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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

#231

Post by dahwolf »

paxys wrote: post #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.…

It's even worse when you consider that others will put something about you out there. They willingly give up their contacts list (with you in it), when joining a network.

A "friend" may make a photo of you as part of a social/work event and directly post it publicly.

Even with no participation on your behalf, your real name, phone number, address and photo are out there.

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

#232

Post by not2b »

zzzeek wrote: post #49
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If you have personal information you do not wish bad actors to see, do not publish it using an open protocol explicitly designed to allow anyone to read said information.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 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…

Meta (when they were Facebook) had a rule that members would use their real names, that their users consented to as part of the terms of service. Apparently they used that as justification to find out someone's real name who was using a pseudonym. Kinda stinks, but I could see how they could justify it (though in the cases I'm aware of they just demanded that people provide real names or verify that the name that they were using was real).

But someone who uses a completely different site hasn't consented to the Threads terms of service, and if Threads randomly decided to dox people and alter their posts to add real names (or perhaps deadnames for trans folks), that's a very different matter, and I'm sure that their lawyers are going to tell them not to do that (or risk legal consequences). Since non-users haven't agreed to any terms of service Meta face real court, none of that binding arbitration stuff, and possibly class action if they do it a lot.

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

#233

Post by hanniabu »

kazinator wrote: post #56
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.

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?

federated is not decentralized

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

#234

Post by not2b »

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?

The terms of service on Facebook require that real names be used, and anonymous users aren't permitted. I know, many ignore that, but they occasionally demand a user's real name or proof that an unusual name is a real name.

Instagram used to have different rules, but they seem to be trying to integrate everything.

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

#235

Post by not2b »

godelski wrote: post #143
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 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 fight over whether or not to federate with threads might actually cause more decentralization, as people move off instances if they don't like the policies the admins have chosen, and different admins make different choices.

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

#236

Post by dahwolf »

the_gipsy wrote: post #29
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.

They're not unhappy about their data being intentionally republishable. C'mon. On the contrary, they are saying that when the product gets successful, they will pull the rug. Like facebook did before, and like twitter did with the API and now again.

Pulling the rug is a daily event in the Fediverse itself.

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

#237

Post by [deleted] »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #121
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…

Not justifying the design decision (which is bad IMO), but the reason upvotes and downvotes are shared is the nature of sending discrete events. I've been working on a Reddit like thing on top of Matrix and likewise I have to send upvote and downvote events, which means other clients that fetch events will fetch each upvote and downvote event and a malicious client can then track what individuals upvote and downvote.…

[deleted]

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

#238

Post by wpietri »

dcow wrote: post #224
Guvante wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your understanding is flawed. Copyright is 100% okay with transitively controlling production of content. After all how else would you describe someone allowing Netflix to stream your content? You can't restream Netflix and Netflix is restricted on how it can stream to you. Both rooted in the original Copyright protection and the licenses to content given out by intermediaries. Most posting platforms give themselves…

It's not that simple. If I sell you a book, I cannot place a restriction on that sale saying you can't resell that book (first sale doctrine). You're allowed to do that because you own the copy of the book. You can't copy the book and sell it, because you don't own the copyright , but you can sell the original copy, show it to whomever you want, etc. It's not that "copyright is okay with transitive licensing" but mor…

> So short of attaching licenses to every post you make

I think you have this backwards. Full copyright protection is the default for all content not licensed otherwise. Publishing does not put content into a "public domain" status. Social media platforms already have strong legal terms around every piece of content. If you violate that license, platforms may choose to fuck you up. E.g.: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/untraceable-s...

It would be easy enough for particular Mastodon servers and/or accounts to be explicit about their downstream licensing.

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

#239

Post by jazzyjackson »

sureglymop wrote: post #141

I want it to be blocked for a different reason. The fediverse has always been small enough that the content is "underground" and interesting. Some of the people on there are weird or completely different than me and that's what makes them so interesting. That's not the case on something like Twitter and Instagram. Good and actually interesting content is drowned out between your average tweets and posts about nothing…

You know what, you've convinced me. I've been rooting for some kind of society-at-large network to succeed at federation (I was so optimistic I tried bitclout, and more recently bluesky. Both want to be a single global database to send money or to index hashtags and blocklists globally)

I really believed that discoverability is king, and I should just be able to search a global graph of user profiles and read everything that everyone has ever said, but you're right, there's a lot of conversations that don't happen in public, and not everyone wants to be "discoverable".

So I think there's a case to embrace the balkanization of social media, and go back to having separate identities to be a part of each phpbb we signed up to. Going to different domains to talk to different groups of people makes sense, and we can have the modicum of privacy offered by a semi-private chat server like discord, so that your messages don't get indexed by google and archived forever. (Obviously discord retains all the message logs, DMs included, but at least its not publically searchable)

And global social media is always going to suffer eternal september. Smaller, unfederated chat communities is a probably a much healthier approach to social media than whatever it is we've been doing the last decade of meta-gramming

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

#240

Post by charcircuit »

dahwolf wrote: post #201

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 happene…

My guess is that she was breaking Facebook's real name policy by using a fake name on her main profile. It seems plausible that Facebook would update someone's main profile to their real name.
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