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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

#331

Post by kazinator »

MBCook wrote: post #197
klabb3 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not all; your IP address and e-mail aren't posted, for instance.

Meta will find a way to get their hands on that.

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

#333

Post by nobody9999 »

turnsout wrote: post #300
nobody9999 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Threads actually federates, it will be another Eternal September [0], and we need that for ActivityPub to truly thrive. Please define "thrive" in this context. Do you mean DAU/MAUs? I know , perhaps, a couple hundred people and respect the opinions/ideas of perhaps a few dozen others I don't know. Those are the only people I care about interacting with and I can interact with them just fine without Meta's "offer…

ActivityPub is doing fine, but the more people who are using it, the better. We saw this with the most recent migration from Twitter to Mastodon about 6 months ago. We got more users, and that brought more developers, bug fixes, enhancements, and new ActivityPub projects.

>ActivityPub is doing fine, but the more people who are using it, the better. We saw this with the most recent migration from Twitter to Mastodon about 6 months ago. We got more users, and that brought more developers, bug fixes, enhancements, and new ActivityPub projects.

You won't get any argument about that from me.

That said, what's needed is more instances, not a single instance with a hundred million users.

What's more, how likely is it that the Meta dev folks will want to share bug fixes/enhancements/etc? And even if they did, how many of them are there?

I'd rather see 100 new Fediverse instances of a wide variety, with a bunch of different folks contributing than a Meta monoculture.

That's not to say I object to Threads. AP is open source. Meta can use/not use federate/not federate the software as they choose. And if they actually do federate and bring new devs and instances along with them, that's great!

I just don't think we need Meta for AP to thrive. It's been doing just fine so far, and will continue to do so with or without Meta.

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

#334

Post by jauntywundrkind »

A million years ago there was P3P, Platform For Privacy Preferences, which pages/resources could use to declare what kind of sharing/privacy rights surrounded a document. https://www.w3.org/P3P/

The working group was closed after browser implementers failed to express interest. As I recall, Microsoft Internet Explorer was the only browser participating. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/ie_standards/ms-...

I could be mistaken/mislead about the purpose here. But this idea of having the data be able to advocate for itself what rights other people have seems semi-obvious. It won't prevent abuse, but the age of ultra-Legalistic DMCA corporate hawkishness seems largely to have won above almost all others, in most arenas, and this idea of sticking a "you can't do that" label on stuff thus seems like a pretty obvious first level defense. One that big data warehouses & big companies in particular probably couldn't violate & keep under-wraps.

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

#335

Post by nobody9999 »

nomel wrote: post #319
nobody9999 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The alternative is, literally, a complete stranger, with no track record, unknown motives, and (as the recent hacks showed) doesn't have the skillset to keep your information secure anyways. That's not the only alternative. Another is, literally, me , someone I know very well, with a lifetime track record that I'm intimately familiar with, known motives and the skillset to keep my information secure. It's called "ho…

My understanding is that many popular lemmy instances use an allow list, which means your replies to comments will go to the void. Is this true? I'm having trouble finding a clear answer.

>My understanding is that many popular lemmy instances use an allow list, which means your replies to comments will go to the void. Is this true? I'm having trouble finding a clear answer.

I wish I could answer that question, but I haven't messed around with Lemmy.

I suggest setting up an instance and seeing for yourself what admin/moderation tools exist and how they impact interactions with the instance.

Sorry. Wish I could do better for you.

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

#336

Post by protocolture »

1. The renaming thing happened to me, and it wasnt that Facebook had scraped something and made some super AI decision, its that one of the things you can report people for on the platform is using an alias, because its against T's and C's, and that form (last I checked) let you identify the actual user.

2 Said well elsewhere but its daft to want to hide public info from a subset of users on a protocol designed to distribute public data.

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

#337

Post by drdaeman »

jdp23 wrote: post #326
drdaeman wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Agreed that these other issues were a problem for XMPP. Christina Warren made this exact point on Mastodon a few hours ago -- in response to a post from Evan Prodromou that talked about the role that spam and harassment played and how he and others in the XMPP community didn't diversify the network. So, there are multiple factors. That said, I still think the post I linked to is very much worth reading.

