Facebook bans, sends C&D letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension

https://www.techspot.com/news/91650-facebook-bans-sends-cease-desist-letter-developer-unfollow.html

by mmastrac • 5 years ago

1513 583 5 years ago

akersten3• 5 years ago

A ban? Fine, whatever, their house their rules.

A cease and desist for making a browser extension that automates a process that any user could themselves do with no special "hacking" required? Absolutely absurd, I hope there is no legal basis for this threat.

NotPractical• 5 years ago

If there is a legal basis for this threat, I guess most browser extensions are at risk.

e92• 5 years ago

It’s probably because extension was recording usage of Facebook. They are cracking down on any type of user data collection even with user consent. Which is ironic but in some way makes sense to avoid another Cambridge Analytica.

Edit: to clarify confusion, author of the extension worked with university to collect user data to use for study: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

lowkey_• 5 years ago

I imagine it's more so, at least according to the article as well, that this extension is automating user interactions.

As an example of automated user interactions: It's clearly not allowed to use an extension that will automatically follow on Instagram in order to increase your follower count.

Sadly, although this extension should morally be categorized differently, it falls into the same category per their rules — automatically following is treated the same as automatically unfollowing. (In fact, a common feature of automatic follower bots is to automatically unfollow afterwards).

ARandomerDude• 5 years ago

Facebook is an ad platform. The guy wrote a plugin that removes their ability to display ads. Now he's banned. It's pretty straightforward.

akersten3• 5 years ago

With the disclaimer that I haven't looked too closely into it - that does make things sound a little sketchier from a user privacy perspective. I probably wouldn't use the extension myself. I'm still curious how Facebook has standing just because data is being recorded about the user's browsing which happens to include (maybe exclusively) their website. Most browser extensions are capable of exfiltrating page content - are they all in target for FB to say "nah, we don't like that" on behalf of someone who goes to facebook.com with the extension installed? I would think (hope) not.

burkaman3• 5 years ago

No, the letter is here: https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a.... It's because the extension "automates actions on Facebook". Why do you say it was recording usage?

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

Given the numerous other claims and demands made in P&C's C&D, why not specifically include such a claim, if merited.

It would certainly read far more charitably toward FB on HN, in US Senate and House hearings, and at the FTC, FCC, and DoJ.

But that's just me.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

Since you linked to the Slate article, let's quote it directly:

A few months after I published Unfollow Everything, academics at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, expressed interest in using it to study the News Feed’s impact on the amount of time spent on Facebook and the happiness of the platform’s users. We began working together. The university recruited people to join two study groups: one where participants deleted their News Feeds using Unfollow Everything and a control group where participants left their feeds intact. Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information—specifically, the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups, and pages they were following and not following, both in total and broken down by category. (For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.)

Again: For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

The "data sharing" claim, which you've repeated several times in this thread, is as bogus as any other FB have proposed.

trangus_19852• 5 years ago

Fine, whatever, their house their rules

When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".

Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

throwaway6734• 5 years ago

There are multiple other ways to contact people. I haven't used facebook in almost a decade and have zero issue communicating with people

bragh2• 5 years ago

If you do not like the rules set by them, you can always build your own social network.

willis936• 5 years ago

This argument gives the platforms more credit than they're worth. It's been obvious for half a decade that social media is bad for mental health. I've cut it out of my life. I tell others to cut it out of their life. No one's under the impression that these platforms are good for anything. They're popular now, but they are not important.

slx26• 5 years ago

Yeah, I always defend there should be a "law of scale". When you start making your own project, taking a risk, spending hours and hours working on something, it's fair for a single individual to have the right to make any calls in what they are doing. But when it expands to thousands of workers and millions of users (or even much, much less), your responsibilities and reach can not be the same anymore. Saying "I built it" is no justification. The growth and the contributions that are making something possible, users included, do not support the logic of "my house my rules" anymore.

This wasn't particularly related to this specific case, and visions and missions of companies should still be respected, but society does have a very warped concept of "property" when it involves their work or ideas.

retrac• 5 years ago

Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

Yes, actually. It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network. If you wanted to use an answering machine not sold by Bell, you had to get it custom rewired by Bell and pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege:

AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'"
Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service.

It was challenged and the seller of the amplifier device ultimately won in federal court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... (Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.)

riffic5• 5 years ago

lol, ma bell did exactly this and more.

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

All these large technology platforms are as ubiquitous as utilities, as powerful as governments, and as unregulated as can be. Their network effects and access to capital gives them unusually strong protection from competition, and also the ability to just copy smaller competitors with impunity. After all, what legal action could a cash-tight startup take up against a behemoth with a war chest in the tens of billions of Dollars? Given their size, scope, and the lack of healthy competition, they need to be reigned in. We need to treat social media platforms like we treat telecom services - as common carriers. And we need to treat other large tech platforms as public utilities as well.

Clarence Thomas on treating social media as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p...

Eugene Volokh on treating social media as common carriers: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media...

root_axis2• 5 years ago

Nah. Nobody needs to use FB to communicate, there are many dozens of available communication platforms, you can't even sign up for FB without a phone number anyway, this idea that FB is some critical communication infrastructure is totally false.

pengaru2• 5 years ago

Facebook isn't a monopoly, as evidenced by their recent outage resulting in 70M new Telegram users overnight.

Even so, as others have pointed out, the telcos did have arguably reasonable restrictions placed on what one could connect to the network.

But to put glorified web sites in the same class as government-sanctioned monopolies utilities tend to necessarily be is asinine. Your telco had to run physical wires across the land, gas company physical pipes everywhere, there was no practical means of a free competitive market, it's a completely different situation.

krapp3• 5 years ago

When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".

Facebook is nowhere near the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, as evidenced by the fact that the world didn't crash to a halt when it went down a few days ago. It's merely popular, but being popular doesn't mean it controls society or dictates its rules.

Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

That would be a valid comparison of Facebook owned the infrastructure of the internet, but they don't. It's trivially easy to communicate without Facebook.

londons_explore2• 5 years ago

It's probably for using the Facebook name or logo.

They could even potentially argue that the names of the "unfollow" buttons and associated URL's (which are in the code of the extension) are copyright facebook. The source code has things like:

    getElementsByClassName("oi732d6d ik7dh3pa d2edcug0 qv66sw1b

Which are very much on dodgy ground...

Even a very weak legal argument is enough to win when you're fighting someone who doesn't have the budget or desire to even show up in the courtroom.

chii2• 5 years ago

those element names have no creative attributes, and i would argue those individual element names do not constitute a copyrightable work.

The contents of the page (including the source code) is the copyrighted work.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

The full cease and desist is posted here: https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

It’s not strictly about automating API requests. He was also using Facebook’s trademarks (easy target for valid C&D requests). He was also using the plugin to collect data from users, including some very detailed data for a subset that opted in to a study. Facebook doesn’t take kindly to people making extensions that use their trademarks and collect user data, no matter how trivial.

jjulius• 5 years ago

Facebook doesn’t take kindly to people making extensions that ... collect user data, no matter how trivial.

The hypocrisy here is absolutely hilarious.

akersten3• 5 years ago

He was also using Facebook’s trademarks

Seems like the only potentially legally valid part of it. And even then, if he's not misrepresenting his product as made by Facebook (just "compatible with Facebook" or "use while you're on Facebook") I think it's still a stretch. Can a cottage industry survive without ever being allowed to even name the companion products for which the extension is designed?

topicseed• 5 years ago

What if they don't reply WITHIN 48 HOURS? It's a big decision to take, would a judge later down the road look at this in any way?

James-Livesey2• 5 years ago

A copy of each and every version of any software code You have developed or used to interact with the Facebook websites and/or services, including any libraries, frameworks, ...

Couldn't one maliciously comply with this particular order? Especially 'used to interact with', which could be interpreted as 'used in the process of development to interact with'. I feel like if I were them, I would in this case send a whole copy of the Linux source code (seeing my PC runs it); Chromium (to 'interact' with Facebook); WebKit (or similar browser-side dependencies that your extension somehow interacts with) etc. Not forgetting to send every version of the aforementioned software!

Might be bending the rules just a bit (/s), but hey, at least I'm on the safe side by including absolutely everything!

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

He was also using Facebook’s trademarks...

There's a distinct difference between using a trademarked term descriptively vs. in trade. The phrase "for Facebook" is clearly the former.

I'll note that on the Mozilla Firefox Extensions site, there are presently 1,305 results for the term "Facebook", the first of which ... is from Mozilla itself, "Facebook Container", by Mozilla Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=facebook

The Facebook Container page doesn't even include the usual trademark-infringement-bane I was going to suggest, "'Facebook' is a trademark of Facebook, Inc. Any and all other trademarks are properties of their respective owners."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

Google Play's store doesn't provide the helpful results counts Mozilla's does (perhaps Mozilla could provide Google assistance with online search technology), but does reveal a wealth of third-party entries referencing Facebook.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=facebook

FB's and P&C's action here doesn't pass muster as casual enforcement of trademark claims.

(The prospect of genericising "Facebook" on the basis of this fact ... would be interesting.)

