Meta now lets EU users unlink their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram accounts

[cnity]

This must have been a painful engineering effort that I bet absolutely consumed the backlogs of at least tens of teams. Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture and services that presumably many many years of code sits on top of.

[ffpip]

> presumably many many years of code sits on top of.

Not so many, since they tried to link all 3 only few years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253472/mark-zuckerberg-f...

[jarjoura]

The challenge isn't unlinking accounts in the database, that's just a simple copy command. The challenge is in all the metadata that is used for account A (Facebook), and account B (IG) that can no longer share any downstream metadata.

So when you have to split the two apart, it's likely a hard legal requirement that there's no way account A can know anything about account B anymore. This means, countless metrics and logs and whatever has to be thrown away. So I imagine, there's lots of auditing of systems and every single property that is stored somewhere was scrutinized in long meetings.

Less an engineering burden than a policy and legal burden.

[stavros]

> Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture

If their business assumptions are "users will never have a choice about how much we track them", they deserve what they got.

[andy_ppp]

And it’s good for consumers and Facebook can afford to do it, I wish the UK was still in the EU and I would be extremely happy about unlinking Instagram from Facebook just to avoid their notifications for it that pop up on Instagram never mind the ease of spying this creates.

[XghTk]

Those are all acquired services, so the opposite is likely: they were linked together through the number of ugly hacks.

[amelius]

And I bet management asked: what can be so difficult about decoupling the accounts? Just set coupling=false somewhere or something, okay?

[summerlight]

At least they have a choice to unlink accounts, which probably makes the overall DMA compliance much easier. For Google, it's just been an engineering nightmare, cross-cutting across the entire stack :D

[madsbuch]

Could be that they have not been entirely consolidated yet as they all previously were individual products.

From a user perspective is appears like the users have been relatively loosely coupled.

[rodgerd]

> This must have been a painful engineering effort

It would be less painful if it were a universal option, and they didn't have to test with a bunch of geo-linked options.

[waynesonfire]

Probably not, if it was painful they would have done it everywhere. Since now they have to maintain two configurations, linked and unlinked.

It also highlights how much revenue is tied to this bundling of service since it's probably very expensive to maintain this dual configuration.

[mcmcmc]

It’ll save them a good chunk of time when they eventually get split off like Baby Bells

[scyzoryk_xyz]

Sounds like a them problem not an us problem. Nothing they couldn’t afford „tens of teams”. It’s a nice moment living in the EU, knowing that common sense policies like GDPR and anti-trust can be enacted and enforced.

[j45]

Could the limited EU accessibility to this engineering feat be broadened by users identifying as living out of Europe?

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Given that the people on these teams are reaping stock from the efforts of mining personal data for people over decades I have a very strong “not sorry” feeling about any sort of negative anything that employees of Meta might experience. I would even go so far as to say, fuck these people, I have no empathy for you. You decided to be a part of the problem, and sucks to suck

[loceng]

I guess part of karmic consequence of "move fast and break things" motto - especially when it comes to not caring to develop or have forethought on security-safety concerns for what such a system, a digital version of The Facebook, could have on society; Harvard was planning to launch a digital version of their print version of The Facebook - and part of Mark's history he's quoted as saying, along with lying to the ConnectU twins he was hired to develop, that he didn't understand why Harvard was taking so long to get it going - that he could do it way faster; the externalized costs/harms are practically incalculable - all for that sweet sweet cheap-shallow-manipulative advertising revenue.

[AlexandrB]

It's constantly frustrating to read about European users getting cool new features to help manage their digital life that the rest of the world doesn't get. The expected cost in lost ad revenue per user must be pretty significant to justify the complexity of keeping this stuff limited to Europe.

[miohtama]

There are also downside for European regulations. There is no free lunch and some toll needs to be paid.

Some examples include

- Banning encrypted messaging (almost passed)

- Cookie pop ups

- Various regulations harming open source (discussed before on HN)

Also due to how Europe is wired up, the cost of doing startup business is higher, why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies.

[cnity]

FWIW, we also get non-stop cookie permission banners and often just straight-up denied access to certain services that don't want to have to jump through the hoops.

[josephcsible]

It annoys me every time a company makes a long-requested change, but only for EU users. Since the technical work required for it had to be done anyway, it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone.

[judge2020]

> it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone.

Only if you consider malice ~= profit.

[mrtksn]

If you think about it, the US seems to be voluntarily headed to universal plug for charging EVs after many years of incompatibility. EU got that almost immediately.

Though, it can be argued that the US plug is a bit better since the standart that almost all companies finally agreed to adopt is the Tesla one. However, it could have been the other way around too - the companies could have adopted a very shitty plug if Tesla had a shitty plug simply because their adoption is based on the charging network dominance and not on the plug superiority.

