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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

#71

Post by 1970-01-01 »

oldtownroad wrote: post #47
marcosdumay wrote: post #4

Hunting down your personal details and publishing them is a crime¹, isn't it? 1 - I mean on the US where Meta really cares about. It's probably one on most countries where Meta has revenue, but that won't send anybody to jail.

The story is almost certainly untrue or a misunderstanding. Facebook has no reason to scrape individuals personal information and then forcefully update their Facebook profile. There are various processes at Meta that do require identification to be submitted and in some cases that information will be published. For example, to be verified on Instagram you must have your name be published. Likewise, certain Facebook…

>Facebook is not finding an anonymous sex workers identity and then intentionally outing them.

They are?

https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-sex-workers-outed/

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

#72

Post by ipaddr »

gonehome wrote: post #65
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 aligne…

Thread users are today's aol users. Better to keep them out of areas where real conversations happen

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

#73

Post by PaulHoule »

sunbum wrote: post #46
PaulHoule wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odd thing is that even the biggest fedi promoters don't seem to get it. I thought "mastodon.social" was based in Germany, heart of GDPR country but there is no consent theater, no harassment by cookie popups, certainly no controls over data. I really don't mind, but there is some serious cognitive dissonance there.

Because almost none of that is actually required if you are not collecting data outside of the actual usage of the application.

People are documenting their own personal lives without any protections. You can delete your account and the system will circulate a polite notification that other servers should delete that information.

If you are a "sexworker" (sic) and you doxx yourself tough luck.

If you reveal your mental illness through the things you write about and the language patterns you use tough luck. (Pro tip: machine learning algorithms can read your social media posts and psychodiagnose you better than the psychiatric nurse practitioner you'll struggle to get an appointment with.)

People get these spams inviting them to play games where they ask questions trying to gather their answers to break into their bank account such as "What was the name of your first pet?" Even if you didn't have a tendency to be paranoid maybe you should.

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

#74

Post by cubefox »

zzzeek wrote: post #60
cdot2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

what an ignorant take. Social media promotion of "hated" groups can be plausibly blamed for mass murder, including a literal genocide for which Facebook is now being sued for £150bn right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...

That's completely different. Libs of TikTok only reposts very far-left takes to expose their absurdity.

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

#75

Post by JPws_Prntr_Fngr »

gonehome wrote: post #65
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 aligne…

Surely you, Foss User, are aware that FB et al don't just "republish" your voluntarily published info as per GP - they doggedly track you around the internet and the physical world, 24/7, without consent, storing, profiling, and reselling you to advertisers.

Example: download the supposedly privacy-focused app pCloud on your iPhone, start it up, and check what IPs it's hitting. That's right, it's hitting facebook tracking servers.

This is not a tribal ingroup club thing. It's a "fuck off, megacorps" thing.

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

#76

Post by fsflover »

kazinator wrote: post #56
Dma54rhs wrote: post #14

What's the point of joining a decentralized federated platform if you don't want other instances or people to see what you post? Meta scraping your name and doing other shenanigans is a different subject and obviously bad, but the rest is like complaining joining a public torrent tracker and being mad about leaking your ip address to its peers.

What's the point of joining a decentralized, open-source federated platform if you don't want Facebook to collect information about you and track you online, even though you aren't a Facebook user?

This is not a problem specific to Federation/ActivityPub/Mastodon.

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

#77

Post by strogonoff »

ilyt wrote: post #61
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

Bug-free software is unsolvable, but it does not mean we should stop trying to avoid bugs, that’d be just silly.

If fully precluding public and private intelligence is infeasible, that does not mean we should be using a protocol that in many ways is optimised for public and private intelligence.

Privacy, like many things, is a spectrum.

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

#78

Post by jdp23 »

cdot2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

Here's a couple of excerpts highlighting way many LGBTQ+ people see Libs of TikTok as a threat

"After gaining a large Twitter following in the spring as she baselessly accused LGBTQ teachers of being pedophiles and “groomers,” Raichik began criticizing children’s health facilities earlier this summer, targeting a hospital in Omaha in June and another in Pittsburgh in August. The attacks resulted in a flood of online harassment and phoned-in threats at both hospitals."

(From "Twitter account Libs of TikTok blamed for harassment of children’s hospitals" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/lgbtq-t...)

...

"One former English teacher, Tyler Wrynn, told Lorenz for her piece that he had been harassed, sent death threats and eventually fired after one of his TikToks about supporting LGBT+ kids was posted by Raichik"

(From "How Libs of TikTok Became an Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Machine" https://www.them.us/story/libs-of-tik-tok-twitter-facebook-i... )

"While the account doesn’t always explicitly encourage followers to do anything, its posts have sometimes led people to harass or physically threaten its subjects. In one instance, a group of five Proud Boys members disrupted a Drag Queen Story Hour at a public library, spewing homophobic and transphobic insults at attendees, which investigators believe was spurred by Libs of TikTok."

(from "Teacher targeted by Libs of TikTok sent death threats and lost his job" https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/04/20/libs-of-tiktok-teache... )

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

#79

Post by notatoad »

PaulHoule wrote: post #57
notatoad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU digital markets act will require "gatekeepers" like meta to provide some form of interoperability or open access. Supporting activitypub would be a way to satisfy that requirement.

But Mastodon can't possibly comply with GDPR the way it is organized. I mean Heavens you can use it without clicking on a cookie popup, they probably owe $70 billion dollars just for all the people who haven't seen a cookie popup already.

I'm assuming this is the point. Facebook can get around things like requests for deletion under the GDPR by sending that data out to the fediverse, and then reading it back in from the fediverse after they've deleted it.

and when the EU complains, they get to throw their hands in the air and say "yeah, you made us do it"

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

#80

Post by mediumdeviation »

jrajav wrote: post #67
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."

More than harassment, literal bomb threats https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/lgbtq-t...

> After Raichik falsely claimed on Aug. 11 that Boston Children’s Hospital performs hysterectomies on children, the hospital received a barrage of “hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence toward our clinicians and staff,” the hospital said in a statement. The hospital does provide hysterectomies to certain patients over 18.

> On Tuesday, police responded to an anonymous bomb threat at the hospital. No explosives were discovered, and hospital officials said they were cooperating with the police investigation of the incident. “We remain vigilant in our efforts to battle the spread of false information about the hospital and our caregivers,” the hospital said.

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