The article skips a lot of context to make it sound significantly worse than reality. Facebook didn't just randomly give Netflix access to everyone's messages. Specific user would need to purposefully log in to the Netflix app with their Facebook account in order to grant Netflix access to the chat functionality (intended to send movie recommendations to Facebook friends inside the Netflix app).
https://about.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-messaging-partne...
Disclaimer: I work at Facebook but not on messaging or anything related to this article.
"Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption "for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook" in December. And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting.1 But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users' private messages.""
1. "Does Facebook use info from your private messages to target you with ads?
No. Facebook says it might look at your private messages to determine if they violate the company's policies, but it doesn't use that information for ad targeting. Facebook won't use the contents of your private messages to target you with ads on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram either, according to a spokesperson."
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17177842/facebook-advertising-...
If the messages are encrypted "end-to-end" or whatever the chosen marketing buzzwords, so that Facebook cannot read them, then how is FB able to "use" messages for anything. One accustomed to normal communications services might think FB is storing and delivering messages and that's all. But in truth, it's "using" them. (For purposes other than complying with any request from a court of comptent jurisdiction.)
Exactly what they might be doing is of course highly confidential. You are free to take guesses. FB may answer yes or no. Answers cannot be verified, so their value outside of marketing is dubious.
NB. Meta _is_ a third party. It feels as if some people believe they can redefine terms like "end-to-end", "third party", etc. As if they know many readers will happily go along for the ride.
They describe several cases where the E2E means user<->facebook<->otheruser. Some examples: group chat. Shared images. Shared Urls with snipets. Absolutely everything involving interactions with a whatsapp "business account".
So they are not exactly lying. just being extremely dishonest.
user<->facebook<->otheruser is the exact OPPOSITE of end-to-end. There’s literally a middleman who can read your messages.
Theyre sooooo dishonest.
Yeah, one of the “ends” being Facebook itself. It's “legal” as in it is indeed end-to-end encrypted in the same way Cloudflare-hosted websites are, but very shitty. I always thought Facebook did this, but having some confirmation bias is very nice indeed, lol.
My guess is that FB stores the keys to reverse the encryption.
The point of e2e is to block any third party to to see your conversations by sniffing packets. Not to stop Meta themselves.
The OpenWhisper protocol, which is supposedly implemented by Messages and WhatsApp, was designed specifically to enable anonymous key agreement between the two or more parties sending messages, and no one else, including the service provider.
Whether or not Facebook actually implements it this way is a great question.
> two or more parties
When you’re having a 1:1 conversation with someone at a party, and then crack a joke and some weird dude 10 feet away laughs at you and says “good one”.
The obvious answer here would be for meta to consider itself party to your conversation.
Packet sniffing is mitigated by TLS/HTTPS.
The point of end to end is to to ensure that only me and the person I'm sending a message to can read it and that none of the systems in-between us can read the plain text of it.
Uh nope, that's a huge move of the goal posts. The point of E2E is to ensure that nobody besides the two endpoints can read the messages, including all hops along the way, notably including the service provider themselves.
The problem is that this requires users to do things like use one device to authenticate another or restart key exchange with all of their peers. If a user loses their phone, then they will need to redo their security exchange process, which nobody wants to do or even understands. Thus companies often store key material in an insecure way to allow new devices to be silently added to the account.
Plus, even if E2E is well implemented, there are still problems when the endpoint software can be remotely updated to a version that exfiltrates keys or messages.
> The point of e2e is to block any third party to to see your conversations by sniffing packets. Not to stop Meta themselves.
No... the point of end to end encryption is to be encrypted end to end. Its literally the name. If meta can read your encrypted messages, that is just normal encryption not end to end encryption.
Although the frank meaning of "E2E encryption" is that a message is encrypted on the sender's device and only decrypted on the intended recipient's device, that is never ever what big tech companies mean when they use this term.
For one, this would remove companies' ability to support lawful interception, which puts them afoul of American law.
Is lawful interception possible with Whatsapp? I thought it had actual E2E encryption.
I'm not clear whether I understood what the article is claiming. It's clear they claim that Meta shared customer's direct messages with a business partner without notifying the individuals who sent and received the messages. It also SOUNDED to me like the article was claiming they did so AFTER Meta introduced "end-to-end encryption" (which would ALSO mean that they were lying about offering end-to-end encryption). Am I reading that correctly?
The cluster of allegations is that the Onavo acquisition put FB-designed and built rootkits underneath TLS on a significant fraction of all smartphones in the United States and that FB/IG (now Meta) used clear text access to ostensibly secure HTTPS sessions to extract arbitrary data from both competitors and partner companies to play poker with X-Ray glasses on as concerned all competition in an ostensibly free and fair and competitive marketplace while simultaneously creating scope for arbitrary other advanced actors to exploit the same intentionally crippled OS-level security at the cost of weakening the entire world’s digital security infrastructure for pure financial profit without so much as a FISA court order to justify such actions.
