Not sure I quite understand the argument against Facebook here, though I might just be missing something.<p>The market for messaging apps is pretty saturated with competitors at the moment; if I didn't like their WhatsApp and Facebook accounts merging, for example, I could just bounce to iMessage / Kik / Snap / Telegram.<p>Whether or not you agree / disagree with the security & user experience argument from FB (I personally can see both sides,) the low switching costs will always mean the user has quite a bit of power here.
Over the last 2 months, I've noticed Facebook has almost completely stopped responding to any vulnerability finds or bug bounty tickets submitted. It's gotten really bad.<p>For instance, right now all 70,000,000 of the Facebook users in Vietnam have their information posted online on an open web server. I am not going to post it just yet in the last hope that someone from FB will reach out to me, but the info is their along with their IMEI number, cell phone number, information on what ads they've seen and clicked on, etc. For some users there are absolutely private messages, it appears to be only for Muslims in Vietnam though (so not all nor am I saying all).<p>Until yesterday, the S3 bucket <a href="https://whatsapp-messages.s3.amazonaws.com" rel="nofollow">https://whatsapp-messages.s3.amazonaws.com</a> was open. You can search CNAME records if you have a SecurityTrails subscription, and this bucket belongs to a certain FB contractor. In fairness it could have been something known as "Domain Shadowing" whereby you secretly hack a groups subdomain records for evading firewall purposes, but in that case the argument still stands.<p>It had over 13,000 pictures from various Latin American police departments that change every few days while I tracked it.<p>NOTE: FB Security ppl, my email is in my profile.<p>EDIT: This is a very good paper from Tsinghua University in 2016 on Domain Shadowing, which more people should be aware of. Check your subdomains, and make sure you use the free option in SecurityTrails to do it. Passive DNS checks aren't enough here: <a href="https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/zhouli/files/2018/09/ccs17.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/zhouli/files/2018/09/ccs17.pdf</a>
In my opinion, the ship has already sailed for the FTC to have any say in how Facebook interoperates its own applications. If they were truly concerned about a monopoly on social media, <i>the sale of those apps should have been blocked in the first place</i>.<p>What is the point of telling Facebook not to make their apps interact with each other? Are they thinking Facebook employees <i>can't</i> see the databases of their other apps? Is the FTC going to pretend they know anything about how the databases are <i>supposed</i> to operate? What about one big database with an App field; would they know if Facebook did that? What about multiple databases on the same server; is that an antitrust violation?<p>The entire rationale for looking at Facebook <i>now</i> just seems like going after an easy target. Either evaluate the antitrust arguments on their own merit and break those apps off Facebook, or leave it alone.
The timing of some of this feels disingenuous... it wasn’t that long ago Facebook completed their graph API migration... functionally their is not a “platform separation” any more their are just different labels on Facebook APIs this change is now heavily reflected in dev tools... Facebook will simply argue that any disentanglement would have high impact to business and move on with their day. The people who work for the government and do this stuff know enough about how platforms work to know that the time to do this was over a year ago before this huge shift was locked in.
If it got to that and it's not some sort of WSJ attempt to advocate for this sort of thing, facebook must fight it tooth and nail, and stop these attempts at governmental micromanagement once and for all.<p>It's suspect that they are going after tech companies which are national treasures but are enemies to corporate media, it's strange that this sort of action isn't being considered against actual malicious monopolists that the press isn't constantly attacking. No one is suggesting going after disney for instance even though they have that market cornered.