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I assume someone at Facebook, hopefully the person that wrote this, or someone who has more influence over this issue, is reading. I am an engineer. I understand technology better than most of the general population. When I sign in to my Facebook account to use Spotify, I am absolutely not expecting that Spotify will now have access to read every single one of my private messages. This is a gross violation of trust, and if this is what happened, then the fact that you not only made this mistake, but also then published this blog post defending it, marks a low point for Facebook. Perhaps irrecoverably so for me. "After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with access to the person’s messages in order to power this type of feature." This is a write permission. So you needed to give Spotify permission to create a message. It seems that your system combines the read and write permissions, since you just grouped them together by saying "access to the person's messages". It also seems from your defense that you see absolutely no issue with this. In order to share a song through Spotify, you are giving them access to every single private message the user has ever written. I find it hard to believe that Facebook refuses to acknowledge any fault in this: The initial product decision, the upholding of this decision through previous privacy investigations, and this PR response. Am I misinterpreting the facts or scale of this? |
I feel that the distance between their rhetoric and their technical machinations is their liability. And to those who say, "no big deal, everyone already knew this" - well, then why does Facebook's rhetoric not match their underlying technology?
If Facebook came out and said, "our business model is to sell ads, so we do everything legally in our power to give people the power to connect to each other, while supporting ourselves by selling ads," then I would have confidence in their statements. They instead obfuscate and disemble.
When they speak of "integration partners" and speak about using Facebook services on various devices, and not in terms of selling the data itself, opening up entire streams of data to read and write permissions, then their aims in this press release are different from the aims of their clients and shareholders. And the extent of that difference is a liability.
That they can't be honest in plain language about their technical systems means they don't yet have confidence that their technical systems would be culturally sustainable were they to be well understood. Incentives are not aligned here - and that is a very scary and generally untenable place to be.