If substantiated, such accusations would be among the most damning in the history of technology.
>If substantiated, such accusations would be among the most damning in the history of technology.
If substantiated? Just search Onavo on HN search - I thought this was widely known for years.
As a former employee until 2018, I heard the words “Project Ghostbusters” two days ago. I was peripherally aware of something called Onavo but I had no notion that anyone was talking about “kits”, we all thought it was some kind of metrics thing that was sort of iffy sounding but lots of iffy ideas got proposed by some PM looking to make a name and shot down by the grownups, what is alleged would have provoked a riot at the weekly all hands.
If any of this is true they didn’t tell people like me about it, and at one point there were three people on the org chart between myself and the CEO.
I’m very skeptical of the allegations, but I’d be lying if I said I found them to be flat impossible. I tread very lightly on this sort of thing and I didn’t even acknowledge I’d ever heard the word Onavo until I read it on TechCrunch.
I certainly hope they’re false: FAIR seems to be the last real hope for an Open future on AI short of a complete housecleaning of the whole Valley.
I had a friend tell me about Onavo in ~2015. I wont delve into what he told me, but at the time I had the "move fast and break things" spirit and thought it was a pretty cool tool that they had figured out to get competitive information. He never showed me anything, but allegedly they could even see what features were being used in other apps.
But I don't think this is something he made up, it's been discussed on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16381812
>I wonder if it's be possible to make a social networking startup, optimise solely for Onavo metrics, and get bought out by Facebook.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16373339
>The Onavo VPN service from Facebook is disguised as a protection mechanism but tracks the user for the benefit of Facebook.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14971839
>The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.
I am surprised that this accusation is at all controversial.
A remarkably astute analysis based on very limited information.
My job was to use information retrieval, machine learning / AI, auction theory, and pragmatic statistical sampling to both accurately model and stably price ads inventory and later dollarized organic inventory to drive specific policy agendas about what got clicked on, dwelled on, commented on, seen in recommender systems in equilibrium to achieve specific policy agendas of various kinds but all ultimately tying out at top-line revenue and engagement metrics.
It did not take me long to work out that PII was useless in this pursuit, there’s no entropy in the off-property like button table as concerns CTR.
It did not take me long to realize that I didn’t want to know what it was useful for.
I easily had the seniority to run queries against Hive tables that I had an explicit personal priority of never querying.
And I left the senior leadership track at the last stop before a directorship.
Could be a question of what we worked on. I did Ads ML Infrastructure, Abuse Detection Systems (spam basically), and then more ML Infrastructure on IG Feed/Stories. I was deep enough in the engine room it was all more or less feature embeddings. So it’s probably fair to say I would have known less about strategic maneuvering than plenty of less tenured folks closer to the surface.
I knew it sounded vaguely sketchy but you remember how many vaguely sketchy things some frisky new PM tried to get pushed through a launch card meeting only to have someone on Sheryl’s radar detonate it on the launch pad. The timeframe is the main reason I’m skeptical: Sheryl didn’t put up with crap like that she knew what was at stake.
This article has nothing to do with onavo.
If this is true that sounds really, really, bad.
> such accusations would be among the most damning in the history of technology.
You're putting this up there with IBM in the holocaust?
I find the article quite confusing and unclear to be honest. Are there any other sources?
This is the original NYT article from 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva... "Internal documents show that the social network gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and others far greater access to people’s data than it has disclosed."
Facebook promised E2E at the end of 2023.
Here's the source media is probably using: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18714274/klein-v-meta-p...
To be honest I found I got much better grasp on the whole debacle by just reading the court papers themselves.
> Facebook promised E2E at the end of 2023.
Wait, seriously? Like 4-6 months ago? Like, yesterday in terms of how long they haven't had it? Sheesh, a day doesn't go by that I'm not reminded of how happy I am to have dropped FB so long ago.
They've had it for years, it was just opt-in. More recently they've applied it to everything.
FB has supported e2e messaging since 2016, but it wasn't the default until 4 months ago (Dec 2023). So likely very few users had it enabled (much less on both ends needed to protect a message from FB).
The netflix deal starts in 2013. Even after 2016, e2e would just mean netflix would get slightly fewer messages.
So I don't see anything that would necessarily indicate FB is lying about e2e.
I wonder if there’s a timing connection here with FB Messenger “upgraded the security of this chat” messages I’ve had on a couple of long-running conversations recently
sheer coincidence, not to google-slide.
