Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/05/facebook-requires-social-fixer-browser-extension-to-remove-key-features?r

by selmnoo • 13 years ago

124 92 13 years ago

shaggyfrog• 13 years ago

What About AdBlock? Why Not Go After Them?

Because it's too popular and too many of their users have it.

I asked about both of these cases, as examples, and I was told by the person at Facebook that she was not aware of these apps or Pages, but would check into them.

Yeah, right. I'm sure they've got top men working on it right now. Top men.

RexRollman4• 13 years ago

The real fix is not to use Facebook in the first place.

walid• 13 years ago

Yup! That is what I finally fell back to. At first I was worrying about all the stuff that I will miss but realized that as long as I was worrying I will never stop using Facebook.

Btw, do you still use Facebook?

RexRollman4• 13 years ago

I haven't had an account in years. I stopped when they started playing games with their privacy settings.

pdonis8• 13 years ago

From the article:

every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users

Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt.

Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, not users. So benefiting users only helps them if it increases their ad revenue. That might happen indirectly if an improvement to the FB user interface gets them more users or keeps existing users on the site longer so they see more ads. But FB already has a billion users, and many of them already seem to spend most of their available free time on FB, so the relative benefit to FB from improving the UI is going to be pretty small.

Finally, I think it's worth mentioning a historical parallel that seems relevant to me. I believe pg mentioned in one of his essays that many companies who made third-party Windows software ended up basically doing market research for Microsoft: MS just took all the popular features from third-party apps and added them to their own apps. Developers of FB apps like SocialFixer seem to me to be in a similar position. Caveat programmer. :-)

[Edit: I see that the "End of the Power User" article that was linked to hits some of these same points.]

jasonlotito• 13 years ago

they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders

I wish the meme that this is the only thing a public company can do would die. It's not true in any way.

selmnoo2• 13 years ago

I too wish the meme would die, but not because it's not true, rather because it's overused a lot as a reply.

As I understand it these companies do in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to make every move be one that benefits their shareholders. Can you please voice your thoughts on how that is not true?

mbesto• 13 years ago

It's not true in any way.

Care to elaborate? This is pretty fundamental to almost every single business I have ever heard of...

matwood• 13 years ago

You're right in the way most people try to apply the meme, but the meme is true. What's best for the shareholders is supposed to have a very broad interpretation where nearly anything a company officer does short of fraud would count.

mattkruse6• 13 years ago

Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt.

This is a very short-sighted view, common to many companies. The BEST way to satisfy the stockholders is to create a fantastic product that users love, long-term. Example: Amazon.

Unless your primary interest is creating a short-term bubble and profiting before it pops, which seems to be the mentality of many investors and companies these days.

I don't like that attitude. I'm not looking to get rich quick. I'm looking to do cool and interesting things. And if I get richer in the long term, all the better.

pdonis8• 13 years ago

The BEST way to satisfy the stockholders is to create a fantastic product that users love, long-term.

In other words, you agree with me that a publicly traded company must make decisions that benefit the stockholders. You just think that "benefit the stockholders" should be evaluated on a long-term basis, not a short-term basis. But there are two key points that you have not mentioned:

(1) Creating a fantastic product that users love benefits the stockholders to the extent that users are a source of revenue. In Amazon's case, they are, directly; revenue comes from users coming to the site and buying stuff. (And from buying services like Amazon Prime.) In FB's case, users are, at best, an indirect revenue source: more users spending more time on FB means more ad revenue. That's a much weaker link between a good user experience and stockholder benefit.

(2) How long-term the calculation of "stockholder benefit" should be depends on the stockholder's time horizon. If I'm investing in a company as a means of giving myself retirement income in 30 years, obviously I'm interested in the company's long-term health, not the next quarter's returns. But if I'm investing on a shorter time horizon, I'm going to want benefits to show up more quickly.

Half a century ago, most stock ownership was by individuals, so the scenario of someone buying shares in, say, IBM and holding them until retirement was actually common enough to have a significant effect. But now most stock ownership is by mutual funds; my 30-year retirement income doesn't depend on how any single stock does for 30 years, only on how my mutual fund does over that time horizon. Mutual funds trade individual stocks all the time based on short-term performance, so to the companies, it looks like everyone's time horizon is a lot shorter, and they act accordingly.

I'm not looking to get rich quick. I'm looking to do cool and interesting things.

