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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

#191

Post by em-bee »

jeroenhd wrote: post #68
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…

this is also what always bothered me about twitter. some friends of mine has absolutely private conversations on their public twitter feeds (nothing sensitive but stuff like sharing shopping lists). my fear always was that if i join twitter they would use it for private conversations with me insteads of using email or something else that isn't public for everyone.

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

#192

Post by cubefox »

srveale wrote: post #180
cubefox wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comme…

The OP article makes it sound as if they are immorally harassing people, not what they are actually doing, at least mainly: exposing things which are damning in themselves.

An analogy: They raise awareness about far-left excesses in a similar way in which the media likes to raise awareness about far-right excesses.

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

#193

Post by ollien »

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.

I think you would agree that harvesting that information is far easier if it's being literally POST'd to your servers (which ActivityPub does) than if you're going out to scrape them, no? It's the same principle with defederation; either they're going to scrape all the data, or the data is going to be literally sent to their platform.

The point is, the idea that "don't use threads" solves the problem being presented (your data being harvested), is wrong.

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

#194

Post by FinnKuhn »

chrisnight wrote: post #104

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…

I don't think you can really compare total users (how many people have created an account) and active users (how many people actually use the platform).

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

#195

Post by someNameIG »

wizofaus wrote: post #175
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…

> 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 use…

me.com is the old address, it's been icloud.com for years now.

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

#197

Post by MBCook »

klabb3 wrote: post #181
w0m wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want the information to be free! But not free to those guys over there. Ever so slightly hypocritical.

That’s a bit of an overstatement. I can want an open neighborhood but still be creeped out when a neighbor puts up a camera facing my house. Systemic data collection and casual access aren’t equal. That said, on these protocols you can’t control it anyway, so it’s not like you can stop it.

But it’s Mastodon. It’s ALL posted online without a paywall.

They could have been scraping it for years (if they cared) and you’d never know.

Federating won’t give them anything new except DMs to their users since those aren’t encrypted.

All the existing stuff you’ve posted publicly is already public.

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

#198

Post by fooofw »

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…

I feel like the fact that Meta (and anyone) can see posts and users regardless of whether or not they are defederated is a bit of a distraction.

However, I do see the point of considering ways for instances to somehow distance themselves from Meta's instance. If another instance/admin was publicly known to comparably engage in pervasive user tracking (both on and off their own websites) and algorithmic attention monopolization, would we not expect many other actors in the fediverse to defederate or otherwise distance themselves from those practices/that instance? Obviously, several instances have decided to do so by premptively saying they will defederate. I'm just saying that I think it makes sense to at least consider it. E.g., compare the labels the data collected by the Threads Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.instagr...) to those of the Mastodon one (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.joinmastod...), and I at least see the contrast.

But perhaps this is just me being naively unaware of rampant community-sanctioned indiscriminate collection of user data in the fediverse (I'm not part of it, just curiously observing Meta's entry).

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

#199

Post by stormbrew »

vidarh wrote: post #186
xorcist wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I think a potential difference here is that a substantial part of the existing Fediverse won't care if we break compatibility with Threads. Many will actively welcome it, so there's potentially less pressure to yield if the make changes people don't like.

The Mastodon corner of the fediverse is also ridiculously more well run and diverse than xmpp outside the big players ever was.

Like, when threads joins it's far far more likely to be a net contributor of spam and abuse towards the rest of the network because the people who run Mastodon instances generally actually care.

Even Mastodon.social (the biggest instance currently) routinely gets silenced or blocked temporarily by other instances when it lets spam get out of control, and that is generally considered a good thing by users.

Honestly that's gonna be the main reason threads gets defederated after the first round of ideological blocks: self-defence against abuse.

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

#200

Post by xg15 »

strogonoff wrote: post #77
ilyt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm with you if you want to keep the API but put them behind stronger authorisation requirements, i.e. what "authorized fetch" seems to be for.

I absolutely disagree if you want to keep the data public but make it "harder to scrape", i.e. remove all APIs bury it in some annoying HTML/Javascript mess.

That would absolutely punish the wrong players: Having an API which allows easy access to structured data allows all kinds of desirable usecases, such as being able to use whatever client you like.

In contrast, the big players who are interested in tracking the entire userbase already have enough experience in building robust scrapers - they won't be deterred by a closed-down API.

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