The user-data collection was truly de minimis; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806696

2pEXgD0fZ5cF• 5 years ago

I hope there is no legal basis for this threat

Does that really matter? If a malicious company like Facebook wants to ruin your life and drown you in lawsuits, they are able to do so. By the time it is determined that the person under attack by Facebook is actually in the right, the damage will be done.

croes3• 5 years ago

Not so fast. What if you bought games in the Oculus store? You can't just ban someone and remove his access to paid software because of a browser extension. What about my computer, my browser my rules?

jessaustin8• 5 years ago

This piece by the actual developer, linked within TFA, seems better:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

fotta• 5 years ago

Discussed yesterday too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788821

londons_explore2• 5 years ago

Neither the techspot nor the slate article link to the tool the entire article is about.

Here is a direct link to the tool:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfollow-everyone-...

Why do news organisations resist linking users to the source of news so heavily?

burkaman3• 5 years ago

That's a different extension. They can't link to Unfollow Everything because he was forced to take it down.

jessaustin8• 5 years ago

That seems pretty bad. They used the threat of a lawsuit to govern his use of a completely unrelated platform owned by a different firm. I'm sure the courts just love this shit, but that would only show how fundamentally unjust the courts are.

Is there something wrong with the linked extension? Is its existence contingent on FB lawyers not identifying the developer?

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

This doesn't seem to be the same tool. The letter cites "Unfollow everything for facebook"

standardUser3• 5 years ago

I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. My feed is now a very limited selection of gaming and media posts that I enjoy immensely. No politics at all and almost nothing in my feed from actual individuals that I know. I ended up enjoying Facebook again, even if in a very different way.

It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.

jessaustin8• 5 years ago

Their business model is based on doomscrolling.

javajosh5• 5 years ago

Good anecdote! In fact, I don't see why FB is doing this at all, as it seems to be against their self-interest. Heck, it never occurred to me to unfollow everyone; it may make the platform bearable/usable. (I went on a "brief" fb pause over a year ago. Just never had a reason to go back, except to say hi to friends that I don't have other channels to. But the cost/benefit doesn't really work out. Unfollow Everything would change that calculation for me.)

prepend2• 5 years ago

I did something similar and I probably open every few weeks or so and it’s great.

It would be nice if I could easily switch between networks but I have to keep the same pared down list of people and things I follow.

It reminds me of Google circles where you could have more fine grained networks.

ViViDboarder• 5 years ago

I use RSS to follow media posts rather than people.

ok1234562• 5 years ago

There's no getting away from politics if you live in somewhat of a swing state. My feed is full of AIPAC, conservative think-tank, and posts by the local guy who just doesn't want his property taxes on his $3 million dollar estate to go up $200/year. All of them paid for. All of them have no way of "unfollowing".

There is nothing in my follows or "likes" that would indicate that this is anything I'd be interested in. It's just as bad as the broadcast TV ads that they "disrupted:" indiscriminate, obtrusive and unwanted.

walrus015• 5 years ago

It's tedious but it is possible to click on the context menu next to an ad, then click "why am I seeing this ad", and then click "never show ads from this source again".

Now that I think of it, a client side extension that automates this process, would be an interesting thing. Generally the same idea as the extension mentioned in the top post, which automates the client-side of unfollowing everything, but for attempting to 'block' ads from everything. I wonder if they've rate limited that...

Marsymars• 5 years ago

All of them have no way of "unfollowing".

If you unfollow all your friends/pages, your feed will be empty and will look something like this: https://romanvesely.com/static/b031d9ff5bb48d618d1226fb363a9...

rndmind• 5 years ago

Yeah, that surmises why I left facebook back in 2014. When all of my older aunts started joining the site, I thought to myself "man... this is just not what it used to be, this isn't cool anymore."

Looking back when I left in 2014, facebook has turned into 4chan but worse because its connected to real life identities. It's an utter garbage fire and I laugh at the users of it.

technion• 5 years ago

I live in Australia and a substantive portion of my advertising feed is for US politics. Right now I'm looking at a Bible quote on an advertisement for the Texas abortion bill, and yesterday I had a picture of a roadblock and an ad that said "Texas is Full". I've had tonnes of advertisements about that my pillow guy's events.

You'd think "targeted advertising" would encourage people to limit their payments to people in the correct country.

malka• 5 years ago

If your feed is totally empty, Facebook has nowhere to put the ads.

thomascgalvin2• 5 years ago

I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago.

I did much the same. I unfollowed every page, and any person I hadn't seen in person within the past year.

My Facebook is now a carefully curated list of people I like, and cat pictures. It's done wonders for my mental health.

trident5000• 5 years ago

Thats great for you and others should give this a try. However, its unfortunate that if everyone did do this facebook would simply force an undo of that action...removing the unfollow feature and subscribing everyone again or whatever it may be.

decodebytes• 5 years ago

Is this the same as unfriending?

standardUser3• 5 years ago

No, you can mute any friend (or any page) without them knowing, but I think the term they use is unfollow.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. ... I ended up enjoying Facebook again, even if in a very different way.

Facebook and other social media platforms actually gives users a lot of tools to tailor their feeds. Muting or unfollowing people (leaving the friend connection intact) should be the go-to operation for anyone who's always posting things you aren't interested in.

The other half of tailoring your feed is learning to embrace the like button. If you see something you like, click the like button. Sounds simple, but I know a lot of people who refuse to click the like button because they dislike the concept of like counts, but they forget that it's one of the primary mechanisms for telling the algorithms what you want to see. The more you like content, the more you'll see it.

tmp_anon_22• 5 years ago

Do they provide bulk tooling or automation APIs to do it effectively?

ohashi2• 5 years ago

I feel like they also are trying to send me content that upsets me to get me to engage. Mute one conspiracy theorist and all the others start getting moved up in my feed.

bryan_w• 5 years ago

It would nice if they offered some sort of lambda that could run against your entire newsfeed inventory that would rank the stories. You want most recent? OC first? MSI first? Fine it's just a simple function that you would be able to provide (in hack).

This way advanced users get the feeds they want without FB worrying about creating another "API" to be discovered by NYT journalists on a slow news day

tomjen33• 5 years ago

If I click the like button, that is a public action, others can see it.

Also there is no dislike button. FB needs to understand that when I say I don't like an ad it means I don't like it, and should not only immediately apologize but also ensure I don't see ads like that again, if they want me to use their platform.

chias2• 5 years ago

I quit facebook for a couple years, but recently reactivated because the truth of the matter was that my family uses it and I missed finding out about so many things, including some marriages and births. When I reactivated, I set out to do exactly that: every time I look at my feed, I unfollow everybody who is not immediate family. It has been tedious and slow-going, but the net result has been actually pretty great.

One thing I struggle with is the tags. You unfollow someone and your feed won't include their posts anymore, but it _will_ include random posts that they're tagged in, and I haven't yet found a way to curtail this. I've used "Hide this post" repeatedly because the option text says "see fewer posts like this", but it hasn't really had an effect. Have you found a way to fix this?

3520• 5 years ago

You may be able to configure F.B. Purity [0] to your liking. I installed it last night after seeing it mentioned in another thread here and it's cut down on all of my newsfeed clutter.

[0]https://www.fbpurity.com/

sanjayparekh2• 5 years ago

I did a Show HN a little while ago but you might want to check out TogetherLetters [0]. We made it to keep going with regular updates for groups of people (friends, family, coworkers, etc.) via email. Never shared on the web and it's consistent (bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly in the free plan, weekly added in the paid plan). It might help solve some of your FOMO pain.

[0] https://www.togetherletters.com

prescriptivist• 5 years ago

I did this too and use facebook for the marketplace and half a dozen pretty active niche groups that don't have corresponding communities outside of facebook. I agree that it was tedious but since doing that I can't muster much ire toward Facebook beyond the general ire I have for everything on the internet, which I think has been a net negative for people's happiness (broadly speaking).

qudat• 5 years ago

It sounds like you turned facebook into twitter. Just use twitter.

Zak• 5 years ago

Facebook is valuable to me if the people I want to hear from post content there, not because of its UX.

cronix• 5 years ago

has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.

I'm trying to think of a for-profit business that does not do that and coming up short.

standardUser3• 5 years ago

There's lots of ways to make a profit and some companies have found ways to make user choice and transparency key selling points that endear their customers and keep them coming back. Or at least show some restraint and not engage wholesale in dark patterns, even if only for reputational purposes.

Look at GoDaddy, a near-universally despised company that has managed to become a dominant player by engaging in anti-user practices. But there's plenty of other players that profit in that same space while maintaining really positive relationships with their customers.

So while I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that for-profit businesses always and only act like for-profit businesses, there's still some room to maneuver. Facebook has clearly chosen to manipulate and data mine every single user to within inches of their lives in what amounts to a scorched earth policy.

cyberpsybin• 5 years ago

I did the same. Spent a month blocking, unfollowing any political page that might appear. Blocked all people who post political content and now the feed is so clean for last 2 years.

Another key thing is to simply not install FB on phone. Only use it once a day when on desktop. Such a nice tool to connect with old friends otherwise.

jsemrau• 5 years ago

Everytime I read posts like these it makes me wonder how much of this is really the truth? The notion of you-are-not-enjoying-fb-because-you-are-doing-it-wrong is regularly popping up on those discussions threads and it really feels like orchestrated corp-speak.

soylentnewsorg• 5 years ago

This is the big takeaway here. Companies thinking they are a monopoly, crippling their product to extract maximum short-term value (the MBA doctrine), and destroy the business long-term, because they now have an inferior product.

Less and less people are using facebook. Most (worldwide) never did in the first place. But an ugly man compensates for insecurity about his physical appearance by pretending he has more power than he does, despite him in reality having plenty of power to feel secure.