It sounds like it, and if true, is pretty damning.
What is being claimed here?
'granted programmatic access to FB user's inboxes' could mean a lot of things. What privileges? I read the article and still can't tell.
I don't believe that Meta allowed Netflix to read messages that a user sent or received, but that seems to be what they're implying.
Agreed. I would like to read more details about the "access to the Titan API" that Facebook gave to Netflix. Has anyone read the lawsuit PDFs? Maybe more details are in there somewhere.
For me it sounds that they read the messages to measure sentiment (what people are watching / what they like and dislike / what they recommend / generic information about competition from other rv shows, movies and video games), but probably the system was "bugged" (plausible deniablity) so those with access could read everything they wanted - be it messages made by employees from some competitor startup, or perhaps partners and sweethearts. Creepy stuff.
An exec can interpret different meaning rather than a technical person. I assume that as full access to read the messages
I don't recall this potential bombshell (maybe because it was shortly before a Christmas, and the NYT headline looked like just more of the same ol'):
> And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."
2018-12-18 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/report-facebook-...
2018-12-18 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva...
The problem isn't whether Facebook used private messages for ad targeting (the claim they denied), its whether Facebook used private messages at all.
Who cares if it was for ads, giving third party companies access should be a huge problem with or without ads.
This should make it a no-go for any sane person that is aware of that, unfortunately not many are.
I always try to convince people I know to ditch Messanger/WA/etc. in favor of Signal, and in many cases I've succeeded.
For better or worse, I found that the people willing to keep Signal installed and up to date largely just to get in touch with me was a good proxy for the list of people that really matter most to me.
I didn't win many over on the importance of privacy or Signal, but the willingness of some to put up with it because it matters to me says a lot about my relationship with them.
What is good about signal? It does not allow unique account names (!), but uses telephone numbers - what is just absurdly bad security.
The state can make a duplicate of your sim at any time. Not to mention linking phones to people is relatively easy.
Signal introduced usernames about a month ago.
Complete E2E encryption, only you and the person that you're talking to can read the messages. Yes, having you be identified by phone number is not great but they introduced usernames recently.
that's the money quote, for sure.
[flagged]
Care to back that up with any citations, or should everyone just take it on faith that what a throwaway says isn’t made up?
Facebook is on both ends of the e2e.
e2e encryption means no from client to client can read your messages.
Your client certainly can - and Facebook is the client. It would have no problem sending back signals on your messages (or the full message) to Facebook servers.
Doesn't mean it's happening. But it's interesting that e2e encryption alone makes you positive it isn't.
There’s been many stories over the years of people being advertised to from things mentioned in what’s meant to be a private conversation.
Can you point out where in their contracts or privacy policy they have legally binding terms that irrevocably dismiss their right to give your messages to advertisers?
If they have no intention to sell, then they have nothing to fear by putting it in writing with a appropriate liquidated damages clause. Otherwise it is quite suspicious why they reserve the right to do that in the contracts that they wrote.
Download a naughty gif/video from reddit and send it to someone on messenger. It will report you and say you are sending a naughty video and that multiple attempts will ban you. Fine for unencrypted chat.
Send same on e2e chat. The video will say "not sent".
Why is Facebook processing anything before being encrypted? The understanding is e2ee means content gets encrypted on device, sent to server in encrypted state and decrypted at other side. There is NO way Facebook should be able to analyze the contents of message, photo, video. .if they are doing this for csam/nudity, what stops them from using same tech for ad targeting and more seriously, for letting governments to spy on people?
Well, how can anyone trust facebook and whatsapp? How can we be so sure that e2e is done properly without looking into source code.
These are all a fair questions, but they’re still questions and not some confident assertion with absolutely no sources from a total throwaway account. That was my point.
It's both true and false. They don't do advertising with msg, and it's e2e encrypted. But they can use the metadata
That's not how it works. They won't be able to see the messages themselves if it's e2e encrypted. You can say they are lying of course
Is metadata useful for ad targeting?
If the claim is that they use the content of messages that's be one thing, but what kind of ad value is really pulled out of timestamps and phone numbers of who you messaged?
That said, collection of metadata can still be a problem, I just don't see the ad value.
OMG, that's such an obvious word play that has such dire ramifications. FARK!!! I have to hand it to theZuck, this totally changes how I look at the name change
Facebook is organized as a for profit company.
Anyone expecting capitalism to not capitalism is going to have a bad time.
This is one of the litany of bad things that happens when antitrust precident is ignored and we allow a small number of companies to become large enough to dominate the economy.