Just to be clear, I am not saying you are wrong at all in having this attitude. I am only commenting on the difference between what you want to do and what Facebook wants to do.

pdonis8• 13 years ago

Unless your primary interest is creating a short-term bubble and profiting before it pops

I don't think that's FB's primary interest, exactly: I think FB's primary interest is in capturing an overwhelming market share in social media during the window of opportunity when that market, worldwide, is not yet saturated. But that ends up making them do many of the same things they would do if their primary interest were creating a short-term bubble and then profiting before it pops.

RexRollman4• 13 years ago

"Facebook gets its revenue from ads"

It is interesting to think about today's big tech companies and how they make a majority of their money.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter = advertising. Microsoft = software. Apple = hardware.

Of the three companies who make most of their money from advertising, Twitter seems to be the most ethical, although going public might change that (Facebook is creating profiles of non-Facebook users and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that Google is creating profiles of people who email Gmail users but don't have Google accounts).

bookface• 13 years ago

What makes you believe that Twitter isn't doing that? If you're willing to speculate that Google is creating "shadow profiles", why not Twitter?

wpietri3• 13 years ago

Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt.

Citation needed.

Also, this is a false dichotomy. Nobody is splashing patchouli on their tie-dyes before marching on Menlo Park to demand that Facebook's servers be liberated for the masses.

The only dispute here is whether Facebook's short-term fixation on control is bad for the long-term health of their ecosystem, which is by far the company's largest asset.

pdonis8• 13 years ago

The only dispute here is whether Facebook's short-term fixation on control is bad for the long-term health of their ecosystem, which is by far the company's largest asset.

But what is FB's "ecosystem"? Is it just their current users? Or is it all their potential users, including those who do not yet use FB at all? I think FB believes that it's the latter, and that it can capture the most value from all those potential users by exerting tight control over the FB user experience.

More precisely, I think FB believes that the costs of exerting tight control over the FB user experience (i.e., the discontent it causes among some fraction of existing users) are far outweighed by the benefits of capturing as many potential users as possible and making them stay within the FB walled garden. To capture new users, the UI doesn't have to be good; it just has to be good enough, and "good enough" to someone who hasn't yet used FB at all is a low bar.

The real test will come when the market saturates and the above reasoning no longer applies. Based on what other companies in similar positions have done in the past (with Microsoft being the #1 example), I don't expect FB to loosen control very much, and to the extent they do, it will be, as I said in another post in this thread, more to allow third party developers to do market research for them than anything else. But we'll see.

blibble3• 13 years ago

the solution to this sort of thing is to always wrap yourself in a limited company...

company formation in the UK costs around £20 and then you're personally immune to this sort of legal bullying

ksrm• 13 years ago

How so?

blibble3• 13 years ago

so say a new shiny product (an extension) is produced by a newly founded company (smallco).

bullyco decides they don't like this and sues smallco.

what's the most the owners (shareholders) of the smallco can lose? their share capital (likely £1).

tmister• 13 years ago

I think it is a bad decision from Facebook to go after Social Fixer. From the Chrome extensions page they have ~200K installs. This is peanuts compared to Facebook's user base(compared to Google where number of Adblock installs are ~40 million combining Firefox and Chrome, it hurts Google more they can't say much about it because of fearing of criticism from their core supporters). But future will be bright for them because people are accessing Facebook more from mobile devices where default mobile browsers are very restrictive and the trend will not change for foreseeable future.

joshribakoff• 13 years ago

About 6yrs ago my friend made a script, which was essentially a pyramid scheme for adding friends. Basically it helps you find other people who want to add you, to inflate each other's egos. It blew up & I was called in to fix the performance, part of that entailed moving it to my server - about a week later Facebook sent me a cease & desist & demanded the domain name be transferred to them. Pretty lame move on their part, because we were having fun hacking the code to handle the load, etc..

seiji• 13 years ago

You realize any non-law entity can't forcibly compel you to do things, right? They can talk a big game, but it's up to them to file legal proceedings if they really want to shut you down.

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

How is "we can force you into bankruptcy by suing you" all that less forcible than "the government will fine you"?

babs4745• 13 years ago

Watch out, when I ran into a similar situation with my extension, unedditreddit. Reddit, was able to convince google to simply remove the the extension from the webstore.

Chrome makes it really difficult to install a non app store extension, so your normal user will not do it.

On the other hand, google and facebook have a more competitive relationship so maybe there is less to worry about.

seeingfurther• 13 years ago

$4.00 a month to read edited comments is why they went after you.

babs4745• 13 years ago

What makes you say that?

