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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

#201

Post by dahwolf »

The sex worker real name reveal has to be bullshit.

I'm quite convinced that Meta actually does have the real name of most of us as well as the ability to link it to other accounts. But the idea that Meta would willingly reveal this without the user's consent means a planet-scale doxxing event. It could lead to actual deaths in the real world, and they would be legally crushed.

What is far more likely to have happened is that the user had an Instagram account with their real name and used that to log in/sign up to Threads. There is no stand-alone account on Threads currently.

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

#202

Post by chrisnight »

stormbrew wrote: post #188
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…

Threads has 100m total users (that number is based on userid badges on Instagram afaik). The fediverse has somewhere around 10-13m total users, about 8-10m of those are on the main Mastodon network, and around 2-4m MAU. It's hard to pin these down precisely because different counters disagree (it's hard), but if you're going to take the most optimistic number from Meta (the only one you'll ever see), you should take…

This is indeed true and we will have to see how the numbers settle as we go along.

However I would be surprised if Meta doesn’t continue to possess well above a supermajority of the userbase until another large corporation embraces ActivityPub.

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

#203

Post by dcow »

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If you have personal information you do not wish bad actors to see, do not publish it using an open protocol explicitly designed to allow anyone to read said information.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…

Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that call. The community doesn't get to make that call. The protocol makes that call and the protocol allows anybody to view stuff you post publicly. You don't get to say "I publish this but Meta can't view it". Not even legally you don't. That's not privacy and no amount of "web3" is going to fix that.

Copyright cannot restrict who can view a work you created once you transfer or license that work to somebody else (e.g. by releasing it publicly on the fediverse). You don't get to say "here's my post but if you show it to Meta then that's illegal". We don't even have a common legal framework for dealing with content distribution that isn't copying (we got "lucky" that you have to copy content to view it digitally so copyright can be poorly jammed onto the digital content distribution model and everything doesn't burn down).

Where the heck did people get the idea that they get to dictate how culture spreads and evolves?

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

#204

Post by stormbrew »

chrisnight wrote: post #202
stormbrew wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads has 100m total users (that number is based on userid badges on Instagram afaik). The fediverse has somewhere around 10-13m total users, about 8-10m of those are on the main Mastodon network, and around 2-4m MAU. It's hard to pin these down precisely because different counters disagree (it's hard), but if you're going to take the most optimistic number from Meta (the only one you'll ever see), you should take…

This is indeed true and we will have to see how the numbers settle as we go along. However I would be surprised if Meta doesn’t continue to possess well above a supermajority of the userbase until another large corporation embraces ActivityPub.

I think that's true, though I also think the fediverse (but not necessarily Mastodon specifically) will outlive threads.

But I think the really big question will be: in 3-6 months is meta putting out DAU and/or MAU numbers for threads separate from Instagram's?

Until then you can only guess how "big" it really is. I don't personally find the numbers so far all that impressive: it's a sub-10% conversion rate from insta daily active users and I think behind the celebratory face they're putting forward that might not be what they were hoping for.

But mostly I see this trend everywhere where people give a lot of latitude to things like threads and Twitter and then give the most pessimistic read of the state of Mastodon.

If Mastodon were a startup and "centralized" its growth, bumpy as it is, would be the darling of the tech press. This is really obvious because every article about the fall of Twitter lists at least one and often several networks that have worse numbers and worse growth than Mastodon as if they're the next big thing.

Though maybe that'll change now that threads has bought its first 100m users.

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

#205

Post by smoldesu »

vidarh wrote: post #189
smoldesu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As many others have said before, this isn't very likely to happen for many of the reasons it never happened with the web or Linux. - ActivityPub is an open protocol. If Meta goes all-in on it, they'll be implementing a transparent spec everyone knows. Modifying that would send obvious shockwaves through the network and signal their non-cooperation. There isn't a covert way for them to really try this. - Mastodon itse…

There's no reason for Meta to use Mastodon in order to federate, so I don't see why the license of Mastodon is relevant.

Then there's nothing for them to extend or extinguish. If they're not able to manipulate the client and they can only control the content on their own server, what leverage does Meta have to extinguish the fediverse?

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

#206

Post by bmacho »

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…

Can Meta scrape twitter or reddit, and pair your messages with your facebook account? Sure they can. But it is probably not legal, and looks very scary.

Mastodon and Fediverse however explicitly offers your data to them.

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

#207

Post by dahwolf »

As the crypto industry discovered: the paradox of decentralization is that every downside it has can only be solved in a centralized way.

You can't have perfect privacy in a system that has the exact opposite goal: federation. It means your data spreads by design and enforcement of any privacy-preserving feature is optional per instance.

The very loud minority on Mastodon that obsesses over safety has picked the wrong software. They should have just created a Telegram group.

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

watwut wrote: post #100
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…

I mean yeah, but also, the actual fault is on the side of people who literally voted for this. And campaigned for this. And spend years trying to put the right people on supreme court so that this happens.

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by s1artibartfast »

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…

What a terrible article. Well relevant to the discussion of data privacy, it completely misconstrues the case. This Behavior would have been illegal against under the row standard as well given that the team was more than 7 months pregnant and the two attempted to incinerate the body to destroy evidence

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

#210

Post by wizofaus »

someNameIG wrote: post #195
wizofaus wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I couldn't recall ever noticing anyone use an icloud.com address as their primary personal email address, though searching through my inbox it has cropped up once or twice. Actually my sister did use one briefly in 2018.
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