But commenters here want that right? They're rilling up against an API that allows data export and user ownership and demand that they're removed and all interoperability to be killed because "users are too stupid". This cements and entrenches monopolies because noone is allowed to compete or interoperate.
In sense, things like Apple Mail is a problem for them because it uses full access to GMail account to extract private data over API.
I find out interesting that the discussion on HN is narrowly focused on the technical/messaging accesss angle, rather than on the anticompetitive collusion. The collusion is the "big picture" root cause of so many downstream evils.
So are you claiming Netflix is a “monopoly” and if so, how would you break them up? The same question for Facebook.
This is a case of possible “collusion” not anti trust
Collision is part of antitrust.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/collusion#:~:text=Collusion%....
You can have collusion without being a monopoly. Your two neighborhood grocery stores can illegally collude even if there are 100 in your city
That's true but also very irrelevant
> Collision is part of antitrust
Would make for some fascinating lawsuits, but I suspect you meant collusion
open protocols in the case of Facebook and banning studios from owning/exclusivity with distributors in the case of Netflix.
So you are saying that no one can distribute their own work on thier own website? Where do you draw the line? Can I not create my own video and put it on my website? Can I not work with friends and we all post our own video on our own website that we jointly own?
How do we stop foreign studios from distribution over the internet? Do we block them too?
Why stop at films? Should book authors also not be slowed to self publish? Software developers?
I ask the same question, if Netflix decides to incorporate in Canada are you going to make a law that forces ISPs to block them? Are large newspapers not allowed to produce their own content? Do you draw the line at newspapers and news organizations because of freedom of the press and the do you allow Netflix to produce thier own documentaries but not fictional shows?
So you are going to pass a law That says depending on size, American companies can’t create content and distribute it?
And then foreign companies are still allowed to distribute thier own content? Are you going to block them from transmitting to the US?
If Netflix decides to incorporate in Canada, are you going to stop them from distributing thier own content to US citizens?
You really don’t see a problem with the government prohibiting companies from distributing thier own content over the internet?
Does that count for newspapers? Video content created by large newspapers?
Buried in the article, but not just Netflix, Spotify as well.
The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."
This is literally the first time in my life I've heard of Facebook Watch.
There is a lot of confidential information in Facebook private messages, probably people cheating, plans to leave one's job, political organizing, brides, illegal activities, etc. If Netflix gets access to this information, it is likely that other companies and 3rd parties got access either directly or indirectly.
Very scary what can be done with that information.
So it's true that just talking to anybody about anything automatically triggers a flag in some server somewhere.
The encryption concerns here are a bit confusing IMO. Facebook owns the UI that show you the text of the messages.
There doesn't have to be a backdoor into E2E encryption at all per say, a simple UI property check would give full access to message contents directly in the frontend code. Throw that into a private API and Bob's your uncle, decrypted messages that were transmitted with 100% secure E2E encryption.
Is that different for any other encrypted instant messenger, though?
No not at all, its a universal risk since you have to trust the UI.
I should have been more clear there. Its interesting to me that I often see concerns over whether Facebook has encryption backdoors when the UI can do all the work.
That's arguably still a backdoor, no?
At least I'd call an instant messenger that which claims to provide end-to-end encryption between conversation participants and then surreptitiously inserts itself as another participant.
However, something very active like that would be much easier to detect and prove than a "true" cryptographic backdoor that could possibly be explained away as an oversight in design or auditing.
Yeah I think that would fall into the backdoor category. My point was mainly that concerns over E2E encryption usually stop at the level of encryption and transmission.
If one really doesn't trust that Facebook isn't honest about how messages are encrypted and who has access to decrypt them, they also shouldn't use an app made by the same company that by design must have access to the decrypted text.
Facebook is always going to pull stunts like this.
They don't do creepy things on occasion by accident, they do them intentionally by default.
Same old story for the last 20 years. Zuck is creepy AF, everything he touches is creepy AF.
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
how much effort did meta put into building a legit competition vs netflix/youtube? it's hard to imagine they couldn't put up a decent competition with max user reach and $
just how great of a moat do yt/netflix have? is Disney the only one mounting a decent fight?
There’s plenty of competition to netflix.
Tiktok is probably the biggest competitor to YT. But it had to come in from short form video angle, because the moat of YT in long form video is probably insurmountable. Its fate remains to be seen.
Wha?
Hacker News is literally constantly claiming that there are too many competitors to Netflix and there needs to be some kind of compulsory licensing to reduce competition. Like there are hundreds of posts on the front page every week to that effect.
Meta never took Watch very seriously, just because it requires literally billions of dollars of investment and they clearly never wanted to spend that much.
They licensed Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the US, clearly saw it didn't move the needle much and they'd need to spend $5 billion+ to get there, and scrapped the whole idea.
