of wrapper around those
widgets that won't load the widget (which will than of course inevitably
trigger transfer of personal data to the social network in question) until
explicitly clicked by the user. This solution was than published under an
open-source license so it can be used by any interested webmaster. It's called
"Heise Shariff" and can be found on GitHub [1].

[1]
[https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff](https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff)

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hn3333
Ok, Is this also true for any embedded youtube video? And Javascript comments
widget? Any ad? Any image not hosted on the same server as the website?

~~~
searchableguy
Ignoring the court ruling, this article is garbage. I don't know why this is
posted here instead of the alternatives.

~~~
iamacyborg
The alternatives being from MacObserver and Futurism at time of posting. No
one else has written about this as far as I can see.

~~~
itchyjunk
Maybe there is a way to post the court ruling itself. Might be more denser to
read but would be free of all the fluff.

Edit: Edited link

Maybe this? [0].

[https://www.courtlistener.com](https://www.courtlistener.com)