So, I guess its not a clear cut.

[micromacrofoot]

isn't this the "free market" that many in the US brag about?

[baliex]

Not just malice, profit too

[black_puppydog]

I'll hold out on whatsapp until I can unlink "send this text to that number" from "here's a copy of my entire phone book"

[ryandrake]

This is great, now do Oculus. I shouldn't need to have an "account" to use my O.G. Rift offline. It's like needing an account to use a monitor.

[colordrops]

I tried using John Carmack's instructions to unlock my old Oculus Go, which involved your Facebook account for some reason, and got banned from my account twice.

[extraduder_ire]

They moved it away from facebook accounts to more generic ones at least. The EU isn't going to force them (with this law) because they don't have more than 10% of EU residents using their headsets. (based on a quick search, they're at about half the threshold if you count worldwide sales)

[str3wer]

https://github.com/basti564/Oculess

[Handprint4469]

> It's like needing an account to use a monitor

Given the current enshittification trends, I would not be surprised if in the next few years Samsung, Acer, LG, et al decide that a subscription model for monitors is exactly what they need to pump those share prices up.

[BiteCode_dev]

Same with google with youtube.

Good.

People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it.

But I welcome this kind of restrictions.

[sofixa]

The EU doesn't make innovation hard, it just puts rules in place to ensure that your "innovation" cannot be abusing users' data.

Nothing is stopping any of the thousands of EU companies innovating in all sorts of fields.

[okanat]

If it is easy, it is not innovation. You're not finding and improving a thing then. True innovation requires novelty and effort. Even smallest innovative projects require many many thoughts and redesigns until they become even an MVP.

The US tech giants were coasting and amassing compound wealth without by innovating but buying the innovative companies or disregarding a basic human right: privacy.

True innovation is and should be difficult and it shouldn't come at the cost of human rights that people has fought over for centuries, sometimes with their own blood.

[smoldesu]

> People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it.

If you consider the GDPR or DMA limitations on "innovation", then I don't want you innovating.

[Euphorbium]

Google also let me unlink youtube and other services. Probably forced by EU.

[xyst]

What about “threads” accounts? I believe these are directly tied to IG accounts.

[gevz]

Is there a criteria to be qualified as a EU user? I assume there must be more than just geo-ip location. What will happen if I pretend I moved to EU for the sake of decoupling all Facebook accounts.

[pfdietz]

I already unlinked myself from all those.

[its_ethan]

If I used a VPN to place myself in Europe, could I unlink my accounts?

[Suppafly]

Can't you already sign up for all of the services independently? I know I can login to instagram with my fb login, but I still had to 'create' the account the first time I did. I could have just created a standalone account if I hadn't had an fb account to start with. Messenger is essentially facebook chat pushed into a separate client, which I had thought they were talking about reincorporating back into the main client, I don't really see why should allow a separate login for that.

[superjan]

If that’s what it takes to get them compliant with EU’s GDPR, shouldn’t the same apply to youtube and gmail? Or the rest of google services, for that matter?

[jscheel]

Their ham-fisted linking of facebook and instagram accounts has been an absolute nightmare for those of us that use their messenger apis. It has never fully worked correctly, and has led to more lost dev time than I care to count. I can't even begin to imagine how much worse this is going to make it.

[barnabyjones]

Shoutout to Max Schrems and Noyb, even if they weren't apparently involved in this decision. That organization seems to be the main driving force behind serious GDPR enforcement by submitting regular legal complaints, the data authorities occasionally take up a case on their own but usually seem content to stick to small violations. It really shows that having laws on the books isn't enough, and even public awareness is not very helpful, what really matters is having lawyers pushing hard for enforcement.

[1oooqooq]

because it's all linked in WhatsApp, which is the only thing anybody still actively uses anyway

[anticensor]

This unlink would just be a formality, as they would still be able to correlate those users anyway.

[pgeorgi]

That's a great way to route 4% of their global earnings into the EU's bank account.

[vodkapump]

> Users can continue using Messenger with their Facebook account or create a new account completely independent of Facebook

So you can't unlink your facebook and messenger, just create a new messenger account without a facebook account. That's sad.

[Zuiii]

So how does a non-eu user get this privilege? Is using VPN in EU enough?

[gerash]

can someone ELI5 what unlinking a "Facebook account" from a "Messenger account" accomplishes?

IMHO we should strive to remove moats around digital services so new competitor can pop up and provide competing services in a short amount of time but somehow EU thinks creating busy-work for the engineers of incumbents is the right approach.

I already despise the "accept cookies" noise on all websites and don't tell me "Oh, it's bad compliance, blah blah". If so, then write a new more useful law instead.