<story><title>Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers</title><url>https://twitter.com/AlexanderAbdo/status/1319761452832534531</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ninth_ant</author><text>A lot of people felt Facebook should do more to proactively stop people from scraping and aggregating data from their site after the CA debacle.  Which is what they are doing here, and you are labeling “absolutely preposterous”.&lt;p&gt;Which way is it?  Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco?  Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>&amp;gt; The researchers (w&amp;#x2F; the help of others) are responsible for a browser plug-in called Ad Observer, which allows FB users to voluntarily share very limited and anonymous data about the political ads that FB shows them. You can read about Ad Observer here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adobservatory.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adobservatory.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;=================&lt;p&gt;Absolutely preposterous takedown demand. Facebook doesn&amp;#x27;t get to dictate what software I run on my own client devices, including browser plugins, or even what browser I use. If I want to install a plugin that sends a screenshot or data of every advertisement I receive, to a third party of my choice, that&amp;#x27;s up to me. Or maybe I want to install ublock origin and see no ads.&lt;p&gt;It sounds like they&amp;#x27;re complaining because they have no way of detecting this or preventing it on the user client end, thankfully, because of the way browsers are architected to prevent a website from screwing with the software on your computer. The only way fb could detect or block this would be to force users to install their own fb-written browser plugin, with extensive permissions required.&lt;p&gt;Obviously fb has a high level of motivation to get every user to use their officially app-store-published android or ios app, where the whole experience is centrally controlled, and such a plugin is impossible to use. Rather than having the user browse facebook in Firefox or Chrome or Edge.&lt;p&gt;If I can display something on my own computer screen it&amp;#x27;s my right to choose to share it however I damn well please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcoveson</author><text>&amp;gt; Which way is it? Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco? Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?&lt;p&gt;No, they should assume all the data they serve about people is being collected and indexed by all the people they serve it to, and then restrict what they serve accordingly. Suing people for asking their computers to record what Facebook served them is insane.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers</title><url>https://twitter.com/AlexanderAbdo/status/1319761452832534531</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ninth_ant</author><text>A lot of people felt Facebook should do more to proactively stop people from scraping and aggregating data from their site after the CA debacle.  Which is what they are doing here, and you are labeling “absolutely preposterous”.&lt;p&gt;Which way is it?  Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco?  Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>&amp;gt; The researchers (w&amp;#x2F; the help of others) are responsible for a browser plug-in called Ad Observer, which allows FB users to voluntarily share very limited and anonymous data about the political ads that FB shows them. You can read about Ad Observer here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adobservatory.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adobservatory.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;=================&lt;p&gt;Absolutely preposterous takedown demand. Facebook doesn&amp;#x27;t get to dictate what software I run on my own client devices, including browser plugins, or even what browser I use. If I want to install a plugin that sends a screenshot or data of every advertisement I receive, to a third party of my choice, that&amp;#x27;s up to me. Or maybe I want to install ublock origin and see no ads.&lt;p&gt;It sounds like they&amp;#x27;re complaining because they have no way of detecting this or preventing it on the user client end, thankfully, because of the way browsers are architected to prevent a website from screwing with the software on your computer. The only way fb could detect or block this would be to force users to install their own fb-written browser plugin, with extensive permissions required.&lt;p&gt;Obviously fb has a high level of motivation to get every user to use their officially app-store-published android or ios app, where the whole experience is centrally controlled, and such a plugin is impossible to use. Rather than having the user browse facebook in Firefox or Chrome or Edge.&lt;p&gt;If I can display something on my own computer screen it&amp;#x27;s my right to choose to share it however I damn well please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rizpanjwani</author><text>This looks like a strawman dressed in false dilemma. With Cambridge Analytica debacle, as I understand it, it was a facebook quiz hosted by facebook and the data collected from facebook directly and used for nefarious purposes.&lt;p&gt;This is a an extension developed by researchers asking users to install it on their machines and used exactly as advertised: scrapes advertisement data that facebook shows them.</text></comment>