
Facebook's Bikini App Lawsuit Is Getting Really Ugly - Varcht
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-lawsuit/
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stevenicr
I wonder if the writer of this article has a disdain for people sexy-izing
things (like pikini would be grouping supposed individual swimsuit pics into a
group of of pics that would be sexy-izing in a way?), or if she has a love of
facebook, or a misunderstanding of the tech in this issue - or maybe I am not
understanding how the API permissions used to work.. but..

"Pikinis went out of business in 2015 after Facebook changed its API to cut
off app developers from their users’ friends data. It did this ostensibly to
protect users' privacy."

Wouldn't the person using pikini already have access to the photos their
friends had posted? So the pikini app would just be gathering and highlighting
pics that were already accessible to the person? So I don't think putting the
"fbook was being chivalrousness and trying to protect privacy through API
breach" is the right light to shine on this.

Again I may be not understanding how the API worked, and if so apologies for
thinking this article is leaning towards fbook was trying to protect while
others were trying to syphon via security holes.

Also, "The irony in all of this is that it hinges on a decision Facebook made
to protect user privacy from apps just like Pikinis, which seized on weak data
protections to pry into Facebook users' personal photos."

Again, I am assuming the way things worked is that User A already had access
to User B's photos. This was not some hacker system made that gave you access
to someone's pictures on their phone through the API - this was pictures that
people had uploaded to the fbook albums and were already accessible to friends
right?

Only fbook itself (all of it's employees and those who demand access to the
data via gov orders) gets access to all the pics on someone's phone through
messenger app and the like, not friends of the person and APIs that could
connect like friends. Right?

Again I may be confused by how the tech works, I've read some about these
things over the years, and things had changed by the time I got to my
bookmarks and read up on and tried to use things like the open graph searches
and such. Apologies to the author or anyone else if these questions come off
as offensive in any way, it's just the thoughts that came up the first time I
read through the article.

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crunchlibrarian
The weird song and dance of luring developers by offering so much personal
data to them for free in the early days of Facebook's API always creeped me
out. I remember thinking about this all the time back in 2007-2010 or so and
wondering how people could be so naive and when it would all blow up.

Blow up would have been nice. I was overly optimistic in those days.

