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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

#131

Post by adolph »

yodsanklai wrote: post #102
zzzeek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point they're making is that Meta is in a special place, where by using their unusually vast amounts of personal data and photos, they are somehow (?) going to dox anonymous users by publishing their real names, based on matching their profiles in some way. At least that is the implication based on the quoted tweet right at the top of the post (which is lacking any real detail how exactly Meta got this pe…

> they are somehow (?) going to dox anonymous users by publishing their real names, based on matching their profiles in some way. Aren't there laws against that? are there even allow to build internal links between FB/IG accounts without user consent?

> Aren't there laws against that?

Law is a weak form of mitigation for risk of harm. If it can be done and there is motive to do it, expect that it will be done.

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

#132

Post by brianolson »

notatoad wrote: post #44

>Mastodon (and most other fediverse software) wasn't designed with privacy and user safety in mind this is the real problem. Mastodon and lemmy share way more information than they actually need to (like lemmy shares a list of usernames who upvoted or downvoted a post, not just a count), and if you're using one of those services you should expect that all your data and interactions are public. that's the actual threa…

ActivityPub has been ignoring privacy since at least 2017 https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

cubefox wrote: post #74
zzzeek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by howinteresting »

cubefox wrote: post #128
srveale wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They provide commentary too. They certainly have an agenda. They have targeted specific people and organizations, and also groups of people generally. The article writer needed an example of a well-known social media account that fit this description, and accounts that are worse in terms of explicitly encouraging harassment have already been banned.

Their only "agenda" is "exposing" and making fun of far-left excesses by simply reposting them. I don't think they have targeted anyone in particular. If the things they repost are damning, they were damning in themselves.

[flagged]

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

#136

Post by mrguyorama »

numpad0 wrote: post #126
kazinator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And what’s wrong about details on bunches of whore - people engaged in the oldest professional occupation known to humanity, no less - scraped into Meta systems, as a replica ? It’ll end up in recording, representing, normalizing birth control as well as commercial sexwork and also current status and known issues around it. It’s just Mastodon movement or whatever it calls itself don’t want to be associated with shady…

Because famously, shining light on a community of people that are hated only results in that community becoming accepted.

Please ignore the people who die and are harmed in the process.

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

#137

Post by joe_the_user »

kevinventullo wrote: post #122
joe_the_user wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid - Meta can (and will if they actually care enough) just rejoin undercover. I agree with the rest of your post but I suspect that in this instance Meta, a large public company, that might leery about doing something that potentially embarassing. But your basic point remains true. A wide variety of companies, many bad actor, are going to be scraping, processing and connect…

Meta, a large public company, that might leery about doing something that potentially embarassing. I don’t know, they did depend on Onavo analytics for a while: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Yeah, the (less-important, subsidiary) point is they'd be happier to use some other source than engaging deception overtly and results would be the same.

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

#138

Post by cubefox »

phailhaus wrote: post #70
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.w…

[flagged]

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

#139

Post by Karrot_Kream »

chrisnight wrote: post #123
ajross wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads is still way behind Twitter, though, which doesn't even federate with Mastodon and never did. If that's your complaint, why wasn't it doubly or triply so with the last corporate overlord? "Don't use that silly Mastodon thing, everyone is on Twitter" is, in fact, the way the world has worked for the whole lifetime of Mastodon.

> If that's your complaint, why wasn't it doubly or triply so with the last corporate overlord? I'll interpret this to mean "If the problem is that Threads owns the majority of the userbase, why didn't you complain about Twitter owning the majority of the userbase?" I'll reply to that as: Mastodon users did. That's why they used Mastodon in the first place, because they felt too much power was controlled in a single…

The fact that Threads has a much larger userbase than Mastodon already means that they won't ever really feel threatened by it. The stated reasons why GChat and Facebook Messenger eventually defederated is that it was hard to keep scaling the platform while speaking XMPP, but the unstated reasons were that Messenger and GChat at the time were still very much niche technologies that were jockeying for marketshare in a crowded space.

This time around Threads is already an order-of-magnitude larger than the existing Mastodon Fediverse. Moreover, now Meta has a diverse array of different social products, so there isn't as much pressure on any one product to succeed. If Threads ends up in a dominant position in the threaded-text social network world, that already nets them more users and more opportunities for ad revenue, which they can collect revenue aside their existing properties of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. On the other hand, interoperating with the Fediverse allows them to be opinionated about what kind of content they allow on their network (e.g. if you're posting from Threads, you can't post sexually explicit content) which can keep them advertiser friendly, while offering a relief valve for the loud minority that will want content disallowed by Meta's content policies. It's a win-win really.

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

#140

Post by mrguyorama »

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.

"You didn't invent the perfect solution so you aren't allowed to complain about the faults of your imperfect reality"
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