[jasode]

In this particular article, "weaponise" doesn't mean private data as a weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]). Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data as a weapon against the API developers.

The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute.

The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is "fraud". Facebook's counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its editorial control and therefore "free speech".

The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.

[1] https://stallman.org/facebook.html

[deadelvis]

Agree that the ability to access a user's friend's data (without said friend's permission) through the API, was a deliberate feature (not an abuse as it has been portraied) and is the interesting bit about this. Facebook deliberately abused user's privacy by deciding to monetize that feature. Only later decided to roll it back.

[_jal]

"Editorial control" as justification for selective access is interesting, and seems in tension with their need to remain considered a "platform" instead of a publication. (They aren't a platform; utility surplus from user participation doesn't flow to the users.)

> wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them

In this case, I think I'm just rooting for injuries.

[jonbarker]

I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is another story and one I am grappling with. And I think social media companies are ultimately aggregators, not platforms. What I think should come out of any regulation is an obligation for aggregators at a certain scale to 1) stop calling themselves neutral platforms, because that's not accurate, 2) be required to disclose in verifiable, auditable detail how they are prioritizing content from an algorithmic perspective, how they are compensating generators of both paid and organic content from a both monetary and "in app currency" perspective (likes, etc), and 3) when they do exercise their editorial judgment and kick 3rd party apps off their APIs, explain how and why they came to such a judgment, not in a storytelling kind of way, but in a parametric (they hit this number, so we took action) kind of way. And if there is a human in the loop, that human needs to have certain competencies, which would resemble professionalism like that of lawyers and doctors. These three requirements would have to be agreed upon like international standards of a sort. Now, I am aware that everything I am requesting is also likely to be infected by 'bureacracy' and that is something I'm not sure I have a way to solve for.

[kinsomo]

> The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.

Is that intentional aspect of the lawsuit or just a side-effect? It would be interesting if a privacy advocate gained control of a defunct entity with standing to sue Facebook over data-related dispute like this, and used discovery to dig into Facebook's privacy practices.

[vignesh_m]

Yeah, that article was all over the place. The only thing I could get from a first reading was that Facebook did something wrong - just using the anti-facebook sentiment I guess