God I wish Apple had the balls of suspending the developer account and withdrawing the Facebook app from the app store. It's infuriating that most likely Facebook will again get away with a slap on the wrist. How will they make the next morally relevant decision?
They should implement permission controls so users can choose what functionality the facebook app can access.
It sucks huge amounts of power, I assume the facebook app is collecting all sorts of nefarious metadata off phones at no benefit to the user. Fine grained controls would allow users to prevent facebook from accessing their information without the user's explicit choice, which would be a huge improvement.
There should be a big "Facebook wants to read and analyze ALL of your contacts. OK or Cancel" prompt before each read, or you should have to explicitly allow "Allow Facebook to read and analyze all of your SMS messages at any time"
Is that really the case though? Lets play through this virtual divorce.
Apple's revenue was a disappointing what 60 some billion dollars last quarter based on devices that have a multitude of functions beyond facebook. Not having facebook available on the device would probably decrease their value somewhat but with facebook getting tons of bad press it could work to apple and alternative social networks long term benefit by further cementing Apple as protector of your privacy and Apple blessed social networks as better than that trash android users run on their comparatively open platform. Users already don't seem to value openness much and place higher stock in privacy and security.
Facebooks was in the same time frame around 16 billion. Facebook depends heavily on access to mobile platforms to reach users. Apple is only 10ish % of the global market but around at least 1/3 of the US market which facebook needs. As people are unlikely to chuck their $1000 phones in the trash before 1-2 years are up it seems likely that most users would keep their facebook account to keep in contact with friends/family on facebook but come to rely on other chat apps on their phone and may ultimately use those apps instead of facebook on and off their phones.
From facebooks perspective its users don't immediately drop but engagement can drop through the floor for that segment while offering substantial help to competitors that may in the long run turn facebook into myspace 2.0. Apple losing facebook would be a negative. Facebook losing apple would be an existential threat. If removed from the play store as well it would basically be dead in the water. This would probably never happen because if apple and or google threatened to do so it would basically have to give apple and or google its left arm and throw in a leg to secure its continued existence. It's bargaining position with either is terrible.
I think both should work together to force facebook to do a better job of protecting its users privacy.
As an aside I think that in the longer run it could probably consider bypassing the respective app stores entirely to work entirely as a website but don't think that would be likely to be a short term prospect.
... so they allow themselves to abuse each other? Maybe enterprises should have % penalties built into their contracts here to effect the appropriate behavior if the normal rules don’t (or can’t) apply.