Tomdarkness• 13 years ago

How do you know Reddit forced Google to remove it? What was your correspondence from Google?

babs4745• 13 years ago

Reddit did not "force" google to remove it, but I know it was at least prompted by reddit. I know this from emails between myself and google.

SquareWheel2• 13 years ago

The admins asked you to remove unedditreddit years ago[1]. And for good reason. It was disrespectful to bring the tool back online after saying you'd disable it, especially when you started charging for it.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/etd52/lets_have_...

babs4745• 13 years ago

1. It wasn't disrespectful. The previous version which you refer to directly interacted with reddit servers. I said I would no longer crawl reddit and I do not.

2. There is nothing wrong with charging for something you have built, but you can check out a free version of similar tool here http://uneddit.com/faq.php it also does a good job of raising some points from my line of thinking.

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

"Even if they left my personal account alone, they could still mark socialfixer.com as being a risky and/or spammy site, like they have done for http://FBPurity.com."

That is seriously disappointing to see. I understand that, like Google and others, they have a right to filter on behalf of their users (and in some cases may be legally obliged to do so), but they're clearly in a position of power and trust in doing so. If they want to tell a user they can't post a site, and that site is neither illegal, risky or spammy, but simply something they dislike, they shouldn't suggest it is. Abuse of user's trust sucks, especially when the reason is this pathetic.

MichaelApproved3• 13 years ago

It'll take time but I think problems like these (unfair flagging a site as spammy/risky) will eventually land a company in hot water with anti-trust issues. Until that happens, this will kind of abide of trust be more widespread.

javajosh2• 13 years ago

This story should cause outrage among the users and developers (and any potential users and developers) of any software that is like Social Fixer, that is, any software that stores, manipulates, and presents proprietary data in ways that the "owner" (e.g. Facebook) of said data did not intend, for the use of a first party.

The thing that makes the FB legal threats against Social Fixer different, and more troubling than when 3rd party services are shut down, is that Fixer is a "first party" piece of software. It's not helping users syndicate information, or reselling it, or letting anyone else even look at it or use it. I'm just organizing the data that I do have into a format that is more useful to me.

If you accept that there are limits on what we do with our data, where does it stop? Am I allowed to download pictures of my friends and view them in programs that do not display ads? Am I allowed to store and search my own messages, or my friends' messages, in a program that does not notify Facebook or display their ads? If I have an Excel Spreadsheet with friends addresses and phone numbers gleaned from Facebook profiles, have I broken the law?

I can understand Facebook's concern. If it suddenly became common to run programs like this over Facebook's site, then the "user experience" will suddenly get completely out of FB's control. People might not become immune to tracking, but neither would they no longer be manipulated by feed algorithms.

FB has about as much right to control what I do with the messages my friends send to me on Facebook as Google has to control what I do with my email. It doesn't matter if the "messaging protocol" is screen-scraped from the DOM.

The key over-reaching provision is this gem: "You will not do anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of Facebook, such as a denial of service attack or interference with page rendering or other Facebook functionality."[1]

Does changing my browser window size "interfere with page rendering"? What about changing font? Or user styles? Or Ad Blocker? What if I switch browsers? What if that browser renders Facebook poorly or not at all, am I in violation? If I edit the DOM in Firebug or Inspector should I get sued?

Going after people who make tools that help me organize, manage, and control my consumption of the Internet firehose is absolutely wrong. If the Justice system supports Facebook's claim (which very well could happen) then the only alternative is to stop using Facebook, and any other 3rd party that claims not only ownership of the data you disseminate on it, but claims the right to limit your ability to organize and read your own inbox.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms Section 3.11

tedunangst4• 13 years ago

Doesn't Facebook have some right to choose what type of content they want to host? The only thing that's happened is Facebook has decided they don't want to host his page.

[Er, oops. Ignore this part. Reading fail] I mean, seriously. FBI? What do they have to do with this?

md224• 13 years ago

I mean, seriously. FBI? What do they have to do with this?

I think you might've misread "FB"...

troels• 13 years ago

They also threatened with legal action.

wpietri3• 13 years ago

And they have said things that he has interpreted as a threat of legal action. Which is why he's taking out the features.

