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Facebook and Instagram Ban Developers From Using Data For Surveillance (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook and Instagram have banned developers from using their data for surveillance with a new privacy policy that civil rights activists have long sought to curb spying by law enforcement. Following revelations last year that police departments had gained special access to the social networks to track protesters, Facebook, which owns Instagram, announced on Monday that it had updated its rules to state that developers could not "use data obtained from us to provide tools that are used for surveillance." The American Civil Liberties Union obtained government records last year revealing that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter had provided users' data to a software company that aids police surveillance programs and had helped law enforcement monitor Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The ACLU found that the social networking sites had given "special access" to Geofeedia, a controversial startup that has partnered with law enforcement to track streams of user content. "Our goal is to make our policy explicit," Facebook said in its announcement on Monday. "Over the past several months we have taken enforcement action against developers who created and marketed tools meant for surveillance, in violation of our existing policies; we want to be sure everyone understands the underlying policy and how to comply."
The cat's out of the bag now, jokers! Good luck stuffing it back in there. Eventually everyone else will realize you should have built privacy into the API.
They're going to have to ban their own developers, too. Facebook and Instagram are surveillance platforms for marketing companies.
That sure is mighty white of them!
So, let me get this straight, Twitter & Facebook think they can tell the government what to do now?
I'm sure the CIA will just take "no" for an answer quietly. They won't just write an NSL saying shut up, do this, and tell no one.
Social media was a mistake.
This 'ban' will not stand up to an NSL..
When you realize that Timmy Cook (Apple Inc.) has $300 billion in Chinese Communist Part controlled banks in China and $200 billion in Mafia controlled banks in Ireland, Italy and Netherlands, the Mafia are already applying surveillance to achieve their goals on Facebook, Twitter and all others.
Oh, a "rule" ??
Well, okay. Sure. That'll work.
/insert Gene Wilder/Wonka meme here
after they finish laughing.
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They want the monopoly.
"Stoppit, stoppit now!"
April fools day came in March this year..
Seriously, what is Facebook going to do? Give them a mean look or something?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Instagram closed its API to developers last year. It's impossible to run a non-sandbox app now unless you're a large company with millions of users, and probably also willing to throw some cash Instagram's way.
Facebook and Instagram Want Clients To Buy Their Surveillance Data
Dr. King was a victim of spying by the US government as well as efforts to ruin his reputation. Over fifty years later we have the FBI tracking people for supporting Black Lives Matter. Somehow a theme of we don't like black folks being converted into those black folks can not be trusted and must be watched. Maybe we simply must not ever have anything like the FBI in America.
Me thinks we're going to need some definitions here.
surveillance: Keeping an eye on what someone does.
Facebook: A way to keep an eye on what people do.
Never mind marketing, though that's a good point too, the whole purpose of Facebook is to see what people are up to. On Twitter they even use the word "follow someone". Just like if you're doing surveillance on foot you might follow someone.
The rule only applies to liberal and progressive activists around the world. Conservatism and populism will be crushed as usual.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
ugh.. it is actually built into the api, at least for general run of the mill 3rd party developers. it's not like you can just sign up as a developer and get access to random peoples privately shared data.
now if you sign up and okay access for a "please surveillance me" app then.. well, duh.
the stuff you can get without permissions you can get via regular http/web anyways, if the target has chosen to do so. which of course begs the question wtf are geofeedia etc selling. my bet is that they're selling 99.999% snakeoil product. it will tell law enforcement for example how many times people have publicly said "pot" in a given geographic area(that the users have marked themselves to be part of). as such the rule changes don't have any effect.
twitter on the other hand has been giving some weirdo firehose access to some partners for analyzing or whatnot. thats also just a better api to info that people are putting on the web anyways.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Isn't the entire point of facebook to look at all of the stuff people have posted? How is looking at your stuff on facebook different from surveillance?
Nah doublespeak "Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., will serve the just fine.
Far more accurate headline would be "Facebook and Instagram launch marketing program to trick their users into believing they are no longer being monitored, analysed and targeting with selected manipulative marketing".
One thing I am really curious about is why people think it is OK for corporations to spy on them in ways they think it would and should be illegal for their own government to do (keeping in mind it would likely be illegal for the government to sell it, government data access audits have real bite, the data generally remains in country and you can force corrections). Wow have the mug punters been sold a sack of crap.
Yep, you sheep can sure trust the corporations more than you can your own government, yep, uh huh, you betcha (never forget who owns your government, those same corporations, wow, just, wow).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Law Enforcement doesn't follow the rules. Whatever Law Enforcement does, it deems reasonable when it investigates itself for wrongdoing.
but not Big Gov. Important difference.
Marketers trying to sell you something don't send a SWAT team if you tell them no. Say "no" to the government (and stick to that answer), they'll send a heavily armed squad for you, after they confiscate your bank account etc. The government is by far the worst of the goon squads.
It was OK while Obama was in office. It is not OK now.
How about you stop collecting the information in the first place?
How long before FB has a company of its own to sell this to the police?
Don't they know only Facebook and Instagram are allowed to do that? I love it when they try to sound righteous, truly pathetic. Fuck Facebook.
Happy 15th birthday!
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Effect: Nothing. Why is this even worth a story?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It won't actually accomplish anything but it allows the companies to tell their data sources, aka customers, that the companies are looking out for their interests. A couple of the smaller developers working out of their homes will be shut out to prove that the new rules are working but the larger shops and the government will continue working as usual.
End result? Nothing will change. "We're banned from using this data for surveillance, but that's okay. We're not doing surveillance, we're doing *monitoring*. So everything is fine.
See also "We're not asking for a back door to encryption. We want to come in through the front door."
So, now when the TLA's do their spying, it won't be endorsed by Facebook. Wonderful. Were they supporting it before? Can they accurately detect what the purpose of my crawler bot is? And if not, isn't this just showmanship?
Given their history of selective enforcement, this will only apply to anything deemed a threat to leftist narratives.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Someone , preferably a raging n_igger crackhead needs to lodge a knife deep into Mark Zuckerberg's neck artery so he can bleed to death in front of his UGLY fucking gook chink wife.
That would be a good start in eliminating greedy jews
No, that is false. You in fact CAN just sign up for a 3rd party developer account, and all it takes to harvest all the personal details of someone is for them or any one on their friends list to use your app. There is no technical roadblock against doing this. The only restrictions on data use are in the ToS and (at least up until now) that was enforced solely by the honor system.
No, that is false. You in fact CAN just sign up for a 3rd party developer account, and all it takes to harvest all the personal details of someone is for them or any one on their friends list to use your app. There is no technical roadblock against doing this. The only restrictions on data use are in the ToS and (at least up until now) that was enforced solely by the honor system.
Absolutely none of this stuff can be gotten "via regular http/web." Through Facebook, the "permission" you refer to consists merely of being signed up and being within 2 degrees of separation of a malicious app developer.
Who are you shilling for, actually? Facebook? Or malicious app developers everywhere?