So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now they're taking advantage of the fact that the press is pissed off at Facebook and will uncritically regurgitate any negative claim about them in headlines as leverage in their court case against them, likely in the expectation that it'll be cheaper for Facebook to settle than deal with the PR fallout.
> $250,000
That doesn't sound like much for a years-long lawsuit against a major company with deep pockets; unless they are suing for far more, there won't be much, if any, net profit even if they win. I wonder what else is going on here. Was the Pikini app a test of Facebook's privacy policy and/or ML image recognition, to see how they would respond? To make a point? The description of it sounds tailor-made for controversy. Or did activists later pick up on the case and support or fund it?
Ordinarily, a developer would bugger off but they (presumably) have alt-right activist leanings and they're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Check 4chan on any day and there will be "FB/IG creep" threads where users anonymously upload photos of their female Facebook and Instagram friends in skimpy/swimwear clothing.
I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.
The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute.
The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is "fraud". Facebook's counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its editorial control and therefore "free speech".
The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.
> wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them
In this case, I think I'm just rooting for injuries.
Is that intentional aspect of the lawsuit or just a side-effect? It would be interesting if a privacy advocate gained control of a defunct entity with standing to sue Facebook over data-related dispute like this, and used discovery to dig into Facebook's privacy practices.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuck...
Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit.
Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention.
Bullshit: 1. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said. 2. Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does. 3. Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility. 4. Non-requisite variety.
Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data.
Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise.
Information: Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison with observed reality at a given point in time.
Back in December 2016, Six4Three ("643") created a website https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com to raise awareness about Facebook's business practices.
"... Facebook started threatening to shut off friend data to companies in late 2012 unless they made extravagant, unrelated purchases in Facebook's new mobile ads product. Zuckerberg did this in order to keep Facebook's advertising business from collapsing because it had been built exclusively for desktop computers."
It has more details on what 643 is hoping to accomplish with the help of other app developers, including a timeline as well as a documentary video.
When 643 contacted Facebook to let them know about this website, Facebook threatened 643 with trademark infringement.1
1. http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