Also, this is not a question of rights, so I think that's a red herring here.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

Hmm,

Doesn't Comcast have the "right" to decide what content it wants to scan, alter or otherwise mangle on the way to and from the Internet? Well, we know Comcast doesn't have the right to just mangle your Internet. But Facebook represents this weird gray area. The content published on Facebook isn't Facebook's content but "our" content, a wide variety of users' content. Facebook has become something like a social public utility - for good or ill, possibly for ill. Facebook rose by willingly hosting "just about anything" and it's users count on it not for its contents but for posts from their friends.

And yeah, maybe FB just throwing monopolistic weight around 'cause it can is perfectly legal and it might be morally Ok in your world but I consider your point of view evil, twisted and despicable.

JacobJans3• 13 years ago

You are absolutely right.

The only alternative is to "stop using Facebook."

The Facebook Terms of Service are an agreement that you can simply choose not to accept.

You have every right.

sseveran2• 13 years ago

I actually took Facebook up on this option last fall. I have not missed facebook nor will I be back. I no longer have to worry about them tampering with my privacy like they did so many times.

My life is definitely no worse not having a facebook account.

captainmuon2• 13 years ago

I never accepted their agreements, and still I use Facebook (and many other sites). When I clicked on "accept", I lied.

Usually, I still follow those agreements - for fear of legal actions or them deleting my accounts. But that doesn't mean that I recognize, accept, or internalize those terms.

And "stop using Facebook" is just not a realistic option for me and many others, because it has become so important for me socially.

The real solution IMHO is to regulate Facebook, and to either have its terms put under some form of democratic control, or to force them to do federation with third party services.

javajosh2• 13 years ago

The only alternative is to "stop using Facebook."

Actually, no. That is one alternative. The other alternative (and the preferred one) would be for the courts to strike down as illegal Facebook's claim that they can limit what you do with your inbox on your computer for your personal use.

gcb1• 13 years ago

power users are probably not even on facebook.

the only way to win this game is not playing.

casca• 13 years ago

Social Fixer is great - I've been using it for a while and it makes my infrequent forays onto Facebook less miserable. From what I can tell, Facebook has removed the Social Fixer page on Facebook and are requiring the author to make significant changes in order to return it. The author is going to make those changes.

Why not just lose the page on Facebook and keep developing Social Fixer? If they threaten legal action, throw the code on Github and stop development on it under your own name. Or put it in an LLC or equivalent and just liquidate if they sue. Why does capitulation seem to be the most appealing option?

mattkruse6• 13 years ago

I have a family and limited time. I could lay out an exact plan of how to do a lot of things, including get around all of this. But I just don't have enough time to implement it.

My microwave has been broken for 4 weeks and I haven't had time to even replace it. There are only 24 hours in a day.

alextingle2• 13 years ago

Would you like me to buy you a new microwave? I will if you promise to keep Social Fixer the way it is.

bambax2• 13 years ago

Capitulation is a strong word; I empathize with the OP's concerns.

However, yes, why not open source the code on Github and let others try?

yason2• 13 years ago

This isn't a Facebook app. This isn't using Facebook API. It's effectively as if he had written a custom browser that displays the Facebook page in a way he likes: a script like that is basically a functional rather than visual stylesheet. Facebook only gets to push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers.

If I understood that correctly then Facebook has absolutely no say about that piece of software. Because if they had, they could also tell us not to distribute a browser that displays Facebook "badly". Or an operating system that does that. Or blueprints for hardware that does that. They could forbid using such a software in the account terms for each individual user but that would be highly unenforceable (as in as soon as the data gets to my computer, I can and will mangle the bits whichever way I happen to like).

What Facebook can do is to terminate the author's Facebook account: I assume he might have broken some legal terms regarding his own account. However, writing and distributing a piece of software is absolutely out of their limits. It's sad and disappointing to see Facebook use the legal card, a multibillion company threatening a one-man party with costly lawsuits.

deong• 13 years ago

Presumably they can terminate his account for any reason they like. There's no legal right to a Facebook account, so they don't have to hunt for any terms he might have violated.

But yes, I don't see how they could expect to win in court if they decided to go further than that, but in losing they could ruin his life.

JacobJans3• 13 years ago

Facebook only gets to push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers.

This is completely false.

Facebook is a business. That means they have the legal right to do a lot more than transmit data.

This is such a basic, obvious, fact that I find it difficult that so many people seem to not understand it.

Facebook is not a data transmission service. They're a business. They have a product that they offer. If you want to use that product, they ask that you agree to a set of rules. This is very, very, normal. It is the foundation of society: The ability to make agreements.

Whether or not this software violates the agreement Facebook asks of its users is another question.

