Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit
arstechnica.com
Facebook Watch, Netflix were allegedly bigger competitors than they let on.

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.”

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

  •  Fixbeat   ( @Fixbeat@lemmy.ml ) 
    38•6 months ago

    I’ve never had Meta (anything) and I gave Netflix the boot a couple years ago. I encourage everyone to also flee. I think both are a waste and they fucking spy on you. I imagine those lengthy privacy statements gave them permission to do this, but sharing private messages is particularly egregious.

  •  Elise   ( @xilliah@beehaw.org ) 
    26•6 months ago

    Ugh and now it’s happening yet again with discord. Everybody seems to want me to be on discord. Just after I managed to get off everything. At least they seem kinda OK for now but we all know it’s just a matter of time until dr evil gets his hands on it.

      •  octopus_ink   ( @octopus_ink@lemmy.ml ) English
        14•6 months ago

        My point here is not overtly about Privacy. It’s about recognizing that Meta has been a terrible corporate citizen for their entire existence. We shouldn’t be pretending they are some friendly geeky company that just wants to participate like the rest of us. Even if they were, that’s not possible when you are going to pour hundreds of millions of users into these fediverse spaces all at once.

        They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.

        •  Leraje   ( @leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) OP
          7•6 months ago

          That’s an excellent point that I don’t see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.

          The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.

          If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that’s still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.

      •  Liz   ( @Liz@midwest.social ) English
        1•6 months ago

        Yes, although I think DMs are still visible to the instance administrator. I’m not sure if there’s a plan or what the timeline is for actually encrypting that information.

  •  Manmoth   ( @Manmoth@lemmy.ml ) 
    21•6 months ago

    Anyone using these services in current year is asking for this. If someone is not computer literate and “has” to use these unnecessary services because they can’t selfhost or whatever they need to recognize that total exploitation of their data is the cost and it will never, ever change unless you own your data on your own hardware.

    I can’t reiterate enough how much the government will never ever solve this problem.

  •  0xtero   ( @0xtero@beehaw.org ) 
    20•6 months ago

    If you want private messaging - use Signal.
    If you use any kind of messaging on commercial platforms, expect immediate loss of privacy. They call them “direct” messages for a reason.

  •  AutoTL;DR   ( @autotldr@lemmings.world ) BEnglish
    11•6 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The streaming business’ demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs.

    The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case.

    One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision.

    By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users’ private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients).

    Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption “for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook” in December.

    The company told Gizmodo that it has standard agreements with Netflix currently but didn’t answer the publication’s specific questions.

    The original article contains 487 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  •  Syn_Attck   ( @Syn_Attck@lemmy.today ) 
    3•6 months ago

    I want to point out how similar this is to the FYES arrangement which allows close allies to spy on each other’s citizens to skirt the legal blocks of a country spying on its own citizens. This allowed Facebook to honestly say (from a legal standpoint) they didn’t read/use private messages for ads. Because they didn’t say they didn’t sell private messages to other companies for tons of $$$, and let them do the reading and advertising.

    Let’s not forget how similar Facebook is to a CIA program that ended from public scrutiny only a few years prior, and how much involvement Facebook now has with US Government entities.

    If the CIA (or just Facebook) wanted to

    • Kill budding decentralization concepts and

    • Cause overload to the system while Facebook retains ultimate control once everyone gives up or only a few small instances are left

    Threads is how it would be done. Interesting naming coincidence too, as pulling a thread causes the entire garment to become structurally compromised.