alt Hacker NewsAre you ok?
Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
Replies
alex1138 • yesterday at 10:52 AM
My understanding of the internet is Google is extremely flawed but fair and they didn't try to hold you hostage
Facebook is not fair and they actively do (ever try deleting an account? surprise! it's back a few months later. look at how many users we have, as measure of our success)
There's this for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1890164
> Are you ok?
What do you mean?
> Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
There was a period of time years before the Graph API launched that was all over the place. Facebook couldn't decide how they wanted their platform to work, so they cycled through a bunch of ideas like APIs, FBML, etc. before “Operation Developer Love” and the Graph API happened. Until that point, you could access a load of personal info, but the data portability everybody cared about – the social graph – was off the table because competitors could use it to bootstrap their own social graph without users having to find and re-add all their friends again. You tried to mirror that, you risked losing your account.