But, they absolutely DO have the right to do more than "push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers."

Dylan168072• 13 years ago

The agreement applies to the users, not to the person coding the browser. The fact that he happens to have a personal page is unrelated, and facebook would probably threaten legal action even if he didn't have one.

On top of that, there is a reason contracts of adhesion are treated specially. An agreement between a billion dollar corporation and someone that wants to post cat photos isn't a true meeting of the minds. It can only make demands that are sufficiently ordinary* Requiring a website to be browsed in a specific way is rather out of the ordinary.

* As defined by libraryfulls of precedent.

troymc• 13 years ago

The fundamental problem is that Facebook's "agreement" seeks to undermine a core aspect of the web, which is that everything --- everything --- sent across the wire is to be interpreted as a suggestion (not a requirement).

The recipient is free to enlarge the font if they have poor vision, they're free to pass the content it through a text-to-speech engine if they're blind, they're free to strip out all the Q's and J's, they're free to turn down the volume on videos, etc.

Facebook can try to impose their will, but all they'll end up doing is looking like a bunch of empathy-deficient, user-deaf nincompoops.

yason2• 13 years ago

By the same token car makers should have the legal right to dictate which roads you can drive on, hardware makers should have the legal right to dictate what operating system you can run on the hardware you bought yourself, and I think at this point I pretty much should have the legal right to dictate how others must interpret what I write here. Or perhaps not?

keeperofdakeys• 13 years ago

There aren't really any legal threats here, just a simple "We'll disable your account if this software continues to have these features." He is under no obligation to remove them, unless he wants to continue using the services Facebook provides.

jrockway• 13 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but the ToS says you may not interfere with the rendering of the page, but it doesn't say that you may not provide software that interferes with the rendering of the page. Anyone with a pair of scissors, a microwave oven, or black piece of paper could interfere with the rendering of Facebook for a particular user, but I doubt the ToS applies to them. Not to mention browser bugs, or OS bugs, or video driver bugs.

I think this is too broad to be meaningful. I sort of get what they're getting at ("don't post broken Javascript that fucks up the page for everyone"), but it's not what they wrote. What they wrote is laughable.

All I can say is: I hope you prevail in your battle. Content creators have absolutely no right to tell users how to render the HTML they deliver; the HTML is advisory, not mandatory. If you want to control rendering, buy a billboard.

JacobJans3• 13 years ago

Actually, content creators get to ask you to agree to a "Terms of Service" that gives you access to that content. If you don't like the terms of service, you could say they are "laughable," but that doesn't mean they don't exist, or have a specific meaning.

It seems very clear to me that a page that promotes the removal of Facebook ads, via its software, fits squarely in violation of the agreement.

Facebook seems very reasonable in this -- they're giving him a second chance, after blatantly violating the terms of service. And yes, it is blatant. Anyone who thinks that removing Facebook's ads are compliant with the Terms of Service is living in the world they wish exists, and not the one that actually does.

mattkruse6• 13 years ago

Removal of ads isn't even something I "advertise" as a feature. It's a side-effect of being able to remove anything you want from the UI.

And if they have a problem with that, surely they would have sued AdBlock Plus by now. Right?

mattkruse6• 13 years ago

Agreed - I think the ToS is pretty clearly targetting people who alter the display of the site for OTHERS, not themselves. Malware, DoS attacks, etc.

If they apply this rule to individuals who alter the way the site appears to them, they are opening a can of worms. There is no way they consistently enforce this.

bambax2• 13 years ago

Freedom is more important than control.

... and Facebook is about freedom... how??

I'm not on Facebook, but just this weekend I needed a Facebook account, so I tried to create a (fake) one.

I entered a perfectly real (French) name (not my own but a real one) and was told it was incorrect. I was directed to this "help" page:

https://www.facebook.com/help/212848065405122

that dares say "Make sure your name meets our name standards".

"Make sure your name meets our name standards"?? What does that even mean? Is Facebook in charge of naming people? What do they know about names?

(And of course I changed the fake name to another one (more fake by French standards) and they accepted it).

How over 1.2 billion people accept that kind of control/arrogance/stupidity is beyond me; but if you expect Facebook to ever care about "freedom" you're delusional, at best.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Here is a suggestion - above certain size - lets say 10% on NA adult population classify every social network and such as a common carrier and regulate them.

Problem solved.

captainmuon2• 13 years ago

Why not make the source available and put it in public domain?

Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

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