It is a valid opinion, and the events described there took place, I just - personally - don't believe the outcomes were caused by the events described, they feel more like coincidences to me. Although Google dropped XMPP at least partially for the same reasons it died - trouble with architecture that made it problematic mobile.

And the comparison is not fair. XMPP was meant to be extended, so complaining about the second "E" in "EEE" is IMHO questionable. Google left a bunch of useful XEPs and even a Free Software codebase (libjingle) that others still use to the day, and I don't see anything wrong with this (and I'm surely no fond of Google, but that's not something I'd bash them for). This is feels very different from what may possibly happen in the whole Meta/Threads/Fediverse/ActivityPub situation - I mean, it's not likely Meta starts contributing to Mastodon project or something. In my understanding, EEE is more applicable to Microsoft and IE (where it surely happened, and a lot) than to Google and XMPP.

IMHO the article is a good read to at the very least be familiar with the events and understand the argument - but personally I find myself disagreeing with the presented arguments, thinking it's quite a stretch. Of course, that's my own, purely subjective opinion.

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

#338

Post by nobody9999 »

jdp23 wrote: post #323
nobody9999 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. A fair point, and one that's not really new either. Don't want something to be public? Don't post it publicly. As I recall, when my employer at the time (mid 1990s) "federated" their email with the rest of the world, they sent out a memo which stated, in p…

The article explicitly says that talking only about public posts ignores other privacy risks, and has an example related to a followers-only post. Knowing that, do you really think his point is fair?

>he article explicitly says that talking only about public posts ignores other privacy risks, and has an example related to a followers-only post. Knowing that, do you really think his point is fair?

I was responding to the idea that if you post something publicly, whether that's on a Mastodon instance, a bulletin board at the library, in a Craigslist ad or any other public forum, it's unreasonable to attempt to limit access to the information contained therein. That's intuitively obvious, no?

If you only want specific people to see that information, only give it to those folks. And if they're trustworthy, they won't share it with others but that's not guaranteed.`

How does the old saw go? "Three can keep a secret, if two are dead."

Don't want something to be public? Don't post it in a public forum. Full stop.

I am unfamiliar with the example you mention and its potential privacy impacts. But even if (and maybe especially if) there are the risks/issues you allude to, that doesn't obviate (and perhaps even strengthens) my point.

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

#339

Post by mcpackieh »

kmeisthax wrote: post #330
echelon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a portion of the far left and the up-and-coming gen-zalpha that takes on a dictatorial "censorship is okay for things we dislike" attitude. They don't realize that in the 90's and 00's free speech was a place of refuge for liberals to escape from evangelical attacks on everything from LGBT rights to Pokemon. They also don't appreciate that the "come one and all" nature of the internet back then led to many pe…

Liberals never actually left the free speech refuge - they just wanted to keep the far right out of it. There's a logic to this; you don't want people advocating for mass censorship to be able to use free speech as a weapon to cut your head off. In other words, it's OK to censor Hitler[0]. Not everyone will agree, I suspect you don't. I put that disagreement in the same category as, say, the BSD vs. GPL arguments bac…

You're right about one thing; those who are liberals today never abandoned free speech. Many progressives did, but in so doing, they ceased to be liberal.

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

#340

Post by jayd16 »

dcow wrote: post #263
wpietri wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/…

I understand that generally you retain the copyright to your works implicitly and that you don't have to actively file for copyright in order to gain the protection of copyright law. I'm arguing that it's pretty preposterous for a global decentralized federated social platform to assume some authority (enforced by whom, that'd require a central group of enforcers) over the licensing of posts on the network by invokin…

Its important to remember that the tech must conform to the law, not the other way around. If it's not compatible, the the tech that must bend.

That said, why is it strange to think that a license agreement must happen before a node can reshare a post?

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