So instead of making their system less-privacy-invasive (which I have seen no indication should be impossible wrt the APIs mentioned here), they just shut down services where this is regulated.<p>Not surprised, but there's no way to spin this in a way that doesn't make Facebook look shady and bad. So much for "working with regulators".
While Messenger is linked to our Facebook account state, where you can be arbitrarily banned for any reason without any accountability or recourse, the idea of relying on Messenger as a communcations app is an absurd proposition.
Seems like a huge hit to the myriad business-to-consumer chat startups that sell premium messenger experiences to brands for customer service etc. It’s also a hit to any business who has invested in chat as a service/sales channel, assuming that all chat APIs will be subject to the same limitations.<p>These APIs that are being limited have very little to do with user privacy and mostly impact usability. For example it looks like handoffs between chat apps are no longer possible in Europe- a company could have an entry point chat bot that routes to a live human, or routes to an order-taking bot. That routing is no longer possible without the “handoff protocol”.<p>It looks like users can no longer send attachments to a business either. (Or rather they can still send the attachment, but the business can’t use the api to access it?). I don’t believe this is a win for users and just shows some unintended side effects of EU legislation.
This is desperately short on explanation? The very high granularity suggests that some features are more privacy-invasive than others, but not why that is.<p>(Also, listing the UK under EEA is .. complicated and subject to change in the next few weeks. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membership_of_the_United_Kingdom_in_the_European_Economic_Area" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membership_of_the_United_Kingd...</a> )
How do people here feel about these changes?<p>I've the initial impression that this will be a good step for reducing the drift of user content into other websites and spaces where messages or user data may end up outside of the context for which it was generated.
It seems like some of these features were loading images directly from the client. So presumably this could have been used to get info like your browser and IP as your phone made the request to the server that they provided.<p>The recommended work around to to just send the link which now makes it explicit to the user that they are connecting to the third party.
I've added a guide here to help you figure out the impact on chatbots specifically: <a href="https://medium.com/chatlayer/breaking-facebook-messenger-api-updates-for-chatbots-in-europe-4db39ae3a330" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/chatlayer/breaking-facebook-messenger-api...</a>
We need a decent gdpr compliant business dependable rich messaging platform for europe. it is ridiculous, now the rest of the world has wechat, messenger, kakao and line, but in europe there is nothing.
Great news, I feel much safer now. Now I'm waiting for EU to completely ban computers, this way I will never be attacked by anyone online.<p>But seriously, if anyone had doubts what GDPR will achieve, I think this person is pretty naive. GDPR is not a progression, but a regression, and it will seriously hit (already does) online businesses in the long run.<p>Same thing with cookie warnings. No normal person will read tons of legal text on every website they visit. And even if the normal person will read it, they won't be able to decline the cookies, because the site will not work. But let's say you're a technically savvy person that is actually interested in cookie privacy; I'm really surprised you're not using "cookie autodelete"-style plugins already.<p>Creating laws only to have laws will never work. It only creates cost for everyone in order to be compliant. And people always go where the cost is lower.