Facebook: you want to do something in an automated way? Enjoy your two day clickfest. Real life: yeah, I'm going to just use something else, and people coming of age will laugh about this legacy antiquated service.

Do you know how you get a fresh start without this process you found tedious? Put in a bunch of fake info into your profile, then just leave the account alone, forever. Then go somewhere else. Facebook has a large userbase. If you're not there for the other users, why in the world would you not use one of the hundred other similar services?

Now, as far as my personal opinion: facebook should lose the lawsuit. This extension is a script run by the user. There might be something that says the user has to click and can't run scripts, that the user agreed to. Facebook then has a case, against the user, and should start suing their users. Facebook has no standing against the people who wrote the script, but are not running it against facebook servers. I am free to write any piece of code, that does anything, as long as I don't have a contract with Facebook saying I won't. This is called freedom of speech, and a government does not have authority to make me stop. And a private company has no enforcement authority, because they're a company, not a government.

denton-scratch11• 5 years ago

Less and less people are using facebook.

So I hear. This is the trajectory of all social-media sites; they cease to be fashionable and hip, as their early users (late teens to early 20s) move on. What remains is then children, old fuddy-duddies, politicos and advertisers. So they become even less fashionable and less hip. Consider Myspace.

What surprises me is that Faceache has lasted so long. If I were into gambling on stocks, I'd be shorting Faceache.

smsm42• 5 years ago

You can clean up the FB feed. I've been doing it for years when I used it. FB purity plus adblockers plus ruthless unfollowing builds you a pretty clean feed after a while. But one day you realize - or at least I did - that no matter what, every time you go there, every time you click on any link, every time you read and react, every time you post - you contribute to it, and with it you strengthen the company's position and their chokehold on public discussion space, and their dominant position in the business of connecting people. No matter what you do, if you do it there, it's to their benefit. I kinda admire the genius of it, but you have other options.

If you don't like what FB as a company is doing, the only way to resist it is not to play. So eventually I abandoned my carefully constructed feed and went to look for better pastures.

raindropm• 5 years ago

I did that too, seperate 'friends' and 'interest' account and never make it overlap, ever, and occasionally 'pruning' who you follow. I somehow enjoy what I used to hate again. It's powerful tool.

Sadly, I think very few people use it this way, billions of people use it as all-in-one hub, and that leads to disaster we see nowadays.

majani• 5 years ago

I did the same thing a few years ago, but my usage of FB dropped off a cliff after I cleaned up my feed. I am no longer even a daily active user. I can see why they want it to be an endless quagmire of mental junk. There's definitely a correlation between that and time spent on the site

oauea• 5 years ago

First facebook tries to take down the entire internet with their bgp spam, and now this?

anonu• 5 years ago

The threat of a lawsuit when the big guy has infinite resources is a scary proposition. Dealing with this can easily cost the developer $10s of 1000s. Basically, corporate bullying. Its not right...

0x4d464d48• 5 years ago

Zuckerberg mentioned how much pride he and the team at Facebook take in their products.

I wonder how much pride they take in users saying the experience is enhanced by orders of magntiude when they unsubscribe from their feeds...

busymom03• 5 years ago

That's why I never watch those hearings or read whatever empty words these people say. Only care about actions. The hearings have pretty much become a way for politicians to grandstand for cameras and partisan politics while the CEOs get to lie and make untrue claims without any consequences.

Actions > Words.

sharklazer• 5 years ago

True, but has this ever not been the case? Pols and Execs alike want great (or at least not bad) sound bites. They perform on an act on a stage.

eddiezane• 5 years ago

~10 years ago when I still had Facebook for campus events I remember installing this extension and loving it. Glad to see it still exists.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo...

magicroot75• 5 years ago

This is like saying that a restaurant owner should consider that his patrons would be happier if their meals were all free. One can take pride in a product while also placing stipulations on it's use.

tzm• 5 years ago

FB also demanded a list of every single domain the developer owns. Seems egregious.

busymom03• 5 years ago

That demand sort of tells me FB is "reaching" too much and may not have much teeth.

In the recent 2020 ruling for VAN BUREN v. UNITED STATES, Supreme Court states that:

"An individual “exceeds authorized access” when he accesses a com- puter with authorization but then obtains information located in par- ticular areas of the computer—such as files, folders, or databases— that are off-limits to him."

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf

To me this means that as long as OP's extension is only doing stuff which their authorized cookie/token etc is authorized to do, they should be fine. Also it's not the OP who's doing these actions, it's the end user who's using the extension to achieve authorized activity. So I don't see how OP's extension is in the wrong.

Only valid claim FB might have is about using trademarked data and any data collection maybe. But the end user using the extension to perform authorized actions (even if automated) should be okay imo.

Btw, link to FB's letter for those curious:

https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

javajosh5• 5 years ago

I went looking for the (Chrome) Extension and found:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfollow-everyone-...

It's called "Unfollow Everyone" though. Is it the same thing? The only clue about the developer identity is the email address, 'easwarismyname@gmail.com' and the developer is "TMP".

I'm curious -- if FB pressures Goog to delist the extension, would this open them up to anti-trust action?

Also I wonder if the Everyone -> Everything was a mistake, or an intentional misdirect to avoid a Streisand effect?

burkaman3• 5 years ago

That's a different one. Unfollow Everything has been taken down.

zhengyi13• 5 years ago

would this open them up to anti-trust action?

IANAL. I understand anti-trust regs to work at a market level. FB asking for an extension that interacts solely with their wholly-owned, private platform doesn't affect the larger social media market at all.

outside1234• 5 years ago

Regulate Facebook now

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

The developer should let the FTC know.

heavyset_go2• 5 years ago

I've made a post here[1] about getting in touch with the FTC, the US Dept. of Justice, and states' Attorneys General offices when it comes to companies like Facebook stifling innovation and competition.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27924908

marstall• 5 years ago

I unfollowed everything manually a couple years ago - on Facebook and twitter. still use both tools, but I feel it's much more under my control. Haven't looked back or missed anything.

What possible basis would Facebook have for preventing people from managing their own account in this way, improving their lives? Insanity.

StatsAreFun• 5 years ago

Is there a chance the EFF might defend this solo developer?

asdff4• 5 years ago

Even EFF can't take down goliath

lightsurfer• 5 years ago

This company is worst than Exxon by at least an order of magnitude. Exploiting humanity and consciousness. What a level of audacity. Eventually MZ will be removed to rebrand.

threatofrain• 5 years ago

Big prior discussion from yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788821

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

The timing of this is interesting. The letter is dated July 1, is this a repost or has this been reported earlier already?

TravisHusky2• 5 years ago

The cease and desist seemingly has no real legal basis, but I mean you can send a cease and desist for anything you want. My mom was building a shed on her property, some neighbors didn't like it so they had a lawyer send a cease and desist with no legal basis. My mom ignored the C&D and is enjoying her new shed.

The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else. It's complete abuse of process, and really should be dealt with more harshly than it is.

JadeNB• 5 years ago

Even more ominous than a cease & desist is a cease & decease, which is how the article (presumably inadvertently) describes it.

ineedasername• 5 years ago

Stop it & die!

It would be an appropriate way for Facebook to phrase their C&D considering the forms that cyber-bullying take on the platform

walrus015• 5 years ago

Give the source code to the extension to a developer located in an impossible legal jurisdiction like Afghanistan. Let them publish it. Good luck to Facebook hiring a lawyer and trying its luck in the Taliban's court system. Even before the collapse of the previous government in Kabul it would have been a near impossibility.

Eikon• 5 years ago

And then, where to publish it? On a website based in an American jurisdiction? On some browser extension store?

Great idea.

JulianMorrison3• 5 years ago

Do you want a Facebook own-brand drone army? Because this is how you get one.

FromTheSteppe• 5 years ago

I'm a developer in Iran willing to do this, email in the profile, just in case the owner wants to and reads this.

mrtksn• 5 years ago

That's actually... interesting. It's a well established tactic to go to another country and publish your stuff from there if you like to keep annoying a government or institution. You know, Snowden is in Russia, some Russian journalists are in EU countries. It happens all the time since ever.

What if someone creates a Telegram group where developers from hostile countries(like US&Iran, UK&Russia, Japan&China) pass each other projects that are not obviously illegal but not feasible due to risk of persecution?

In this case, If FB thinks it has a case can try its luck by sending Google a scary looking letter then proceed to compel Google to remove the extension by court order.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Oh yeah, find someone that wants to be a target of a major US corporation in Afghanistan/third world.

You forget we have Guantanamo where people were "renditioned" with little or no legal basis either in the US or otherwise, and I believe there are people in Guantanamo that have no publicly provided evidence to be there?

All it takes is waiting for some politically opportune reason to enact a little dragnet and getting someone on some CIA list with little evidence, and BAM, You're in something like Guantanamo or even worse (client torture security services, assassination, etc).

Yes we withdrew forces, but we've been there a decade and likely have a large network of CIA contacts that would kill or injure a random Afghan civilian.

The US Government is a very very very very dangerous entity to anyone in the third world should you get on their radar. They are dangerous to US citizens with the Padilla case, antiterrorism law overreach, no fly lists, and a variety of other harassment techniques.

The state department and CIA are power extensions of the corporate elite in the United States. We have toppled regimes for oil... minerals... even bananas.

