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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

#161

Post by drdaeman »

jdp23 wrote: post #90
dabedee wrote: post #50

This reminds me of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategies Microsoft used extensively with Linux and open source software in the 90s. From [1]: "a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences i…

There's a lot of discussion about that! Here's a very good article on the EEE threat. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo... Personally I think it's more an "embrace, extend, and exploit" approach; a decentralized model could work well for Meta, for example if they do revenue-sharing on ads hosted by other instances (think Disney or LA Lakers). Update: here's another good article looking at h…

In my personal (subjective) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers. At the very least, that's why I stopped.

It's not like Google had "extinguished" anything, it's more like the "largest server went uncooperative and removed themselves". Sucked for people who were able to chat before and got separated, but I disagree with painting this as some sort of fatal blow.

I don't think there's some statistics on reasons why people stopped using XMPP, but I don't believe Google is the reason for it. I'd speculate that it just coincided with the beginning of the smartphone era and this whole "Google killed XMPP" is a convenient myth.

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

#162

Post by gonehome »

wmf wrote: post #156
godelski wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid One question I've had for fediverse people is how you prevent a federated system from centralizing. I am legitimately curious. Email is often given as an example, but imo that a perfect example of a decentralized system BECOMING centralized. Sure, other players exist but the vast majority of people are on gmail, apple, or outlook (which is much smaller than the other t…

You can force decentralization in certain ways like only allowing one user per domain but nobody has the courage to try it.

This is similar to how urbit’s ID system works fwiw - the ID is tied to the computing node itself 1:1 and you can’t have an account that’s separate from a node.

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

#164

Post by giancarlostoro »

I know the main image in the article claims Meta scraped their posts and updated their profile, but is it not feasible they used the same email address or phone number they use on IG / FB and Meta just filled in the missing blanks using information they have already? Which mind you, Facebook buying IG was under the premise that they would NOT merge IG and FB, but they've been doing that for a while now, they are arguably already merged to the hip.

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

#165

Post by mrguyorama »

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.

[flagged]

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

#166

Post by itronitron »

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.

If I take public transit to work should I be bothered by Uber posting my daily commute details?

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

#168

Post by zzzeek »

cubefox wrote: post #138
phailhaus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

going to call bullshit on that. Share the source of so called "illegal gender treatment". Going to guess it was a hospital that had to quickly change practices due to one of those reactionary laws recently passed in Texas or similar at best. These laws violate people's human rights and should be overturned (and they will be).

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

#170

Post by jdp23 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #119
Nextgrid wrote: post #39

If you have personal information you do not wish bad actors to see, do not publish it using an open protocol explicitly designed to allow anyone to read said information. Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid - Meta can (and will if they actually care enough) just rejoin undercover. Furthermore, when it comes to the fediverse, Meta is actually one of the more trusted actors compared to whatever else is on th…

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…

I should have been clearer about how this relates to general issues. I added a sentence

"Of course, Meta's far from the only threat out there, but as I discuss in 'Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy', looking at Meta-related threats also points to solutions that increase privacy and safety in the fediverse more generally."

Here's a link to the longer post (still a draft). https://privacy.thenexus.today/fediverse-threat-modeling-pri...

And agreed, it doesn't scale for Meta to infiltrate people into every single fediverse instance -- although threat actors who are targeting specific people or communities might well do this, so it's also something to take into account.

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