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Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

privacy.thenexus.today

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Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#61

Post by ilyt »

strogonoff wrote: post #48

ActivityPub has a problem of laying all data out, nicely structured, just waiting to be scraped and mined and machine-processed, in perpetuity by default, as if it was something people inherently need when communicating. Is it, though? It does look like something idealistically-minded early techies would justifiably find really cool. It may indeed be desirable for, say, Dutch government (and perhaps any government th…

shrug not having API didn't stop anyone before that.

And "I want random people to see my social stuff (cos I yearn for attention) but not that particular person/corporation" is unsolvable problem

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#62

Post by kazinator »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #38
ollien wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you don't use Threads, when they eventually add ActivityPub support, Mastodon users' data will inevitably be harvested. Instance admins have been signing a pact[1] to defederate with Meta for this reason, in addition to the fact that they don't trust Meta to moderate their instance well enough for it to be safe to federate with. [1] https://fedipact.online/

> when they eventually add ActivityPub support What does that have to do with anything? Mastodon is explicitly setup to allow all user data to be harvested. What Threads supports or doesn't support in the end has no bearing on Mastodon having all user data public.

Just like digital entertainment is set up to allow all movies and music to be downloaded for free!

If you don't like it, just don't make movies or music.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#65

Post by gonehome »

crooked-v wrote: post #3

"Decentralized access for everyone, unless it gets popular enough that somebody actually wants to interop with it" I understand the Meta hate, but joining a very explicitly public and intentionally republishable service and then being unhappy that your data is public and intentionally republishable is bizarre to me.

I think for a lot of mastodon users it's more about being part of a specific ideologically aligned in-group than it is about anything else (this post touches on a lot of stuff that makes overtures to that).

The irony to me is that any chance of relevance for a protocol is obviously going to need big players like meta to sign up (and that's a good thing for the protocol).

A weird set of circumstances might have aligned where meta sees an advantage in being part of a federated protocol to commoditize a threat to themselves (twitter, bluesky, etc.) and still hold a dominant position in quality of the end user clients (which is the only thing 99% of users care about).

It's a little funny a lot of the mastodon hosts are up in arms about this, but not that surprising when considering what they're actually getting out of being part of it (the identity stuff that comes along with being a mastodon user).

I'd guess similar stuff was said during the eternal september era of the web itself - simply being an internet user was no longer an identity that meant something culturally specific.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#67

Post by jrajav »

cdot2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

You're the only one making the absurd terrorist analogy. Reposting a person's content in another context with a whole crowd of people specifically there to mock and humiliate that person, many of whom will then go out of their way to personally harass that person, definitely counts as "targeting."

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#68

Post by jeroenhd »

Modified3019 wrote: post #51

https://news.yahoo.com/teen-mom-plead-guilty-abortion-230802... >A Nebraska woman has pleaded guilty to helping her daughter have a medication abortion last year. The legal proceeding against her hinged on Facebook's decision to provide authorities with private messages between that mother and her 17-year-old daughter discussing the latter's plans to terminate her pregnancy. If you have information you don't want oth…

If you have secrets at all, don't send them through any ActivityPub conversation.

People on Mastodon make this mistake quite often, tagging someone they're talking about, or realising that the person they tagged now receives a copy of their conversation.

This is a massive issue on top of the lack of end to end encryption. Both servers receive plaintext copies of the messages exchanged. I'm sure mastohub.ai is a safe server, but how can you be sure they'll never be bought out or hacked?

If you want to federate and share secrets, try something like Matrix or XMPP. They make it significantly more difficult to read your messages.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#70

Post by phailhaus »

cdot2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

When the account "just reposted stuff" with inflammatory claims about children's hospitals, those hospitals were targeted by a deluge of online harassment and phoned-in threats. [1] If Twitter is the public square, then their account is on a massive soap box with over two million followers. What they say is going to have real-world consequences, and to pretend as if they have no blame is ridiculous.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/lgbtq-t...

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