Louis Barclay the extension author felt that unfollowing everything improved his Facebook experience and helped him break his Facebook addiction. Louis wrote this extension so other people could try this and enlisted a Swiss University to conduct a study to see if this improved user satisfaction with Facebook.<p>Facebook not only took down the extension but banned the personal Facebook account of Louis Barclay and ordered that he never make any tool that interacts with Facebook, which he felt was heavy handed but as a UK resident felt unable to seek legal redress as in the UK if one loses one is liable for the opponents court costs.<p>Here is the Slate article by Louis Barclay.<p><a href="https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...</a><p>and an opinion by Cory Doctorow on the utility of Unfollow Everything, the study and heavy handedness as a tendency of Facebooks to squash research it doesn't like.<p><a href="https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/" rel="nofollow">https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/</a>
This is yet again the same thing as when youtube-dl was being "mirrored" not long ago. What is the point of mirroring this extension?<p>Facebook only needs to change ONE SINGLE LETTER in their website and it will immediately make all the "mirrors" of this extension useless.
Quoting a fellow HNer:<p>I recommend avoiding all browser extensions unless they come from well-known developers (eg 1Password) and they’re downloaded and installed through official channels.
Browser extensions have a lot of access to your browsing activity and can phone home as well. One of the reasons this extension was sent a C&D was that it was sending some data home to the author’s server. That might be what the install instructions above are hinting at with the warning to examine the JS and remove any phone-home code. The original author defended the data collection as just enough to make sure the plug-in was working, except for study participants who apparently submitted much more information through the plug-in. Either way, I wouldn’t rush to install a plug-in that was caught sending any of my social media data to a 3rd-party server.
I certainly would not install a browser extension from an unknown 3rd-party website just to spite Facebook, regardless the claimed origin of the code.<p>Source: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804308" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804308</a>