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

privacy.thenexus.today

171–180 of 458 posts

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

#171

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…

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

#172
A lot of privacy problems (including every single one raised in that article) will be solved by just not posting your personal business on social media, but people are somehow unwilling or unable to accept it.

If you post incriminating content on a Mastodon server it is still out there whether Facebook can officially connect to it or not. It is archived forever out of your control. The server owner can be subpoenaed. Anyone can scrape the website, take a screenshot, or share it in a hundred different ways. Regardless of what pseudonym you use it can be tied to your real identity with 5 minutes of internet sleuthing.

"Private" online social media is an oxymoron. If you put something out there in the world you don't get to control whose eyeballs land on it. Facebook isn't the problem, your expectations are.

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

#173
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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).

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

#174
post #25

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.

> Hunting down your personal details and publishing them is a crime¹, isn't it? It's a crime to obtain public data published on a public network built on a public protocol explicitly designed to share data? Isn't that the whole raison-d'être of mastodon?

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

#175

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 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…

> the vast majority of people are on gmail, apple, or outlook

What do apple email addresses look like? I genuinely don't know anybody that uses an address that says to me "provided by Apple"... I do know a lot of people that use their corporate/organisational addresses for personal email though, which always surprised me.

Edit: just read that "me.com" email addresses are apple-provided - I have at least seen them used occasionally, though nowhere near as much as gmail and hotmail/live.com (outlook).

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

#176

The problem I see with Threads isn't what Meta will do with fediverse data, it's the power they have with owning 97% of the entire fediverse network [1]. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Owning the vast majority of the fediverse userbase will cause them to have a large amount of power to compel users or servers to do whatever they want. What do you do when Facebook implements a new feature and all of your followers compl…

The power imbalance when a semi-monopolist joins an open protocol is a really hard problem to solve.

Google all but killed XMPP by using it in GTalk/GChat/Gmail/whatever it's called now. They probably had no ill intent from the beginning, but their very presence gave everyone the need to quickly be if not bug- then quirk-compatible.

By the time everyone came around they suddenly de-federated everyone and with vague references to spam, which everyone knew was bunk. But the damage was done.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I don't know why you're responding to me then. The post I'm replying to is pretending that "just reposting stuff" is totally harmless and has no real world consequences.

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

#178

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 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…

It's certainly a challenge. Mastodon's development tends to prioritize mastodon.social (Eugen Rochko is BFDL of the software platform and also runs mastodon.social) -- for example, the mobile app now signs people up by default on mastodon.social, and functionality that people running smaller instances have implemented in forks hasn't been integrated back into the main line. So there's the weird dynamic that people generally have better experiences on small instances (as long as they're well-admined) but the vast majority of the current fediverse is on large Mastodon instances. So it'll be interesting to see what happens in response to Meta. There's likely to be a partition, and if .social winds up taking a Meta-friendly position, then the anti-Meta region may be much less centralized.

https://heat-shield.space/mastodon_two_camps.html looks at tensions between people who just want a "better twitter" (which tends to lead to centralization) and people who focus more on small communities (a more decentralized solution).

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

#179

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…

Meta has walled gardens at least with privacy settings that cannot be scraped.

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

#180

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.

> I don't think they have targeted anyone in particular.

Then maybe research before commenting? They do this regularly.

> If the things they repost are damning, they were damning in themselves.

The whole context of the account is to "damn" the things they are posting. Sure, if you pick one of their posts at random it'll probably be something that 99% of people agree is wacky, but come on. They have inflammatory commentary, they target specific people, organizations, and groups, they know they influence politics and society and are proud of it. If you need me to, I can spend the time to prove all that, but it's all to say that yes, they are a good example of a social media account to use in OP's article.

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