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Facebook Threatens To Delete Users' Photos If They Don't Install Moments app (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson, reporting for BetaNews: Not content with forcing people into using its Messenger app, Facebook is continuing its aggressive tactics and driving users to install its photo-sharing app, Moments. The social network has warned users that their photos face deletion if they fail to use the Moments app. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a huge surge in interest in the app, pushing it to the top of the download charts. Facebook says it is going to delete Synced Albums and Synced Photos if Moments is not installed by July 7, sending warning emails to a number of users. This has understandably led to panic installations of Moments as people sought to protect the photos that have been automatically synchronized from their phone. It's important to note that it is only these synced photos that are at risk, but it's clear that there is an element of confusion about what Facebook is planning to delete.
For facebook, you are the product, not the customer. I don't get it why people think otherwise and then first use it and after that get upset if they get treated like a product.
Don't make a facebook account, that's it.
It's clear that you should not use Facebook for anything. Ever.
I can't really feel sorry for the ones who do lose their photos. They take photos with a crappy cell phone camera and then Facebook compresses the hell out of them. What? You didn't save them somewhere else? Tough. Even if you save them from Facebook, all you have is tiny little files that are masquerading as photos.
My bother's two daughters, both college educated, are like that. They never back up the photos from their phones. They just depend on Facebook. The photos look okay on a phone, not so much on a 24" monitor. And forget about printing them.
I know that americans firmly believe that it's the god-given right of companies to screw them any way they like, but it doesn't work that way in the rest of the world, particularly not in the EU.
Here companies have a legal duty of care to the public which is codified in a large number of consumer and data protection laws, and those laws have teeth.
A company has the right to implement anything they want on their own machinery, but that right doesn't extend to the machinery of others. They don't own their user's equipment and so they can't mandate that a user install anything on it. Even less can they threaten users with destruction of data or loss of access if they fail to comply with what appears to be an unlawful request.
Facebook runs a web service, not an end-to-end delivery service running on set-top boxes or other equipment leased from Facebook over which they could have legal control. In trying to assert control over equipment which they do not own, they appear to have exceeded the boundaries of their legal rights. The threats just make it worse.
As I understand it, the Facebook app had a feature to synchronize photos you've taken to Facebook. This feature has been removed from the Facebook app, and put into a separate app (which probably has extra features related specifically to managing synced photos, I'm guessing). If you used the synchronization feature in the Facebook app, you need to install the Moments app to continue to use that feature. Anything synced from the Facebook app will be deleted, unless "transferred" to synchronizing from the Moments app. A feature from one app is being branched off to another app. If you want to use that feature, there's a more specific place for it now.
I've never used any of these apps, so I don't know how accurate this is. It's just what I gather from reading some articles on this.