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  • 2014-08-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Does Facebook Messenger Require Acceptance of Invasive Conditions? (en)
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  • In mid-2014 Facebook rolled out the Facebook Messenger app, a standalone version of that social network's instant chat feature which users accessed separately on their mobile devices (i.e., without launching the full Facebook app). That rollout prompted renewed interest in a December 2013 article by Sam Fiorella (circulated widely in August 2014) warned potential Facebook Messenger users that the app's Terms of Service (TOS) requires the acceptance of an alarming amount of personal data and direct control over your mobile device: As others such as the Washington Post noted, however, many of these permission requests are neither uncommon nor unreasonable and aren't really much different or more onerous than the permissions required by the main Facebook app itself: According to Facebook themselves, the concerns about its Messenger app are overblown and based on misinformation, as the Wall Street Journal reported: The brouhaha over Facebook Messenger's Terms of Service does highlight a couple of important issues with the apps many of us use these days. One is that free products are not truly free — someone has to pay for their development, deployment, and maintenance, and that funding is commonly accomplished these days by serving up ads to users. But advertisers want to be able target and personalize their ads to specific groups of viewers, and that targeting requires knowledge of information about users such as their geographic locations, age, browsing habits, and the like. Providing this information is the trade-off we engage in as payment for the acquisition and use of free apps. Another issue is that nearly all of us blindly accept the Terms of Service presented to us when we buy or download software without reading them, and that the TOS are becoming so increasingly lengthy that most of us simply couldn't read, understand, and process them if we wanted to. A 2008 study found (as summarized by techdirt) that it would take the average person about a month of working time out of each year to just read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis (exclusive of Terms of Service): Whether Facebook Messenger's TOS are truly insidious or not, Sam Fiorella warned that if users are willing to accept TOS as lengthy and involved as Facebook Messenger's without reading them, app developers might be emboldened to include even more potentially invasive conditions in future TOS: As exemplified by this comment and answer exchange between Sam Fiorella and a reader, all of this concern highlights a common modern dilemma: In order for apps to do what they need to do efficiently, they need to be granted a variety of accesses and permissions by users. Do we accept that such access will not be used for malicious purposes (by either the developers or unauthorized third parties), or do we give up ease of use in exchange for more cumbersome protections? (en)
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