This is wiretap level.
Never use Facebook or any other of the big ones as a login provider. Always use a separate account for each cloud service.
Facebook had a streaming service? This is the first I’ve heard about it.
If the product is free, you and ALL of your data are the product.
My solution is to not use online products.
I have a Gmail account because everyone needs email these days, and an iPhone with Gmail and banking and little else “online”
Sorry not sorry tech people but I never really asked to be born or have your existence specifically but on me specifically.
You’re society’s problem, not mine. It can deal with it without knowing I exist.
What is Facebook Watch ?
For important context on my post here, please read tsunamihippo's post first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39859319.
This story seems very overblown. Are we arguing that Facebook should not ever allow any third party app to ask permission to read the user's Facebook DMs? There are valid use cases for this permission, and every case where an app asks for it is not a "privacy violation". Sure, did Netflix or Spotify actually need the ability to read back DMs instead of just write them so that they could send recommendations? No, they shouldn't have needed that. If Facebook's API required that they have read access just to send a message, then that's crap design. But is it nefarious? No.
As long as the user is appropriately briefed on what they are granting (and it appears that they were), and as long as Facebook addresses over-scoped permissions requested by third party apps in a timely manner, then this should not be an issue.
I for one believe that we need to mandate that FAANG companies have these sorts of permission-driven systems to avoid the vendor lock in we're all too commonly stuck with today.
Because these things are needed for competition to thrive and to avoid the big companies from creating moats that prevent us, the startups out there, trying to dethrone them, its all the more important that these companies invest in better UIs that help a user understand the implications of what they are doing, and better review processes to stop bad actors from exploiting users' ignorance on an ongoing basis.
I despise Meta, but come on. Don't throw the baby (interoperability) out with the bathwater (interoperability can enable exploitation).
Remember that this site is full of people outeight supporting monopolies and walled gardens when it comes to companies they like. So yes, they're absolutely defending removal of APIs that allow data sharing with explicit user consent.
Facebook also installed root certificates through Onavo to spy on their competition. Some email exchanges from this court doc https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
From Zuck:
Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . . Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.
From Danny Ferrante (FB Data Scientist):
- We developed "kits" that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage (i.e., specific actions that people are performing in the app, rather than just overall app visitation). This is a "man-in-the-middle" approach.
- Our plan is to work with a third party—like GFK, SSI, YouGov, uTest, etc.—who will recruit panelists and distribute the kits under their own branding. We already have proposals from several of these providers.
- The panelist won't see Onavo in the NUX or in the phone settings. They could see Onavo using specialized tools (like Wireshark).
Gonna give it like two weeks before tech bosses posit that users don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their private messages
Isn't that why they got renamed to "direct" messages basically industry-wide?
Wow I never made that connection.
Bleak and rings true. The worst origin for speculation turned fact.
Sorry but that's ridiculous. The terms are synonyms, and usage varies by platform. Neither one gives you more privacy.
Two things are truly horrifying if this is true. 1. Just how normalized this behavior has become in Silicon Valley upper management circles. 2. That this has not gotten out earlier. Hundreds or thousands of employees at both companies could have reported this to the FTC or elsewhere.
Vesting period
Cue the FCC for yet another toothless Meta consent decree.
And if a user consented to Netflix-based chat, Facebook overshared all chat data, instead of only the Netflix chat data, because they couldn't be bothered to build a properly isolated API?
That's like asking permission to read and write your entire phone, just to provide the ability to write and read back a file.
This isn't how permissions work in most OAuth APIs. When you request permissions on apps like this, you request an "action" on a "subject". The "action" can be read/write/delete, the subject can be "DMs". How does Facebook determine whether a specific DM is a Netflix DM? In the database it's just a message from one user to another, with a certain text content.
By the way I'm not suggesting that it cant work this way, just that it doesn't. Facebook could have added a specific scope to allow an app to only read back messages related to itself. But that would have required anticipating the use case before these companies implemented it, or at least having better review policies to try to reduce the permissions apps are asking for.
But if the app wants to allow the user to have a back and forth with the other user, then that implies that Facebook Chat needs to have the ability to have app-specific conversation threads. It doesn't have that, though.
Netflix and Spotify requested read permission for DMs. Did they need it? Most assuredly they did not. But requesting read permissions for DMs in general has valid use cases, even if it should be treated sensitively by Facebook's authentication flow.
If there's any problem here, its that Facebook didn't seem to recognize that the apps (Netflix and Spotify) should not have been requesting read privileges at all, and should have revoked their ability to request that permission in a timely manner.
This is why OAuth is insufficient for privilege management, especially for multi-tenant systems, or what should be segregated data sets. You want to grant access to dataset abc123, but not dataset abc124 belonging to the same user.
