> After paying for access to the scraping software, customers self-compromised their Facebook and Instagram accounts by providing their authentication information to Octopus.
They didn't "self-compromise" their account. They trust Octopus to act on their behalf, and unlike Facebook, Octopus' interests are most likely more aligned with their users' since their service is paid. This is no different from handing your Facebook credentials to your social media manager or secretary. There's no evidence that Octopus misused this access in any way.
> Octopus designed the software to scrape data accessible to the user when logged into their accounts, including data about their Facebook Friends such as email address, phone number, gender and date of birth, as well as Instagram followers and engagement information such as name, user profile URL, location and number of likes and comments per post.
This is either information people intend to be public or information they trust their friends to keep private. Now if Octopus was leaking the private information to third-parties it would be one thing, but so far I see no evidence Octopus was disclosing the scraped information to anyone but their customer (who is already authorized to access it).
> Meta is an industry leader in taking legal action to protect people from scraping and exposing these types of services
Translation: Meta is an industry leader in protecting its disgusting business model that hinges on making public data behind a walled garden with an unacceptable "privacy" policy. There wouldn't be a market for Octopus (or other scrapers) if Facebook already allowed customers to efficiently access information they're already entitled to, but that would be against their interests as their entire business hinges on information being held hostage.
They've created a problem, are selling the cure (well in this case monetizing it via ads) and are now pissed off that someone else is selling the cure for cheaper.
The reason is simple: they just want to maintain their monopoly on the data. That's it. These companies themselves run their advertising companies based on the very same data and train their machine learning models, and also, actually sell it(cambridge analytics, ... possibly 1000's more through 3rd party partnerships to take the blame if things go wrong).
US companies are truly monstrous... by size, and their ability to care for others.
The proper response to CA would've been to send everyone affected a notification saying "Your friend <name> shared your data with a third-party that is now known to be malicious. <Unfriend> <Learn More>".
The real issue with CA is that people are dumb enough to trust anything they see on the internet without a second thought. Why does a stupid "personality test" require access to my Facebook account? It doesn't and they should've declined the access prompt right there and flagged the post as malicious.
These companies themselves scrape entire internet. How come facebook content lands up in google search? Is that not scraping? Facebook also runs it's own scrapers over internet. What about those?
It's simple: a user choosing to share their data publicly "is" public data and NOT facebook's property. Fuck zuckerberg! The asshole.
So Meta scraping Wikipedia is okay, but other entities scraping Facebook-owned media isn't?
1. So that other humans can use it in a personal capacity to find out about me.
2. As a way of boxing all recruiter spam into a single location.
The LinkedIn terms and conditions restrict usage of my data to those purposes. That's why I'm comfortable publishing my data there.
Having my personal data indexed by Google makes it easier for people to accomplish (1) and the copyright restrictions on that data result in (2).
To those saying that scraping of all "public" data should be unrestricted: how would you suggest I meet my above goals?
Obviously if you make your email public then all bets are off.
