"Facebook private messages are governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which forbids communications providers from intercepting user messages, barring limited exceptions for security and valid legal orders."
Are private message systems in apps generally governed by this or is there something about facebook that makes this a special situation?
I'm genuinely curious about that as well. I'm hoping it isn't. How would you prevent spam from bringing down your site's usefulness? How would you prevent that swearing overtakes an otherwise family friendly site?
I'm not a lawyer, and that guy is, but I disagree with him. Facebook is not "intercepting" messages, it's simply preventing you from sending them. It would be like your boss standing over you as you write a letter and saying, "no, we can't send that, shred that now." and then shredding the letter. That's not tampering with mail, as it never became mail, it's just a piece of paper on some guy's desk.
In this case, Facebook is refusing to let you submit a form, just like when you omit a required field. If you want to talk "wiretapping" or "intercepting", what about corporate spam filters and false positives? That is literally sitting between you and a legitimate sender and is throwing away data some algorithm doesn't want you to see. Sounds like this guy's definition of "wiretapping" to me, but we all know that email would be dead without spam filters.
Anyway, this is an issue for facebook and its users. If its users are willing to be censored in exchange for being able to share low-res pictures of their friends smoking pot, then so be it, that is what their customers want.
This is exactly why I don't use Facebook. They are so busy trying to get advertisers that they are making their site worthless. All so you can see more ads.
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[ 43.1 ms ] story [ 489 ms ] threadAre private message systems in apps generally governed by this or is there something about facebook that makes this a special situation?
In this case, Facebook is refusing to let you submit a form, just like when you omit a required field. If you want to talk "wiretapping" or "intercepting", what about corporate spam filters and false positives? That is literally sitting between you and a legitimate sender and is throwing away data some algorithm doesn't want you to see. Sounds like this guy's definition of "wiretapping" to me, but we all know that email would be dead without spam filters.
Anyway, this is an issue for facebook and its users. If its users are willing to be censored in exchange for being able to share low-res pictures of their friends smoking pot, then so be it, that is what their customers want.
We have detected suspicious activity on your Facebook account and have reset your password as a security precaution.
etc...
No thanks.