This leads to an explosion of scopes, or an explosion of API keys, unless you have a policy engine, or resource-based access control. A company as big as Meta should be able to (is able to) do better than they did, but they probably didn't think this was worth prioritizing because money lie in attention farming, not in mending the fences.
It's not just RBAC, the actual feature needs to be designed with this sort of use in mind. When it is, OAuth is perfectly capable of handling it. The ideal way to implement something like this is to expose the message in the Facebook Chat app as a "Netflix Chat", separate from your normal one on one conversation with a user. Then, any message in the Netflix chat is shared with Netflix so they can render it in their UI, but nothing else. Put a message under the Netflix logo in Facebook Chat that says "Netflix will be able to read messages in this chat"
The OAuth consent screen details for an app ("Netflix" and the Netflix logo, etc) could be used to present this to the user.
However this presupposes that this was ever a good idea. On desktop you have a Facebook tab you can chat from, and on mobile, you want to chat on the Facebook (or whatever) app so you have all of its normal features, instead of a gimped version stuck inside a third party app. The third party app only needs to be able to ask the user if its OK to send a message with specific content, and possibly be able to enumerate who it might send to, but even that we've weeded out into the OS' own Share dialog nowadays.
> The problem is they granted read access when all Netflix needed here was write access.
At that point, why not just have an URL that opens facebook with a message pre-populated and skip all the oauth?
It’s also an already solved problem. Every contact could be like a channel (like in IRC) where you can gain access to (or not)
Slack has a notion of private channels to which a bot can be added. Even a bot with full OAuth scopes can’t read private channels it hasn’t been granted access to. Of course, many people wouldn’t explicitly add the Netflix bot to their DM with their friend - but that’s exactly the point here.
OAuth is absolutely compatible with bots being treated as principals in a social graph, it’s just that that’s incompatible with the type of passive surveillance that was desired here.
So when it comes to adding value for advertising fb is able to separate every object and data piece into sickening degrees of detail… but when it’s about privacy and authentication it’s “not the way things are done around here”… As you’ve mentioned as well it’s a choice by fb. Just as we have a choice to call fb out on making immoral choices. Better yet, the developer(s) that coded this part, and the developers that make a daily choice to maintain it in its current form.
And yes, it’s a choice. Just because people don’t take responsibility to make a deliberate choice, doesn’t mean it’s not a choice.
The engineers who worked on Chat at facebook likely had the same access... They had an employment contract which said that they were allowed to use their access to debug bugs and improve the product, but not to spy on their girlfriends DM's.
Netflix presumably had the same.
As long as that access is audited to ensure it really was being used only for the intended purpose, I'm fine with that.
Inspected 50 messages all from your test account: fine. Inspected messages from an account after that user contacted customer support citing a problem with messages: fine. Inspected messages from an account after that account fired off alerts to the devops team for causing segfaults: fine. Look at a random account: not fine. Dump messages from many accounts with a script: not fine, and rate limits should stop you after like 100 messages.
i’d question the “…couldn’t be bothered to build…” i’d be more likely to believe they knew exactly what they were sharing and wanted it that way.
I don’t know. If there is a “Facebook Messenger” feature on some Netflix interface then I would be surprised if it only worked with some chats and not others.
(That being said I have no clue why there would be such a thing, and why a user would prefer it? Maybe if Netflix were making set-top boxes)
That is how permissions work on android. I hate it.
That's why I moved to GrapheneOS.
What incentive does FB have to limit that access? Feels like MBAs would just see that as a cost/burden? We know FB does give a fuck about privacy, so that’s never gonna be a reason.
If you believe FB is in the business of selling user data, then giving out user data for free is not an optimal move.
Absolutely. So the question is, did FB view this through that lens? If they did, then maybe the ROI wasn't there. So they said fuck it.
Courts across the world fining them.
We often act as if corporations are unalignable super intelligences, but you're right, if there are consequences for the board/executive/shareholders, they would start caring.
> That's like asking permission to read and write your entire phone, just to provide the ability to write and read back a file.
...it occurs to me that this is in fact how most desktop apps work, and I do prefer it that way.
On windows idk but Unix has permissions for that reason.
Normal Unix permissions do nothing here in a desktop context because the program is running under your account.
There are permissions, but I think https://xkcd.com/1200/ is relevant here.
