The author made a post explaining the plugin was almost certainly legal, but facebook can exploit the legal system make it too expensive to be worth defending.
And unfortunately, the author comes from the UK which is now no longer under the jurisdiction of the CJEU. That might have provided him some protection.
The UK currently replicates almost all the same provisions as the EU (because, it was part of the EU, and in leaving it was easier to just say, yes, we're keeping the rules the same).
It will inevitably diverge from the EU rules, but most of these are identical for now.
The case in the OP was against the Belgian Government, who do have the resources to fight silly lawsuits. Random individuals in most jurisdictions can't really entertain such things over something that doesn't make them any money against a trillion $ company.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France
It reminds me of the issue of whether game cheats are legal or not. Activision is losing a lot of money because cheats are ruining the game for everyone.
Here, the only "victim" is Facebook itself. And it's not cheating as much as automating a manual process.
My opinion is that Facebook overstepped here. A net negative move with all the bad PR they got, of which they already have plenty. And the attentionthe plug-in got.
IANAL, but FB never made any direct or implied promise in its EULA that you could mass unfollow everything, and there probably ARE terms against scripting their API in an unauthorized way, so I don't think there is a case.
> FB never made any direct or implied promise in its EULA that you could mass unfollow everything
Why does this have to be explicitly allowed? Everything not prohibited is permitted.
> there probably ARE terms against scripting their API in an unauthorized way
The extension is not bound by any terms. It's the user's choice whether to violate these conditions by installing and using it.
In any case, users should have every right to do this. It's essentialy self-defense against corporate abuse. They can get us addicted to content feeds so we spend hours looking at ads but we can't script their site? That's abuse and we have every right to defend ourselves. These stupid terms are like a drug dealer that makes us promise not to go to a doctor and seek help for addiction before giving us our free sample.
EULA doesn't mean anything as it's a one-sided contract. It doesn't allow the user to provide their terms in an input field. So it can't be taken seriously.
It's basically 10,000 employee company against single consumer. No judge would think that is a fair way to go about these things.
All the time with my personal data. You don't even need to install anything. Many applications and websites will do share your data to Facebook. Friends too. It's great.
generally by searching Facebook on duckduckgo and following links, for some people it might be preinstalled on their phones so they literally bought it.
in any case it was given willingly to me by Facebook
Facebook has a buggy UI that makes it hard to unfollow everything. Some dev created a plugin to fix this. Facebook banned him and lawyered up.
Is the plugin legal in europe or not? Is fixing a dark pattern a bugfix?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28801908