Ngigi, has hit the nail on the head.

Everything else is "white noise".

If access to the API equals access to 'public' info then why all this...


On 14 Oct 2016 18:35, "Ebele Okobi via kictanet" <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:
This is not a legal issue.  It's against the rules of Facebook's developer agreement for someone to pose as a commercial developer and then sell information it gathered based upon APIs targeting publicly available information to police. None of this is illegal-it's just really creepy and against our terms. 

In answer to your last question, absolutely not.

Ebele Okobi | Public Policy Director, Africa

On Oct 14, 2016, at 3:16 PM, Ngigi Waithaka via kictanet <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:

Ebele,

There is something about this that I am not understanding. 

If the APIs only allows a developer to access *publicly* available information that is in the FB Platform, why would it be illegal for law enforcement / intelligence to even access it? 

It can *only* be a problem if the API allows accessing *private *information from FB users.

Which then brings us to an even *bigger problem*; is FB allowing developers to access our private information and messaging on FB for commercial purposes?

Regards
Sent from Nylas N1, the extensible, open source mail client.

On Oct 12 2016, at 8:58 pm, Ebele Okobi via kictanet <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:
Yes-this is a mess, and this article isn't an accurate report. Basically-this was a private company that set itself up as a developer-same as, say, Candy Crush makers or those quiz things about your friends on FB. As a developer, it got access to API (see here  http://readwrite.com/2013/09/19/api-defined/ for definition) that allowed it to build programs into FB. This allowed it to write programs targeting publicly available information on FB platform. That means-no private chats, no private groups, no data that users haven't made publicly available. The point of APIs in this context is SUPPOSED to be so advertisers (from small business to nonprofits to Andela, etc.) can send ads to targeted users. This group completely violated our policies and used their API access to target publicly available info to send to police. FB has kicked them off our platform. As you can imagine, there are many conversations now about this. But key to know that FB did NOT and does not sell user data; that this was a completely unauthorized use of our developer platform, that  we rectified this as soon as we were notified, that the access was not to user data, but essentially a program that allowed them to target public info on Facebook. It's still unacceptable, and something we are taking extremely seriously.

Ebele Okobi | Public Policy Director, Africa

On Oct 12, 2016, at 5:43 PM, Ahmed Mohamed Maawy via kictanet <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters. We are pleased that after we reported our findings to the companies, Instagram cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts, and Facebook has cut its access to a topic-based feed of public user posts.

More here: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed

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