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If everyone is entitled to interact with the internet on their own terms, then why would that not include a service being entitled to act in a way that's adversarial to your desires?


In my opinion, it does! However, on my machines, I am the arbiter. Facebook cedes control to me the moment any of their content hits my browser.


Except that when you signed up for a FB account you agreed to access the site on their terms, not yours.

And let's be honest, and I'm the last person to defend FB, but they are not likely to be going to be going after a lone user who has automated something for his own convenience with Selenium or whatever...

Once I decided I wanted to delete a lot of old email from a webmail account. There was no "select all" function so I wrote a one-liner in the javascript console of the browser. When that worked, I automated clicking the "delete" button, and then added a loop to do it over and over. This probably violated a TOS clause somehow, but nothing ever came of it.


I have not signed up for a FB account and yet they still try to deliver payloads to my browser, in the form of tracking buttons embedded in non-FB sites. They've likewise ceded all control of those buttons, and what I do with them, to me!


Agree with you there; my comment was in the context of a FB user interacting with the FB functionality.


How often have FB unilaterally changed those terms in the interim, after usera are already locked in through network effects and data?


Given FB's near-monopoly position, any such "agreements" are effectively forced.




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