Note that everyone had access to the Inbox API at the time. We made an art project highlighting the invasiveness of such broad access:
"E-dentity is a project that asks a participant to login to its Facebook account, then takes his/ her private data from their profile and automatically prints them in an understandable booklet that is handed to the user. This booklet seeks to raise awareness of the hidden data we are sharing which we are often not aware of."
https://github.com/some1else/Edentity
Thanks for the context, it's important. But from the link you posted:
So here Facebook acknowledges that an app that sends messages needs write permission, not read. I would assume that sending a recommendation is a write only thing, especially with something private as direct messages. And it is pretty well understand pattern. When you share something through iMessages, Signal or WhatsApp from the a different app, the app does not get an access to you chat history.The allegation that Arstechnica are pretty sever:
Strange naming "Inbox" for sharing API. This is something that Netflix could do even without special access to the messages, since links originate from them. But so could Facebook, since they see the traffic in messages and can identify referral links. Looks like Titan API, whatever it is, gave even more access?NYTimes article from 2018 [1] has more details, but it is still unclear if user consent was explicitly obtained for Netflix to read messages. But an interesting quote from Steve Satterfield, Facebook’s director of privacy and public policy:
A rather conspicuous statement by someone who have properly collected consent from users.[1] https://archive.is/DH17k
> So here Facebook acknowledges that an app that sends messages needs write permission, not read.
I guess the feature at issue here is that you could actually hold a conversation with a Facebook friend inside of Netflix or Spotify which does indeed necessitate the ability to read back messages from the other user.
Whether it was wise to allow that instead of the kind of sharing systems we use today in 2024 is another question.
Depending on the OS architecture it might be possible to have an SDK render messages without handing any data to the parent app. Or of it's not possible at least the question is where any of the messages even hit Netflix servers.
> Disclaimer: I work at Facebook but not on messaging or anything related to this article
Same as "Hey, Googler here. Let me tell you how I'm right and why you should think this way."
> Facebook didn't just randomly give Netflix access to everyone's messages.
That's not at all what the title alleges, nor what the article says. The article (1) provides evidence that Facebook monetized user private messages in a data-sharing project with Netflix and (2) cites court documents that litigate Facebook having Jedi-Blue-like monopoly-preserving interaction with Netflix.
It doesn't matter what the Facebook TOS says or how the tech works. Human users never provided informed consent that their private comms would be monetized as well as used for anti-competitive un-American purposes (un-American as in the Sherman Act, altho creating a monopoly is perhaps very American indeed). And Facebook has done that time and time again.
I only read the headline and this reply gave me even greater concern. wtf they shared ALL msg data for logging into Netflix chat?!?
I dunno I’m surprised I’m still surprised these days
so you agree then that “private” messages aren’t private on fb? i don’t know how to interpret this in a way that isn’t terrible for fb users…
not if you log in to enable and agree to share such messages. no.
If you give access to your chat as the parent poster claims, why are you surprised that Netflix has access?
Because it’s not a reasonable expectation that your private messages would be shared with an advertising partner when you link your account to it, and “give access” is rarely a step that your average user actually reads, much like agreeing to TOS’s upon signup.
And catering to the average user’s expectation is what should dictate policy, not a “technically we have permission” caveat.
> would be shared with an advertising partner
In this case Netflix was not an advertising partner. You were signing into Facebook Chat inside the Netflix chat, and participating in Facebook chat messages inside the Netflix app.
You were opting in and using the Netflix app as a Facebook Chat client. Its like being surprised the Pidgin executable could see your Jabber messages.
In the sense that some users may not have realized what they were allowing, that's fair. But that just implies that the permission dialog for this sort of thing should be pretty onerous while being very easy to understand.
There are details that aren't clear here too: Did Netflix request read permissions when you signed in via Facebook? If so, that's shitty and is worthy of condemnation, but the onus falls more on Netflix than Facebook there. You should be able to sign in with Facebook without expecting your DMs to be sent to Netflix. It's still on Facebook, but to a much lesser extent: They should make what's being shared super clear when you sign in with Facebook, and that includes making the sign in super onerous and scary if its something like reading DMs, so the user doesn't miss these details. And they should be reviewing third party apps and what permissions they request, and making sure its inline with the functionality the app is presenting.
However, if the normal Facebook authentication flow did not grant this permission, and the permission was only granted when the user accessed the "Netflix Chat" or whatever feature which obviously did, in actuality, require the read permission to function, then this isn't that big a deal.
You would expect that giving permission to send specific pre-approved messages does not imply permission to read everything you've ever said to anyone or they've said to you..
Right?
The web was rampant with these patterns in the early 2010s when OAuth didn't exist, and HTTPS the exception rather than the rule.
The most egregious example was probably LinkedIn's GMail "integration," ostensibly used to invite your GMail contacts to LinkedIn. Back then, that sort of thing felt innocuous. But the implementation was even worse. Due to lack of OAuth and MFA, you literally entered your GMail password into LinkedIn. Then LinkedIn logged into your GMail account where they could do anything. Even if they limited it to scraping your contacts, they still got every email address you'd ever sent or received an email to or from, over the lifetime of the account.
