[fanso99]

I might be remembering the details wrong, but wasn't the main issue that users half-knowingly allowed spying on their friends without any consent required from those friends? Open API isn't the reason this abuse happened IMO - Facebook failed to prevent massive data collection on users who did not give any consent.

[closeparen]

The concept of “personal data” with one sovereign owner applies in very limited scenarios like a private Google Doc or unshared Dropbox folder. The vast majority of internet applications in fact represent some kind of sharing or communication. Such applications necessarily either help you to restrict how your counterparties interact with shared data, limiting their freedom, or don’t, violating your privacy. As such it’s hard to see either side of this tradeoff as especially blameworthy.

[baeaz]

Sure - if you give a 3rd party application API access using your account, they can see whatever your friends have made available to you.

This is as if my friends sued Facebook because I gave you my password and you used it to snoop on them.

[fanso99]

I am not buying this. It's borderline victim-blaming. An informed consent must be required. Giving access to an app is not the same as sharing your password with them and explicitly allowing them to do anything they want. Saying that, even if you do share your password, the app should not be able to collect data on your friends without their consent.

There is a huge difference between you stalking someone else's friends and a company collecting billions of data points to use for political manipulation. The purpose, the scale, the incentives are different. We need to stop assuming that the rules should be the same for an individual and a business just because they use the same loophole.