
Facebook communication and lawsuit documents: 7000 pages leaked - pmlnr
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252473540/Lawmakers-study-leaked-Facebook-documents-made-public-today
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FillardMillmore
> Six4Three’s lawsuit alleges that Facebook made threats to shut down
> developers’ access to data unless, for example, they sold their companies to
> Facebook for a price under their market value, spent large amounts
> advertising with Facebook, or agreed to feed all of their data back to the
> company.

It's not like we haven't heard about this stuff before, but these documents
will likely make a stronger anti-trust case if that's where the government
wants to take it. I'm sure they've been keeping a seat warm for Zuck in
preparation for his next Senate hearing.

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hanspeter
> Facebook made threats to shut down developers’ access to data unless they
> sold their companies to Facebook

How does this even make sense? "We will only give your company data if your
company is not your company"? Sounds more likely that they were denied access
generally and then separately had talks about acquisition.

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elliekelly
You can sell your company and still retain an ownership interest. If you owned
a company and data access was critical to profitability then Facebook has a
lot of leverage to "encourage" you to sell: you can either own 100% of the
company without access to the data or own 10% of the company (or whatever
percent Zuckerberg was generous enough to allow you to retain) with access to
the data.

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SpicyLemonZest
I really don't understand the prevailing narrative about this lawsuit.
Six4Three ran an app for downloading all your friends' bikini photos, and I
don't think there's any serious argument that it's a bad thing for Facebook to
shut that down. Why should we trust their selective leaks?

~~~
pmlnr
You're talking about 3 things.

1: whether or not the leak is selective, we don't know. Given it was a sealed
doc in a lawsuit vault, it might not be that selective, and it very much looks
like they may not even be the people who leaked it.

2: the morality of the app was never the topic.

3: Facebook has been doing switch & bait for too many years, even with one's
own data. See
[https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/](https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/)
for more details on this. It's the same story as Twitter: yes, come, develop
apps, spread our influence, then board up all the resources. This needs to
stop, both from an anti-trust perspective and with developer awareness.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
What you call a bait and switch, I would argue is an honest lesson the
industry has learned. Nobody realized, in the early days, just how easy it was
to abuse a social network API.

We don't know for sure whether the leak is selective, but Facebook claims it
is. The morality of the plaintiffs seems very relevant to evaluating whether
you believe that.

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d0ne
Wouldn’t say “Nobody”. It was obvious to enough folks in the privacy and
security sectors. Facebook, along with others in that space, received view
points from some of those concerned but made the decision to proceed as they
did.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
The privacy and security sectors are pretty consistently aware of ways things
can go wrong. But they were overwhelmed at the time by the popular consensus,
that openness is super important and it's terrible that social networking
companies don't have more of it. Remember when Tim Berners-Lee criticized
Facebook for not putting all your data on the public web?
([https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8151101/tTim...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8151101/tTim-
Berners-Lee-criticises-Facebooks-walled-garden.html))

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Andrex
Did you read the article you linked?

You have a very uncharitable interpretation of Sir Berners-Lee's comments.
He's railing against walled gardens being poor stewards of user data and
having nonexistent data portability (as well as telcos violating net
neutrality.)

Relevant then and even more relevant now. I see nothing about him wanting
Facebook to enforce publicly-published profile data.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I’m not trying to pick on the guy. My memory is that this simply isn’t what
data portability meant in 2010; data portability was widely understood to mean
that there should be a public API to access any resources the Facebook web app
will serve me. (Note how the article ties this into calls for Facebook to open
up the social graph API.)

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bemmu
Hacker News was mentioned in these twice, first as the source that discovered
a bug, and second as a place to reach developers for article promotion.