In any other context this would be called phishing. And by the way, this pattern still exists. For example, apps that force you to log into a third party site in their embedded WebView can read the entire DOM (including your password). ..
Think about the difference between accessing these specific messages, and accessing all messages.
it’s disingenuous to think that users read and fully understand the various permission scopes of a service. “private” has an unambiguous meaning—playing the “well, technically” card falls pretty flat imo.
So when I give thunderbird my email details, someone at thunderbird gets access to all my emails ?
So... this sounds like OAuth, with a nice consent scene that says I'm giving Netflix this access to my FB DNs. That's what you mean, right? Otherwise, what the fuck is the difference?.
And really, as if this makes anything better, wow. Imagine having the feeling of obligation that you have to stick your neck out over this. Just take your over-sized salary and be happy knowing you work for one of the worst companies of our time. (despite my tone, at this point, I honestly say that without judgement, just ... own it.)
When you give your mail client credentials to read your email , would you not expect your client to be able to read your mail?
On Android, when you give a third party client permission to receive SMS, you don’t expect it to have access to your SMS?
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> Is Netflix a secret Facebook client that I don't know about? Lmao, is this a serious comment I'm replying to?
Yes, in fact, that's what the feature was. You could send a movie recommendation via Facebook within Netflix, and then continue the conversation with that friend, still in the Netflix app.
It's a dumb idea for all of the obvious reasons that its in Netfix' best interest to hoover up the data, but that's why it doesn't exist anymore and hasn't existed for years.
Totally agree with the sentiment here. The comment by the employee make it sound like it's the user's fault. Something akin to dark pattern and malicious compliance by giving the user an OAuth consent for their DM.
It's only a dark pattern if this was the permission Netflix asked for when you hit "Sign in with Facebook" or some other unrelated feature. If the permission was granted when you tried to use Netflix Chat, a bidirectional in-app chat powered by Facebook, then its not a dark pattern at all, its just the usual way things are done.
Lmao, love seeing what HN decides is controversial these days.
God give me the power of some of y'all's utterly depraved self-serving self-delusion. I at least acknowledge the moral compromise of how my labor accrues in the system instead of burying my god damn head in the sand about it and offering poor incoherent defenses of my employee in public. And I make a third of what I could make at FB, and still probably don't contribute as negatively to the world.
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You can't attack another user like this on HN, no matter how you feel about their employer.
Since you've unfortunately done this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37430894), I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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> Disclaimer: I work at Facebook but not on messaging or anything related to this article.
So, it could work exactly as it sounds and you'd have no idea?
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Although I'm not sure the complaint [1] (linked from articled) actually says that messages were given.
[1]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/compl...
Yes I think they're giving their general nerd opinion while also being transparent about possible conflicts. Their comment reads like an analysis of the article not the technology.
If this wasn't Facebook it wouldn't even be news.
I hope you’re being sarcastic? Or is that actually your stance on people’s privacy rights?
Google docs literally has the exact same feature and we're not even talking about it. Using the exact same OAuth framework as here you can grant Netflix and Spotify the right to read everything and all comments in your Google Docs. You can even grant them the right to read all your emails in Gmail!
In all seriousness i believe anyone providing oauth should just shut it down at this point, Cambridge Analytica was entirely users granting a third party oauth access to read their friends lists with an explicit permission dialog and all and it was a scandal that led to massive fines. The world decided that oauth access is not ok even with the dialogs prompting to allow third party access and at this point we as developers should listen and take it away. Google currently flys under the radar with the exact same access that led to cambridge analytica but they should probably just shut it down unless they want to run the risk of similar court cases.
It seems you have to do that here too though. In the end you have to deal with the headline the media can write about it.
If Netflix and Spotify went through the vetting process for the purposes of enabling an in-app email client the media could write pretty much the same headline.
Boiling it down here... some users hit the "Yes" button when Facebook asked them if it was OK to allow Netflix to access their DMs for a feature that allowed you to chat (bidirectionally) with your friends inside the Netflix app. That's a privacy violation?
Rather, it seems like cynicism about the media, than a stance on rights.
Lots of comments here look like some sort of astroturfing made by a PR agency
The root comment is literally a Facebook employee who is intentionally trying to change the narrative. An employee of a company that has been fined billions for privacy breaches, that was responsible for literal voter suppression https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/t... etc etc
HN "guidelines" say "Please don't post shallow dismissals" -- Don't allow FANG to astroturf these forums.
I've been on HN since 2007 man.