Facebook definitively bans the developer “Unfollow Everything”

Facebook is said to have banned the developer of the “Don’t Everything”, a browser extension that allowed users of the social network to get rid of the news feed, from its platforms.

Unfold Everything developer Louis Barclay revealed the ban in an October 7 blog post for Future Tense. “This summer, Facebook sent me a cease and desist letter threatening legal action,” he said. “This permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts. And it required that I agree to never create any tools that interact with Facebook or its other services again.”

Barclay says he released the first version of Unfollow Everything to the Chrome Web Store – a central repository for Google Chrome browser extensions – in July 2020 as a free download. Facebook users could install the extension to no longer follow their friends, groups they joined, and pages they liked in order to have an empty news feed.

He then collaborated with researchers at the University of Neuchâtel on a study comparing a group that emptied its news feed with Subscribe Everything to a control group that did not. This seems to be what has drawn Facebook’s ire, and based on similar bans the company has issued to other researchers, one might speculate that it is apparently because of this aspect of the study:

“Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information, particularly the time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups and pages they had visited. they were following and not following, both in total. and broken down by category. (For regular users of Unfollow Everything, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total number of profiles, a metric that helped me make sure the tool was working.) “

Facebook previously said it banned New York University researchers from its platform to “protect the privacy of individuals in accordance with our privacy program under the FTC order,” which the agency denied, and told a research group on Instagram that using a browser extension to collect data from volunteers violated both EU laws and its own terms of service.

These projects have a lot in common. The three used browser extensions to collect information about Facebook users – all of whom volunteered to participate and installed the extensions knowing their data would be collected – to learn more about how Facebook’s services affect people. And, of course, all three were shut down under the auspices of user privacy.

There is little that these individuals and organizations can do to challenge Facebook’s requests. Barclay says that because he lives in the UK he “would have been personally liable for the costs of Facebook’s litigation” had he sued the company and lost. Facebook is a trillion dollar business; Barclay is an individual developer who released a free browser extension. The math is simple.

Facebook did not immediately respond to our request for comment.