Facebook Blocks KDE Photo App, Deletes Users' Pics 262
Znarl writes with a report from Joe Brockmeier, who writes that: "KDE users have gotten a rather unpleasant surprise from Facebook: Not only is the site blocking KDE apps like Gwenview from uploading, the social media giant has also taken down photos uploaded with the KDE plugins. Yet another reason that users might think twice before depending on Facebook for photo storage."
My guess (Score:0, Informative)
I'm Facebook. How do I know that the API key floating in the wild - in KDE sources - is not being used to send spam?
Re:Does this COMPLETELY delete them? (Score:5, Informative)
Found it [facebook.net].
You're at their mercy (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook gets to decide how and when you use their site. The best solution is to use something else if you want to access and store your files on your terms. I use Facebook, but I treat it as a secondary system for whatever feature they have. Do not rely on anything related to Facebook as your primary method to do something like store photos, IM, E-mail, etc. The files were deleted to send a message, that you have to use their implementation of a feature if you want to use it at all.
Probably the worst example of Facebook's policy abuses is the censorship. Try making a status update linking to a site critical of Facebook's policies, or about blocking ads on Facebook, link to Firefox and Ad Block Plus. See how long it takes for your status to disappear. Or if it doesn't, ask your friends if they can see it, you might find that it has been made invisible to everyone but you.
Re:Scaled down photos (Score:5, Informative)
No, the download link does not give the original. It gives at max a 2048x2048 image. Even if you upload an image within those dimensions, it still gets recompressed.
Facebook is not a place to store photos at all.
distributing the private API key (Score:5, Informative)
Each application on facebook get's a private API. In FOSS, this key is present in the source code. That is not permissible according to facebook terms of service. In effect, they are blocking FOSS software. An alternative is to use a different key for each user.
More info: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276609 [kde.org]
Re:Does this COMPLETELY delete them? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account [facebook.com]
From the link above:
If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted, then click "Submit."
Content hiding (Score:5, Informative)
I'm now curious if that is negative feedback from their users, or the users' friends - essentially blocking the app-generated updates because they don't care for them.
When you read around the various "Banned" threads and the canned reply, it seems that this is the apparent reason.
Up until now, the ban decision was based on number of users, votes and likes of users, etc.
Lots of applications were considered super-successful.
Suddenly they seem to have changed the criteria : If some user blocks a publication seen on the news-feed that counts as a negative feed-back.
Now look at the forums : most of the "formerly successful applications getting now banned" are either games or photo uploading applications.
These are application that are mega popular (some of them are 300k users with 4.9 out of 5 reviews). But not all friends are interested into them.
There are a lot of people who simply remove games for the news feed like my self, because I'm not interested into flash games and I'm on facebook only to share news and pictures with friends and acquittance. I don't personally care that someone among them won 300 golden pigs on her virtual farm. It's not that I wish that all games go burn in hell and disappear from facebook, It's just that I don't personally care about them and I find that they are polluting my news-feed for the usage I need it for. I perfectly understand that there are people who are here *for* the games and thus are definitely interested in latest flash-gaming fads, etc.
If there are enough non-players like me on facebook, small games are going to suffer a lot because every such "hide it for me, thanks" is going to count as a negative vote. If you're not Zynga with a gazillon of players on your virtual Farm to counter-balance the non-gamers, you're screwed.
And there are people who are on facebook either to play games or only to share news with the family. They are probably not necessarily interested into seeing photos of their friends naked or passed out or mushy pictuers of friends' babies. (Specially some players who have big friends lists to get bigger virtual farms, and thus a lot more distant acquittance they don't necessarily care about, as close friends).
And here the situation is even worse. If you block photos of non-friends and this indeed counts as negative feed-back, by doing so, you're massively voting against lots and lots of photo different applications. Also these applications aren't even responsible for appearing on friends' news feeds : they only upload photos. It the standard "publish album on my profile" feature of face-book itself which makes them visible.
Thus even photo uploading applications with 300k users are getting banned.
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I think the whole "based on users blocking it from news feed" stuff is asinine.
Sorry, but given the sheer size of facebook's userbase, whatever app you take into account is *never* going to please all the users.
There's always going to be a range of users who are not interested into it and are going to block it (for no reason other that they don't see any use of having it in the news-feed).
So either they need to relax the banning criteria. Or we're going to see a massive ban of applications just because some part of the users-base does not share the same interests as another part. Taken to its extreme conclusion, this will lead to a facebook were there's nothing.
Except maybe Farmville (as it has a big enough share among facebook to compensate the blocking).
And applications uploading kittens (because everyone likes kittens).
Re:Does this COMPLETELY delete them? (Score:5, Informative)
Note that it does not say your data will be irretrievable, only that YOU will be unable to retrieve it. It doesn't even say that any of your information will be deleted, just "your account"... whatever that means.