Russia would be far better.

matheusmoreira14• 5 years ago

Better yet: anonymous git hosting as a tor hidden service. Now there's nothing they can do but rage at all the "unauthorized" extensions giving users control over their little platform.

manquer• 5 years ago

Even better fund organizations like EFF to take cases like this and make sure there is legal precedent that gives a strong footing to all developers.

Hiding in other countries is a not sustainable solution, they are going to force extension stores to remove it etc payment gateway not to process you, pushing you as a dev to the fringes and silence others

The chilling effect is the real aim, they are effectively signaling that they can come after anyone who pisses their business model of.

pixl97• 5 years ago

Would this be considered a SLAPP?

bathtub365• 5 years ago

It’s impossible to tell since there isn’t a lawsuit

cyral2• 5 years ago

Not a lawyer but I believe that only applies to actual lawsuits. Anyone can send you a C&D and you can choose to ignore it. It will cost at least $300 to consult with a lawyer to even write a response. If the other party really believes they are right, they will sue you.

c2h5oh• 5 years ago

That would require a lawsuit IIRC, but it does have a some legal ramifications - I remember reading somewhere that C&D would make it easier for the recipient of it to sue.

It definitely doesn't help their image or any antitrust lawsuit FB might be facing.

javajosh5• 5 years ago

Tangentially, I wonder why both the words "cease" and "desist" are necessary. Aren't they synonyms? Perhaps it's just for emphasis?

morsch• 5 years ago

It has an interesting history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet

fogof• 5 years ago

They are slightly different in meaning. Cease = Stop doing it. Desist = Don’t do it again.

dlivingston• 5 years ago

“ A legal doublet is a standardized phrase used frequently in English legal language consisting of two or more words that are near synonyms, usually connected by "and", and in standard orders, such as "cease and desist".

The doubling—and sometimes even tripling—often originates in the transition from use of one language for legal purposes to another… To ensure understanding, the terms from both languages were used. This reflected the interactions between Germanic and Roman law following the decline of the Roman Empire.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet

celticninja• 5 years ago

Cease is more like stop doing something you were already doing, where is desist is More like don't even start it.

So perhaps they should be cease or desist.

citizenkeen• 5 years ago

My law professor told me it was a temporal phrasing: stop doing it (cease), and don't do it in the future (desist). Otherwise I could stop for one day, or in the age of the internet one minute, and then begin again: I would have ceased and resumed.

smileysteve• 5 years ago

A much more related example of ignoring of ignoring a Cease and Desist is the one that Zuckerberg received from the Winklevoss twins as he and Eduardo were marketing The Facebook -- only it had some legal basis.

lacker3• 5 years ago

The cease and desist seemingly has no real legal basis

It seems pretty straightforward to me - the Facebook terms of service say that you won't make scripts that interact with the Facebook site except through approved APIs, the cease and desist is telling him that he is breaking this agreement. There's no lawsuit involved, Facebook will just enforce this themselves by banning the account and making the script not work. It's not a big deal, this probably happens hundreds of times a day for various bots that people make that manipulate Facebook in different ways.

asdff4• 5 years ago

I feel like websites shouldn't be able to just ban scripting. What if I have a disability and a custom script is the only way I can interface with fb?

salawat• 5 years ago

They can't ban the account. The account would be the downloader's and presumably, would auto-generate unfollow actions just as a user in a browser would manually. If they break the script, they'll probably break the unfollow UI for legitimate human user's and create evidence that they employ dark UI practices as a core part of their business strategy, which would be a P.R. nightmare.

Messing with this is a lose-lose for Facebook.

newhotelowner• 5 years ago

If they could ban the account, they would have done it.

Extension is more like a automated tool. Don't need any permission from Facebook. User can install the tool, and click on a button to unfollow your friends.

Facebook could write TOS for his users not to run a script on their website.

I write scripts (userscripts) all the time. I have a script for Gmail that I use it all the time. Gmail doesn't know that.

Talanes• 5 years ago

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

The actual timeline of events doesn't match what you think would happen. They banned him and then used the threat of a lawsuit to get him to take down the extension/code.

akudha2• 5 years ago

demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services.

How is this legal in any shape or form? It is a browser extension, running on users' browsers, installed intentionally by his users. This is insane. The level of arrogance and entitlement here is mind blowing.

unclebucknasty2• 5 years ago

How is this legal in any shape or form?

IANAL, but have some experience with this from a business matter, resulting in obtaining advice of counsel.

And, yeah this is not a criminal matter, but a civil one, so you're right that the developer isn't likely in civil breach unless they are using FB resources (e.g. API or SDK) that they access under agreement with FB and are violating.

The irony is that if the FB standard user agreement prevents users from, say, using software to programmatically access the site, then it's the user of the extension who would be in breach with FB.

So, as long as the developer doesn't use the extension on their own FB account, then FB doesn't have much to stand on (and even then the C&D would only be applicable to the developer's use of the extension as a user).

On a related side note, if the extension actually did something not related to a specific account (e.g. scraped a public profile while not signed in), then even the user would likely not be in breach, as there is no affirmative assent (i.e. clickwrap) to terms of use required to simply visit the site.

rmah2• 5 years ago

It's legal in the same way it's legal for me to demand that you never eat tomatoes again. It's also legal for you to demand that your neighbor turn off his TV. Anyone non-government party can pretty much demand anything from anyone else. It means next to nothing. Not trying to be snarky here. It's just that I find it odd that so many people seem to think that the law is about what's permitted when it's really about what's not permitted. At least in the USA.

Arrogance and entitlement on Facebook's part though, that I agree with.

matheusmoreira14• 5 years ago

The level of arrogance and entitlement here is mind blowing.

Yeah. They put a server on the internet but we're not supposed to talk to it. We can only do it on their terms. Gotta control those users so they don't hurt a billion dollar company's business interests.

I remember the pirate bay's responses to legal threats. That's exactly the kind of reply Facebook deserves.

chrisseaton2• 5 years ago

How is this legal in any shape or form?

Are you asking how it's legal that you can demand someone to do something?

How is anything legal? Because there's no law against it. There's no law against demanding something. You can demand (almost) anything of anyone you want.

quotemstr2• 5 years ago

How is this legal in any shape or form? It is a browser extension, running on users' browsers, installed intentionally by his users. This is insane. The level of arrogance and entitlement here is mind blowing.

Google banned the Chrome extension "bypass paywalls" for doing nothing bad except annoying Google's friends.

This is why walled gardens are bad. It's not Google's place or Facebook's place or Apple's place or anyone's place to tell me what programs I can run on my own computer.

chemmail• 5 years ago

They think they own the internet. But in some countries they do.

javajosh5• 5 years ago

How is this legal...

In theory, legality is the Judge's opinion of the law applied to circumstance. To even approach this state is extremely expensive and takes a great deal of time - on the order of years.

So, for the most part we're all on our own. And in that context, legality doesn't matter. At all. What does matter is leverage. The justice system itself is, ironically, most often used as leverage, not as a service for determining legality, but as a threat of the expense and time of getting to that determination.

It's sickening, but that's how it is.

XCSme• 5 years ago

My mom was building a shed on her property, some neighbors didn't like it

Note that depending on the country, you might still need authorization to build any structure on your own property.

ethbr03• 5 years ago

I recently moved into a neighborhood with a stricter HOA, after avoiding them for most of my life.

My plan is to wait until February 2022, and build the ugliest golden Trump mailbox I can slap together. Then, when they ask me to take it down, request an appeal, and film the ensuing meeting. Then, send said video to Fox News et al. Then, run for HOA on a platform of abolishing the HOA.

... I really don't like neighbors telling me what I can and can't do.

TravisHusky2• 5 years ago

Yeah; she had the permits. It was kinda funny from the outside because people kept complaining to the county and the county kept pushing back saying it was approved. That shed must've been inspected 3 separate times because of a couple of neighbors who didn't even live on the same street but I guess were just bored.

The neighborhood has an HOA but the HOA actually had no actual rules because they were not properly registering with the county when they made bylaws (where my mom is all HOA rules have to be submitted to the state, otherwise they are not enforceable). Gotta love HOAs.

blocked_again• 5 years ago

My mom was building a shed on her property, some neighbors didn't like it so they had a lawyer send a cease and desist with no legal basis
The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else.

Convincing people that America is the land of the free, is the biggest trick the devil has ever pulled.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

Nobody has ever been “free” but damn are we a whole lot more free than most humans in the history of civilization.

UglyToad• 5 years ago

Yeah this is the problem more generally with the legal system both in my home country of England but especially in the US. As one hn user put it so perfectly recently "the process is the punishment".

I think a lot of people in the software bubble don't realize what a huge sum even $100 is for the average person, the law only affords power and protection to the rich and already powerful.

panta• 5 years ago

The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else.

There is no certainty in the legal system, they could very well win even if they are in the wrong. More so when they can employ an army of lawyers and put economic pressure on the system.

ransom1538• 5 years ago

"The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold"

Meh. Just show up. Don't hire lawyers. File motions all day to see more evidence.

65102• 5 years ago

and in this case: bring journalists and popcorn

AlexandrB• 5 years ago

Contrast this action with this paragraph from Zuckerberg's statement 2 days ago:

At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?

This ban is the answer the rhetorical question in the last sentence: Yes, this is exactly something a company focused on profits over people would do. Whatever corporate-speak tweaks Facebook makes to the news feed, the one thing it can't abide is people actively choosing what they experience on the site.

asdff4• 5 years ago

I can barely stand reading any quotes from that man. So blatanly two faced.

Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?

This is like BP patting themselves on the back for barely cleaning up an oil spill they themselves caused, and saying "see, we aren't evil, we did the bare minimum necessary to get some puff pieces in the press for us"

neither_color• 5 years ago

Anyone have the source so we can build it ourselves?

cproctor• 5 years ago

I have been thinking about the difference between human users and computational agents. There is a widespread pattern of enforcing that only human users may interact with a service, not computational agents. Running a user-installed extension is one example; additional examples are CAPTCHAs, account verification by phone number, or services which refuse to provide API access such as banks.

Sometimes the reason is to protect users (e.g. banks), sometimes to protect the service from abuse. But often the reason is to ensure value can be extracted from users (e.g. serving ad impressions) or the power that can be exerted over users. Regardless, I believe this comes down to power: computer scientists understand that acting through a computational agent is fundamentally more powerful than acting directly as a human user. Computational agents can operate at scale, they provide virtualization (e.g. throwaway identities), and thereby conserve the ultimate scarce resource: our attention. Many systems seem to have computational power asymmetry as their fundamental principle: as little human contact on the system's side as possible; as much human contact on the user's side as possible.

If there's any path ahead that avoids a totalitarian nightmare resulting from asymptotic concentration of power, it depends on cultivating a more widespread understanding of computational power and developing new social norms and policies. As a CS educator, this is one of my top priorities.

wussboy• 5 years ago

I haven’t thought about it like this before. Thank you.

userbinator• 5 years ago

Knowledge is power... and they don't want you to have too much.

Imagine if almost everyone knew that they could use things like userscripts and stylesheets to enhance their browsing experience. Or that DRM can often be cracked by changing a single byte.

This is why the war on general-purpose computing started. There are some things they don't want you to know because they'd lose control.

rektide2• 5 years ago

I have what feels like a religious belief, that denying humanity the ability to use tools to explore, to poke & prod & pry at the virtual materials in front of us is Anti-Enlightenment, flies in the face of the godhood & what nature & destiny & whatever provenance might be has built in creating mankind.

No material in the universe has ever been resistant to understanding, to probing, to exploration. It's from this exploration that humankind has emerged & whatever of greatness of civilization that we have has been built. These mechanized systems that we legally are not allowed to explore or work is one of the most de-humanizing hells I can imagine.

Humanity as we know it can not endure in a world where we are never allowed to understand or go further. Shame on any company or law that acts otherwise; they are monsters.

Thank you for your very succinct well captured write up. Humankind seems desperately in need of a defense force, needs to be able to grasp what an existential threat forced-consumierzation is, how radical of a historical upset this juncture we're at is. I 100% agree that giving people insight & visibility & faculties to work with, understand, see, & monkey with computers is essential to keeping our core liberaties alive, in an increasingly mechanizing & automating world.

quantified2• 5 years ago

This is why large roomfuls of people spend their days curating a set of social media profiles. It’s a jobs-creation policy for the lower rungs of cyber-scamming and mischief, while maybe discouraging it from getting out of control. Eg [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/02/click-far...], was looking for other references too.

matheusmoreira14• 5 years ago

But often the reason is to ensure value can be extracted from users (e.g. serving ad impressions) or the power that can be exerted over users.

Yeah, I assume this is the most common reason. This needs to be fought on principle. It doesn't matter what their terms and conditions say. It doesn't matter how much money they lose. We should always have full control. We should be able to block their advertising. We should be able to automate our browsers. We should be able to turn our user agents into cyberweapons against them.

This is legitimate self defense against their abuse. We're talking about a company that gets people addicted to bullshit feeds so they can make money by showing ads. Of course an "unfollow all" button is necessary. They won't provide one because they want us addicted to their feed. So we'll provide one for them.

People spend their days on social media because they're addicted to it. If a browser extension can somehow help people break free, it's objectively a good thing for humanity. If this world was just, courts would rip Facebook a new one if they dared to waste their time with this stuff.

ddingus2• 5 years ago

Thank you. That is good work.

TeMPOraL3• 5 years ago

Computational agents (...) conserve the ultimate scarce resource: our attention. Many systems seem to have computational power asymmetry as their fundamental principle: as little human contact on the system's side as possible; as much human contact on the user's side as possible.

That's the key thing nobody is telling people about the so-called "attention economy": it's whole point is to make things as inefficient as possible - because money is made on the friction. In order to make money off attention, companies need to capture it (thereby making you spend it on something else than what you wanted to). To make more money, they need that attention to last longer (thereby making you spend more time, and/or spend it more often, on things that make them money).

Seen this way, it's clear why services hate end-user automation: their whole business is causing the very friction the users would like to automate away.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

Another element is that time is the ultimate zero-sum, nonfungible, rivalrous resource.

Time spent on FB is time not spent on another site. And the higher-friction FB can make activities (to the pain point of driving away users), the better for FB.

There's a similar notion in other areas, and one of the most ridiculously malevolent examples I can think of is a brick-and-mortar sales promotion gimmick: a furniture store would run a midsummer sales event on a weekend where every family visiting the store would receive a free gallon of ice cream.

Because if you've just put a gallon of ice cream in your trunk, you can't visit another furniture store, you've got to head home to put it in the freezer. And time not spent in a competitor's furniture store is time not spent assessing and purchasing their products.

(That leverages the sunk cost fallacy as well, among others.)

selfhoster11• 5 years ago

That's the key thing nobody is telling people about the so-called "attention economy": it's whole point is to make things as inefficient as possible

Thank you for putting that thought into words.

denton-scratch11• 5 years ago

This motivation doesn't seem to have much to do with the friction that banks introduce.

My bank is not showing me ads (or at least, not paid ads - they advertise their own services). The friction comes from the authentication process. I must produce a username, then a password, then a personal secret (a relative's middle name), then I have to cross the room and get this device, activate it, key in a PIN, and read an access code from the device's display, that I have to type into the browser.

The password and the relative's middle name amount to the same thing; it's just a longer password.

I'm OK with the device - "something you have". It's annoying, but it's the only bit of robust security in this loop.

I'm OK with the username/password ("something you know"), although I question the value of the password - it amounts to just an extension of the username. The middle-name business is just silly. And of course, the password I use is 12 characters long, and I have to look it up in a password safe, because it's not memorable.

I can't see what possible benefit there could be to this bank (a very large international bank) from increasing the friction of authentication. They are not showing me ads during the 3-minute authentication process; if they make it hard for me to authenticate, then they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs.

fnord77• 5 years ago

Humans are the product that facebook sells to advertisers, data brokers etc.

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

And the whole gosh darn thing is one sided and hypocritical.

They badly want to bot the #%^* out of us.

ByteWelder• 5 years ago

or services which refuse to provide API access such as banks.

Just as a sidenote/fyi: In Europe, the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) requires banks to provide API access to payment accounts.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/intro/mip-online/2018/html/18...

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

How can this C&D have any legal basis? This person is providing an extension that is just a piece of software for a browser. The user can choose to 'violate the terms of service' or not. But browser automation isn't something Facebook has the standing to block, I would think.

Also how do they feel about Social Book Post Manager (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...), an extension that lets people delete their Facebook history selectively (like all your video views), in bulk? This seems like a basic feature any trustworthy social media platform or technology company in general should provide. But since Facebook doesn't, someone made an extension that helps users out. Unfortunately this extension is out of date and doesn't work in 2021 because it doesn't have '2021' as an option in their date filter, and because Facebook's continual UI changes to the activity log seem to be designed to break this extension, since they certainly provide no benefits to users.

Can some hacker here who has the skills please make a tool to help lay persons clear their posts/comments/likes/etc. one by one for Facebook, Instagram, and the rest?

cyral2• 5 years ago

C&Ds often have questionable reasoning to back them up. Any lawyer can write something that sounds scary to get you to stop. Whether they are actually interpreting the law correctly is up to the courts, and Facebook knows most people give in because they don't want to chance it or spend money fighting it.

jerf• 5 years ago

One trick they can pull out in the future is to write into the terms of service that you can't use the service to develop extensions manipulating the service. Then they change something, anything to make the extension not work. If the extension gets fixed, clearly someone broke the terms of service.

Watch for a terms of service update from facebook.

I had a company fire this at me back in 2000 or so. It worked, in that it wasn't worth dealing with the issues and I stopped. It didn't work in the sense the company is long gone anyhow....

voodootrucker• 5 years ago

I just did this manually in protest.

christoz• 5 years ago

I'd tried to unfollow as many as I could by tapping, at some point after 50 taps Facebook blocked me form further tapping, I don't even remember how I got to the list of all individuals - groups - pages, I am using mobile web version. Clearly Facebook won't make your life easy in this

nvr2192• 5 years ago

Here is where you can download the extension

Here's the extension zip files that were archived from the Chrome Store. You can get all versions back to 1.0.

https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid... https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid... https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid...

They are CRX (Chrome Extension) files, some manual steps needed to unpack, or change .zip to .crx and open with Chrome. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...

Install Instructions: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...

spiderfarmer• 5 years ago

I didn’t know about this extension but now I do. Thanks FB lawyers.

leeoniya• 5 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

SilasX4• 5 years ago

Chrome doesn't require extensions to be signed? Or hasn't revoked the signature?

gnicholas• 5 years ago

I could be wrong, but I think you can side-load any extension locally. About 3 years ago Google made it impossible to have users click a link on your website and install that way (which some people referred to as side-loading), but I think you can still enable dev mode and side-load a downloaded file.

gizmo686• 5 years ago

The linked instructions involve loading the unpacked extension in developer mode. There isn't really a way of preventing that without crippling the ability of extension developers to develop their own extensions.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

I recommend avoiding all browser extensions unless they come from well-known developers (eg 1Password) and they’re downloaded and installed through official channels.

