No, but signing up for an account and agreeing to the Terms of Service does. The not-logged-into homepage is 1.3mb. Still not tiny, but definitely not the same as the web app.
No it doesn’t. Informed consent is not the same as shoving a ToS/EULA in front of someone who may not have the legal or technological education to understand it or its consequences.
From the Wikipedia definition[1] of informed consent (in medicine):
> An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and consequences of an action. Adequate informed consent is rooted in respecting a person's dignity. To give informed consent, the individual concerned must have adequate reasoning faculties and be in possession of all relevant facts.
What tech companies do is obtain the minimum legally required consent - and sometimes not even that. This may be legal, but it’s far from ethical.
Fortunately, Facebooks ToS[0] is not full of legalese or jargon, and I'm sure anybody with enough technological education to sign up for Facebook can understand it too.
Quick read of it and it is obvious that document likely cost millions for Facebook to produce and with the aid of countless hours of legal professionals who in sum likely have 1000s of years of legal experience.
Claiming the average person is able to understand scope of that document— and the likely 1000s of internal documents related to it, and the 100s of thousand pages of related legal code and case law is a stretch.
Document also does not disclose Facebook is subject to secret court orders, gag orders, etc.
— and that doesn’t even begin to cover the knowledge required to understand the related technology and the impact it might have on the users.
That's not what I've said, and I somewhat agree with the original point, but this trend of wanting to cater to the lowest denominator rubs me the wrong way.
Some guys think the web should be usable with a 50€ smartphone on GPRS, and I say no, because there's a middle ground.
How about just caring for the real world instead of the numbers provided by the internet provider? Those download numbers are for the best case scenario. And unlike broadband 4G is not reliable at all.
No, it's not merely showing text. Facebook does a thousand things more than show text. You could argue those features don't belong in Facebook, but you can't argue that features are supposed not to take up any space, because that's unrealistic.
I just opened FB with the cache disabled and it downloaded 5.85MB (19.76MB uncompressed).
Most of it happens after the page has rendered, which is great, but that's a lot of stuff. There are 13.74MB of uncompressed JavaScript.