[Bug 77360] Turning off Facebook Platform prevents log in to Facebook chat

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77360

--- Comment #1 from Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> ---
(In reply to comment #0)
> If the platform is turned off, according to Facebook: "This means you can't
> use the Facebook integrations on third party apps or websites. If you want
> to use these apps and websites with Facebook, turn Platform back on." 

We aren't trying to integrate with Facebook as a third-party website, but we[1]
*are* trying to integrate with Facebook as a third-party app.

Unfortunately, Facebook does not distinguish between:

* local applications on your computer (like Telepathy, GNOME or KDE), which you
can trust as much as you can trust your OS vendor and hardware (i.e. if you
can't trust them, then you have already lost your privacy and security)

* webapps on third-party servers, which you can only trust as much as you trust
the owner of that server

It would be good if they did, but convincing websites like Facebook and Twitter
to acknowledge that local applications *exist* was hard enough, so I'm not
holding my breath.

[1] actually GNOME Online Accounts + empathy-auth in GNOME, or whatever KDE
uses instead; I don't use KDE myself, but possibly it's something based on
libaccounts?

> An idea: is it possible that Telepathy could query the Facebook API and see
> if the user has Platform integration turned on? And pass that back to the UI?

I suspect this may be impossible for privacy reasons: "tell me about this
user's privacy preferences" is just the sort of thing that should only be
accessible by trusted applications.

However, if you discover otherwise, I'd review patches. If someone wants to
work on this, I would suggest concentrating on working out whether it is even
possible, and getting the information into the telepathy-gabble process: after
that's proved to be possible, we can help to design a way to get it through
Telepathy to the UI layer.

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