Browser extensions have a lot of access to your browsing activity and can phone home as well. One of the reasons this extension was sent a C&D was that it was sending some data home to the author’s server. That might be what the install instructions above are hinting at with the warning to examine the JS and remove any phone-home code. The original author defended the data collection as just enough to make sure the plug-in was working, except for study participants who apparently submitted much more information through the plug-in. Either way, I wouldn’t rush to install a plug-in that was caught sending any of my social media data to a 3rd-party server.

I certainly would not install a browser extension from an unknown 3rd-party website just to spite Facebook, regardless the claimed origin of the code.

cryptoegorophy• 5 years ago

One of the reasons I stopped using chrome was “extensions” I had 2-3 popular extensions like Adblock and something else. They were leaking information for every page I visited! I contacted the “source” where I saw my information leak but there was no reply and nothing. Either chrome itself leaks that info or one of the popular extensions.

1vuio0pswjnm76• 5 years ago

No extension is needed. (I never use extensions for anything.) Unfollowing all friends is not complicated and can be done in a couple of lines of shell script, or using whatever programming language or HTTP client one chooses. Obviously, curl would work. There are a hundreds of ways to send HTTP requests. It is a very simple protocol. No POST requests are even necessary, only GET.

1. Log in to Facebook

2. Open "Developer Tools" (F12), select the "Network" tab, locate "Request Headers", Alt-click on "Cookie:" and select "Copy value". Use this in each HTTP request. Do not log out yet.

The URL for the Friends list is

   https://mbasic.facebook.com/friends/center/friends/?ppk=1

where 1 is the page number.

Using m.facebook.com as the domain will also work. There 10 friends per page.

3. Extract the UID for each friend from the HTML and create the new "unfollow" URLs.

   grep -o "uid=[^&]*" 1.html|sed 's>uid=/https://mbasic.facebook.com/a/subscriptions/remove?subject_id=>'

4. Log out.

Done.

3np2• 5 years ago

Quite a few extensions have source available; you could survey the code and build it locally and load it from zip (Firefox) or crx (Chromium)

nvr2192• 5 years ago

The instructions I linked to have examining the javascript and removing all phone home stuff as step one. Considering this is hn I didn't feel like I had to point that out again.

temp8964• 5 years ago

My first impression is that if you need a program to help you unfollow, you seem to have a problem already…

MobiusHorizons• 5 years ago

I don’t think anyone is arguing with that. It’s just that the problem is not rare (unfortunately)

kayxspre• 5 years ago

Not really. With the confusing interface Facebook introduced (even the Activities Log where I used to find logged actions more easily), it has become more difficult to find the list of people/pages followed. It's not surprising that they would often look for tools that can simplify the process instead of finding a needle in Facebook's own haystack.

stackedinserter• 5 years ago

Understandable, because (anecdotally) it turned out to be the most effective way to get rid of Facebook. Over a couple of weeks I unfollowed all the friends and communities, and ended up with clean page that asked me to add more friends. Since the place turned to barren land with no life, I simply stopped coming there.

mdoms• 5 years ago

It seems like this guy straight forwardly violated their terms of service.

wesleywt• 5 years ago

I guess C&D and ban is another way to treat your Facebook addiction.

mlboss• 5 years ago

It would be nice to have the extension source code on github.com. We can all create and install the extension locally.

bsd44• 5 years ago

Why is this worthy of media attention? As much as I despise social networking websites, I don't see anything wrong here.

annoyingnoob3• 5 years ago

What makes this browser plugin illegal software that is worthy of a ban?

What else can Facebook demand that its users use or don't use?

krapp3• 5 years ago

What makes this browser plugin illegal software that is worthy of a ban?

It isn't illegal. Facebook isn't a legislative body or a court, it can neither create nor adjudicate law.

And you can read Facebook's case via their cease and desist letter linked in the article.

What else can Facebook demand that its users use or don't use?

Outside of their platform? Nothing, obviously. They're not going to break into your house and burn your books or anything.

rglover• 5 years ago

Can anyone who works at Facebook speak anonymously about what's going on over there? They seem like they're in full authoritarian meltdown mode...

bridgestanding• 5 years ago

Typically these are done because the author was caught scraping data from users of their extension, or this was a significant risk that they would be able to. Then the developer goes to news to create outrage to get their extension re-approved.

Basically to prevent Cambridge Analytica from happening again.

fullshark• 5 years ago

Seems so short sighted, if some subset of users prefer another version of FB, give it to them to make sure they don't leave. The value of FB is the network, keep it healthy instead of doing whatever you can to increase ad real estate.

unobatbayar• 5 years ago

Interesting that people still use Facebook, even after everything that has happened and happening.

hwers• 5 years ago

Great ad for the extension, I wanna try this now.

wrboyce• 5 years ago

I received a C&D from Facebook many moons ago. I was a young man and absolutely shit myself, to the extent that I don’t even have the source code anymore. All I did was publish some CSS to make Facebook look a little less shitty.

ben_w2• 5 years ago

Eesh.

Ironically enough I was thinking recently about how, content aside, Facebook’s UI is as bad now as it was in 2010.

SMAAART• 5 years ago

Long time ago I took the time to unfollow 99% of my "Facebook Friends" and get out of groups and pages that were of no interest to me.

So now I follow a handful of friends and a few pages of interest to me, it's quite interesting.

VieEnCode• 5 years ago

In a similar vein, I've been using News Feed Eradicator:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

jordwest2• 5 years ago

Creator of NFE here. Given this news I feel it's just a matter of time before we go the same way as Unfollow Everything.

So many users tell me they avoided deleting Facebook thanks to News Feed Eradicator, so killing it would really be shooting themselves in the foot for a short term gain, but it would not surprise me one bit.

MR4D• 5 years ago

Is there a GoFundMe page we can donate to for legal defense Yet?

smashah2• 5 years ago

How come Teller API is (apparently) 100% legal and has massive VC backing but there is possibility of legal grounds for this blatant bullying?

Just shows that tech is more scared of Facebook than massive established institutions.

warkdarrior• 5 years ago

For banking specifically, you have the Open Banking initiatives around world, including the PSD2 directive in Europe, which requires that APIs for banking should exist and be offered to all.

There is no regulation or other government directives requiring social media companies to provide APIs open to all.

smashah2• 5 years ago

I know about PDS2 which is why I specifically bring up the example of Teller. They literally use mobile clients and reverse engineer banking protocols manually then expose them as APIs to their customers.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/teller-api?comment=483805

I support teller in this endeavour.

TheRealDunkirk• 5 years ago

Everyone who says they've done the same thing is probably guilty of the cardinal sin of social media: linking to accounts you really have no business linking to. The underlying problem is connecting to everyone you recognize and everyone who asks. On Facebook, I only befriend people who are actual, real-life friends. (Currently a paltry 148.) Life changes and moves on. People who fall off my radar get unfriended. It's pretty simple. And, of my friends, I mute those whose posts I find annoying and/or spammy. The people who are "friends" with thousands of people? That makes ZERO sense for anyone, and you have only yourself to blame for a news feed that is nutty and bizarre. I get it. We're all still working out how to live with an antagonistic service that we can't live without, but I have settled into this approach, and I can promise it works much better than gaming your number of contacts.

noasaservice• 5 years ago

I logged into FB with chrome (normally use ff). Got the plugin, and ran the unfollower.

Now, my FB feed is empty. It's pretty nice and now tamed. I don't see the usual inflammatory garbage Fb always tries to entice me with.

randall• 5 years ago

Fwiw I have adhd and (by necessity of my job) spend a lot of time on fb. Newsfeed eradicator has been very useful for me.

tonetheman• 5 years ago

Glad Facebook is really working to make their platform more safe. I mean this is clearly worse than the treason, sedition, antivax and genocide normally seen on their platform.

justapassenger• 5 years ago

I'd assume that ~trillion dollar company can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Especially, if you look at Facebook history, siphoning data from there (that this extension was also doing) brought them one of the biggest scandals (cambridge analytica).

sedatk• 5 years ago

Here's the first-hand account of the extension's author: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

annadane2• 5 years ago

One of the worst things that could have happened to Facebook is the whole Cambridge Analytica thing; now they can always just hide behind the veneer of "we disable scripting/API access to x degree because something something hand waiving black magic user safety third party developers and do you want another scandal like we had with CA" even when they may be completely different situations

eigengrau5150• 5 years ago

Isn't this basically a prelude to a SLAPP lawsuit?

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

Who is SLAPPing whom?

If FB were retaliating to a lawsuit against it with actions of this sort, yes.

As it stands, no, this is simple intimidation and coersion on the part of FB.

goldenManatee• 5 years ago

Oh look, Facebook trying to make themselves more popular with us this week.

Karawebnetwork2• 5 years ago

a tool that unfollows all connections automatically, potentially making the social network less addictive and depressing.

Having done this manually, I can attest to the increase in the quality of my feed. Every now and then, I need to do the manual work again.

I'm glad that Facebook has streisand effect this extension, I'll look into installing it.

rytill2• 5 years ago

As someone who doesn't have Facebook, what actually appears on your feed at all when you've unfollowed all connections? Wouldn't your feed be empty?

Karawebnetwork2• 5 years ago

Groups, pages and family members that I have not blocked.

Some of the posts Facebook shows to everyone and the ads.

The video widget list that shows what is pretty much embedded Instagram videos.

And quickly enough, the "you've reached the bottom" message and end of scroll. I can't remember its exact wording, but the way it's displayed makes it seem like a bug or glitch. It shows that they did not expect users to get there.

NackerHughes2• 5 years ago

So... where can I download the extension?

mort1merp0• 5 years ago

See nvr219 comment above

NackerHughes2• 5 years ago

Thanks!

For any others as unobservant as me: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...

quickthrower24• 5 years ago

Ha ha. Streisand Effect!

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

"This is so upsetting. I am going to continue to use Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, then buy an Oculus VR headset. That will teach them"

- Average Facebook user

annadane2• 5 years ago

I don't like this line of reasoning and you see it all the time on Reddit: "Oh, you dislike Facebook but I bet you still use Instagram lol!"

The existence of a company being scummy shouldn't lead to consumers being blamed. This is ridiculous. If anything it should be a GREATER cause for regulators to break them up immediately

baoha• 5 years ago

Someone should create a gofundme page for the guy to fight this nonsense in court.

1vuio0pswjnm76• 5 years ago

If Zuckerberg had not ignored a C&D letter (from the Winkelvosses lawyer), there would be no Facebook.

Once Mr Barclay is no longer using Facebook, then whatever "browsewrap" agreement was created between Barclay and Facebook is arguably no longer in effect. Whatever provisions survive do not include a prohibition on using automation.

The Terms state

"If you delete or we disable your account, these Terms shall terminate as an agreement between you and us, but the following provisions will remain in place: 3, 4.2-4.5."

The prohibition on automation is provision #2.

Even if you believe that Facebook can bind non-users to these Terms, then you also have to consider that most courts have refused to enforce browserwrap agreements to begin with. For websites trying to enforce browserwrap, there is a recurring problem with the question of consent. Generally, the website has the burden of proving the user read and understood the Terms.

But let's assume Facebook can get past this hurdle. Let's consider the "automated means" provision. Is it enforceable. It is unlikely a provision like this one in a browsewrap agreement has ever been reviewed by any court. Facebook's provision is extremely vague and ambiguous. What is "automated means". It is the essence of a computer. If browser extensions are banned, why not state this explicitly. For example, Facebook-approved web browsers without any extensions all use automation to request image and JavaScript resources. Users do not manually request those resources.

The clause itself states

"You may not access or collect data from our Products using automated means (without our prior permission) or attempt to access data that you do not have permission to access."

But the UnfollowEverything extension does not access nor collect data.

It is arguable that (a) for any ordinary user, using UnfollowEbverything does not violate the Facebook Terms and (b) that it is only the usage of this extension by researchers who were otherwise gathering behavioural data that triggered the C&D letter. We already know that Facebook fears researchers studying the effects of its (scripted, automated) website on users.^1

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20210806191005/https://www.wired...

In the Facebook Terms, Facebook itself admits to using automation:

"And we develop automated systems to improve our ability to detect and remove abusive and dangerous activity that may harm our community and the integrity of our Products."

It is 2021, and courts in Northern California are well-aware that automation is useful, for everyone. They would also understand that unfollowing friends results in no loss to user privacy. Nor does it interfere with any ads.

But let's assume Facebook can overcome these hurdles and a court in Northern California agrees with the ridiculous arguments Facebook's lawyers would have to make. Imagine (a) Facebook manages to affirmatively prove Barclay consented to the browsewrap that no one ever reads and (b) he understood that using UnfollowEveryone was a violation of the Terms. What would Facebook claim as damage/loss for Barclay's alleged "breach".

As an aside, this bit in the Terms is amusing

"We do not control or direct what people and others do or say, and we are not responsible for their actions or conduct (whether online or offline) or any content that they share (including offensive, inappropriate, obscene, unlawful and other objectionable content)."

It is easily arguable that Facebook does seek to control/direct what users do as it forced Barclay to spend hours in order to unfollow each of his friends by pointing and clicking.

Facebook attempts to control and direct what users see and do when using the website, rather than allowing users to make their own choices. That seems beyond question.

Ajay-p2• 5 years ago

This seems like it would fall under Anti-SLAPP if taken to actual court.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

SLAPP is specifically an action in response to a civil claim or other public criticism.

The extension itself isn't such a public participation action. Facebook's C&D isn't a SLAPP.

Facebook and Perkins Coei's letter are simple intimidation. Quite arguably monopoly abuse as well, which might interest the US FCC, US FTC, and CA State AG.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

Ajay-p2• 5 years ago

What if Facebook sued? Then would it be SLAPP?

iainctduncan• 5 years ago

FWIW, I just do this by never going to the feed. Ever. I open FB on my messages, check my handful of groups (who I sure wish were on forums, but aren't...) and never see the crack flavoured candy.

Also, a wonderful tool is Stylebot. You can make CSS overrides to hide auto suggestions, "you might need this dopamine rush", "other addicts got addicted to this" and all that crap. Makes reddit actually usable.

CosmicShadow• 5 years ago

What I want to know is how do we keep making things worse for Facebook?

quickthrower24• 5 years ago

Well we could all tell everyone we know about the extension. Chuck it in your slacks #random

Edit: I chucked elsewhere on social media and will slack it on Monday.

m0zg• 5 years ago

Reminds me of how many years ago I advised a guy who was being sold a real shit instrument at a musical instruments store that what he's about to buy is a waste of money and he shouldn't buy it. I also explained why that is. Things got heated and I was asked to leave, as well. :-)

gdsdfe• 5 years ago

This maybe why the no-code low-code movement, if can call it that, maybe be very useful. If one can easily create such an app and run it for themselves, what Facebook are gonna do ban everyone from their platform?

Ansil8496• 5 years ago

Facebook engineers lurking on HN reading this: you are complicit in things like this by developing the technical infrastructure that makes it all possible. If your motivation is money, you can absolutely find that employment elsewhere.

AdrianB13• 5 years ago

Shaming does not work, otherwise FB would have no engineers at all; the fact that FB still exists is a proof it does not work, so what is the point?

Ansil8496• 5 years ago

I genuinely feel like shaming and social ostracization should be way more commonly used. If suddenly you stop hanging out with friends who work at outfits like Facebook, if they stop being invited to dinners, are socially shunned, then I genuinely believe it will have a net positive effect.

The problem is that bad behavior is normalized and rationalized in our society, 'everyone needs a paycheck.' This legitimizes working for companies like this.

urda• 5 years ago

Every employee and Engineer that is currently at Facebook is involved in this mess. Every one of them are complicit. To the FB Engineers reading this: it is a saddening you have chosen to use your talents to build dangerous technologies instead of technologies that improve our lives.

int_19h8• 5 years ago

It might also work in a sense that FB has less qualified engineers than they would otherwise have. Which would cause their quality of service to be less, hopefully. Which would provide some advantage to their competitors, and/or annoy some of their users into leaving.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

One reason FB pays what it does is that it can. Demand.

Another is that it must. Supply.

There are those who respond to recruiter contacts with "Please tell M.Z. F-U personally for me."

For those who do work at FB, we're well aware of the price of your soul.

ectopod• 5 years ago

I'm not making any kind of moral judgment here, but as a simple matter of fact shaming absolutely does work. That's why people hate it so much.

laweijfmvo2• 5 years ago

Disclaimer: Facebook employee.

This is a perfectly valid opinion to make, but I think everyone doing so should disclose where they work.

Additionally, I would hope they apply the same scrutiny to all companies that are harmful or don’t provide value; for me, that would include (non-exhaustive list): tobacco, alcohol, soda, fast food, junk food, high-frequency trading, gambling, and any company that is currently not or does not have an actionable plan to become carbon neutral, and that’s just off the top of my head.

Or we could just let people (and by extension advertisers) decide for themselves.

Ansil8496• 5 years ago

I definitely agree with your point that Facebook is not a singular problematic entity and not even in a singular problematic industry, it's just the one this thread is about.

Or we could just let people (and by extension advertisers) decide for themselves.

That's the idea of shunning though. People can make their own decisions to work wherever they please, and in response to these choices other people can likewise decide to disassociate with them.

Nextgrid2• 5 years ago

A lot of the industries you mention don't try their hardest to get my attention and monopolize online social discourse. Facebook does.

Alcohol bottles, cigarettes, sodas, burgers and high-frequency traders don't follow me around everywhere to get me to drink them. Facebook does.

Alcohol bottles don't monopolize socializing and drinking; I can still go to the bar with alcohol-drinking friends even though I would only order a soft drink. Facebook tries to, there's no way I can communicate with Facebook users unless I am also on Facebook and accept the ToS and "privacy" policy.

cybernautique5• 5 years ago

I've railed against FB and employees in previous threads, but this is already a negative thread. Thank you for engaging openly and honestly. I find your perspective refreshing, and shockingly similar to my own. I'm a self-employed contractor, for reference.

aserdf• 5 years ago

the banality of evil on display?

ummonk2• 5 years ago

Of those companies, the only one that's a big employer of HN audiences would be HFT companies, which are more in the space of "don't provide value" than "harmful". Arguably most social media is actively harmful.

fighterpilot2• 5 years ago

  "high frequency trading"

It's wrong if you think HFT belongs in a category like tobacco. HFT has significantly reduced rents collected by market makers and significantly reduced bid offer spreads, and most importantly it doesn't kill people and doesn't destabilize democracies. They've automated market makers and brought scale economies and the efficiency of technology to the game. It's a great thing on net. The race to the bottom incentive for speed leads to some waste but that pales in comparison to the benefits.

zestyping• 5 years ago

I honestly would really like to know what you think and feel about this. I'm so curious because your perspective seems like it must be so different from mine, so I'd like to understand.

How serious do you think the problem really is? How much of it do you think Facebook is responsible for? What would you do if you were in charge?

davidgerard• 5 years ago

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism

nix23• 5 years ago

tobacco, alcohol, soda, fast food, junk food, gambling

They all provide a value...it's called FUN, too much Fun is never good but a little bit is.

Your comparison lacks the basic understanding of having a good time.

jonas212• 5 years ago

This comment is the sort of toxicity that's become commonplace on other social platforms (including Facebook) and that I come to HN to avoid.

Ansil8496• 5 years ago

You have it backwards. This is a _response_ to toxicity and people willingly associating and enabling this toxicity.

cybernautique5• 5 years ago

Highly agree in the means, not the ends. I'm also rabidly anti-FB, to the point it's had a detrimental impact on my social life. It's a cost I knowingly walked into and one I'm happy to bear. Take a look at my public posts: I categoricaly think FB and their employees to be immoral.

Shunning is likewise immoral.

lanza• 5 years ago

Ditto. Issues like Facebook's role in society are nowhere near as simple as reddit and twitter make them out to be. Posts this naive and simplistic being upvoted is kinda ominous for the future of HN.

Oddskar4• 5 years ago

"Ugh, please don't bring morals and ethics into our technical discussions"

victorvation• 5 years ago

Facebook engineers on HN are not sending out C&Ds.

Ansil8496• 5 years ago

No, but:

you are complicit in things like this by developing the technical infrastructure that makes it all possible

shepherdjerred2• 5 years ago

The responsibility lies with the company, not the cogs who are there for a paycheck.

slickrick2162• 5 years ago

Nah everyone has a choice. Facebook engineers choose theirs. Don’t infantilise them.

ummonk2• 5 years ago

You make it sound like Facebook engineers are unable to work elsewhere.

phy6• 5 years ago

"They're just doing what they were told to do"

denton-scratch11• 5 years ago

Software engineers earn pretty fat paychecks; they don't have to check their ethics as they enter their workplace.

I once refused to work on a project for the USAF, and I think that decision limited my pay and promotion. But I still own my own home, and have an adequate pension.

Isn't "I'm just a cog" what the defendants at Nuremberg have usually said?

dom962• 5 years ago

If your motivation is money, you can absolutely find that employment elsewhere.

Genuinely asking: what alternatives are there that HN doesn’t consider “evil” and can provide the same remuneration and working environment?

Also consider that not every FB employee works in the Bay Area.

Oddskar4• 5 years ago

How about /not/ getting the same amount of compensation, and being able to spend every day making the world a better place (or at least, not a worse one)?

I have made that choice. For me it was a simple one to make.

grumblestumble• 5 years ago

This is the kind of malware I can get behind.

Danielsauck• 5 years ago

quotemstr2• 5 years ago

HN: "How dare Facebook ban this extension! All it does is let a computer do automatically what a user could already do on his own. Ridiculous!"

Also HN: "automated facial recognition is bad"

8note• 5 years ago

If you are banned by Facebook, does that mean they will stop tracking you?

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

No.

"What’s a Facebook shadow profile, and should you be worried about it?"

You can thank anyone who allowed Facebook to scan their mobile phone contacts through the “find friends” feature. When someone uses this feature, Facebook downloads all of a phone’s contact data to its own servers. This includes mostly emails and phone numbers. At the same time, Facebook is also collecting harder-to track data on how you and all your friends and friends of friends are connected to each other. That’s how it finds people to recommend for its “people you may know” feature.

The company’s mobile app even tells you it will do this...

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/facebook-shadow-profiles-pr...

eyeareque• 5 years ago

If they ban you does this mean that they stop tracking you and saving data about you? Sounds like a win.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806504

indianhippie• 5 years ago

I wrote a custom script for myself about two years ago to do the exact same thing! It’s still publicly accessible in my GitHub gists. I had no idea that others will find it useful.

I unfollowed everyone. Then I added a selective few to follow. I have tweaked who I follow and who I unfollow over the last two years to give me a balanced news feed that I enjoy. Basically twitter behavior but on FB.

lilSebastian• 5 years ago

Delete all accounts, block all social media endpoints at DNS level. Nuke the site from orbit...

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

We have a serious information overload problem and the level of control provided by that extension is infinitesimal to what should be routinely available to all users.

gitowiec• 5 years ago

I don't get it, what is cease-and-decease letter? I'm not from US

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

A letter asking someone to stop doing something, usually from a lawyer, and typically with an explicit claim that the act is illegal and either explicit or implicit threat of imminent legal action if the request is not complied with.

dredmorbius15• 5 years ago

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-a-cease-and-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease_and_desist

ubermonkey• 5 years ago

Is there a way to do the same thing in Firefox? BC I don't really want to run Chrome.

GuB-42• 5 years ago

I am actually curious about the need for such an extension.

What's the point of reading your Facebook feed if you don't want to follow anything? Just don't read your feed. I kind of like the fact that my feed is so terrible, it makes me want to leave quickly and not come back.

Facebook is good to get in touch with friends, it is excellent to organize events, mostly because of its popularity. But when it comes to the feed, for some reason, for me, it has a signal to noise ratio close to zero. Even content coming from real friends I hold in high regard is terrible, as if Facebook makes the worst out of people. The best I can hope for are moderately funny jokes and memes, beside that, nothing is salvageable.

spurgu2• 5 years ago

I used to use custom friends lists to achieve the same effect (although I've been off Facebook for maybe a year now), I only saw content from explicitly whom I chose to add to those lists.

Now however when I just checked I can't seem to find a way to browse those "custom friend" feeds anymore. They're located under Friends -> Custom Lists but that only takes me to editing them (seemingly without a purpose). Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to actually use (browse using) those lists or if FB has discontinued the functionality?

spurgu2• 5 years ago

I'm still able to create a new list and there it says "Create a list of people so you can easily share with them and see their updates in one place.". Weird.

shimonabi• 5 years ago

This is exactly what I did to all my "friends" a few months ago, but only manually.

The algorithm then went crazy and proposed my country's "Melinda Gates/McKenzie Scott" as a friend.

nstart• 5 years ago

As much as this sucks, I can’t say that I’m surprised. I made a script to unfollow everything 2 years ago (and I did the same to Twitter). Shared the script on GitHub gists so the few people who were willing to open the console and paste the code in would do so. Several people asked me to make an extension. It would have been trivial but I refused because I figured that would put me on FB’s radar and get me banned. Just running the script was nerve wracking in case I triggered some detection mechanism (I inserted random times between actions to avoid it if possible).

If I was this person I’d have done this as anonymously as possible.

What’s more sucky though is that at least with Twitter I was able to use the api for this. FB has locked down their APIs for personal use which resulted in having to script browser actions :-/

Lamad123• 5 years ago

Now I want to know everything about this person and this thing!

LudwigNagasena• 5 years ago

I still can’t believe that there are so many people supposedly adult enough to drive, vote, manage money, etc that get tricked into some sort of addiction by Facebook algorithms. Really makes you lose faith in democracy.

anaganisk• 5 years ago

People were tricked since the dawn of human intelligence, algorithms are just a way. How else do you think cults or even hitler rose to power. How do u think Putin is still a president. How else do u think people are more attached to lines on a map, rather than living in a global brotherhood.

godmode2019• 5 years ago

I did this a few years ago to make Facebook boring, unfollowing is not enough you also need to add and follow random people from groups you have no interest in.

Spanish rap groups for example, then like every post by these people.

It worked really well, when ever I went on by habbit there was complete random stuff in a language I didn't understand.

Also try and follow only males for obvious reasons and disable people being able to find you and write to you wall.

This completely broke facebook and broke the habbit.

Over the years of going on once a month I starting getting to know these random people.

This male model from Pakistan who posted duck face photos, nice guy.

I would like something to delete all comments i have ever made, one by one if anyone knows the script.

sabujp• 5 years ago

you can do it using this script : https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28 , login, go to your news feed settings -> unfollow -> scroll down all the way to the bottom of the list (it won't work unless you do this!), then copy paste the script into the developer console.

UPDATE: I had to run it a few times, somehow even though it logged that it had unfollowed all of the items, there were still ~40 left the 2nd time, 3 the 3rd time, at which point i just unfollowed the remaining friends/pages manually.

amin• 5 years ago

He could counter-sue Facebook to at least get back on the platform, if he wants. A Dutch politician recently won a lawsuit against LinkedIn, which banned his account for posting sensational nonsense about COVID. The Dutch judge ruled that LinkedIn was within the law to remove his posts, but also that a lifetime ban was disproportional.

zeruch• 5 years ago

That's going to escalated quickly. The Streisand Effect at "web scale"

notananthem• 5 years ago

Damn I downloaded and ran the unfollow everything extension and my timeline is BARE. It is amazing and now I'm just wavering on deleting it entirely. Thanks for highlighting this cool extension.

Facebook bans, sends C&D letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension

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