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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

#341

Post by mcpackieh »

omoikane wrote: post #212
Havoc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>using their unusually vast amounts of personal data Jikes. Hadn't considered that. Certainly seems plausible, not just via technical means but also content. I've got a reddit profile that I try very hard to keep "clean and anonymous" yet I've had people from halfway around the world message me say "Hey you're Jack from X". Post sufficient volume and it becomes identifiable no matter how hard one tries.

I think people can make that discovery but you could always deny that association, and it might be difficult for random strangers to gather enough proof to say that two accounts are linked. Meta appears to be publicizing account associations that were previously difficult to confirm, in a way that defeats any previous efforts to maintain deniability.

When somebody confronts you with PII like that, the best move is probably radio silence. Neither confirm nor deny it, and don't even confirm that their message was received. Don't do free battle damage assessment for potential adversaries.

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

#342

Post by sanderjd »

gowld wrote: post #309
sanderjd wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe people who are into decentralization and federation now essentially want to reinvent DRM!

Why not? These are separate concepts.

It's a good question, so let me try to explain why this is dissonant to me, if I can.

I think maybe the easiest way to illustrate it is through the person of Cory Doctorow. I don't know for sure because I haven't been following him for awhile, but I suspect he is a fan of the fediverse concept. He and the kinds of people that he influenced (like me) strike me as the kind of people for whom open federated social networks are appealing and satisfying as a solution in contrast to closed centralized corporate social networks.

But then, a big part of my time following him and just generally being in that milieu, one of the primary boogeymen for us was the DRM being pushed by corporate interests.

So to me, DRM seems anathema to this entire aesthetic of federation.

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

#343

Post by mattigames »

Guvante wrote: post #218
dcow wrote: post #203

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. 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 am…

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…

Is Facebook supposed to scan all Twitter everytime you post something to check if it's not violating the copyright of someone there? To know every paragraph of every single book? Or scan the entire internet for that matter? That is not "lazy", that is just a ridiculous expectation, no (legal) social network would survive if that was necessary to operate

Not to mention the millions of derivative works where the definition gets fuzzy: I applied a filter to someone else photo and put an emoji over it, is still the same work? Should FB algorithm be smart enough to classify it as a copyright violation? It would be unsustainable economically to run that algorithm against the millions of posts, and even if they told the user "stop! that is copyrighted!" a huge chunk of users would just edit their post a bit and just try again.

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

#344

Post by themitigating »

gowld wrote: post #309
sanderjd wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe people who are into decentralization and federation now essentially want to reinvent DRM!

Why not? These are separate concepts.

Because people who create decentralized networks usually also subscribe to the concept of free flowing information, hence the decentralized network.

One is their issues with a centralized service is control. Their issue with copyrighted material is control.

Of course not everyone holds the same beliefs

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

#345

Post by zzzeek »

not2b wrote: post #232
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…

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 the…

What if Meta identifies a user on Threads and/or Instagram (who has therefore agreed to the TOS) using a pseduonym on a totally arbitrary Mastodon server? All Meta has to do is drop a little sidebar on that person's Instagram profile that says "This user also identifies as XYZ@server"

Person has been doxxed, the content is entirely on Threads or Instagram , they agreed to the TOS, and it seems very plausible Meta would do something like this.

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

#346

Post by wpietri »

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…

> 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

Why is that not-an-entity the only thing you're considering as able to enforce copyright or otherwise check a platform for doing something legally dubious?

> the colloquial "public domain".

That is not what public domain means.

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

#348

Post by boyter »

godelski wrote: post #320
boyter wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the moment it cannot be too centralized since Mastodon being the main software becomes prohibitively expensive to run.

Prohibitively expensive implies more centralization not less

Let me rephrase. I don’t think the current iteration of Mastodon can scale well enough no matter what hardware you throw at it. It’s not designed for it. You would need to build a new system to achieve what was proposed.

I suspect that the above along with the cost is why it hasn’t happened. Although you do miss a lot of what’s going on by not being on one of the larger instances.

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

#349

Post by mcpackieh »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #285
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…

> algorithmic manipulation of emotion have led to hyper polarization. I don't think algorithmic manipulation is really that big of a problem. Look at HN during the Reddit blackout. Tens of overemotional posts, lots of low quality pithy responses, and not an algorithm in sight. Flame wars are at least as old as Usenet itself. I think the truth is humans online, without the context of body language and the consequences…

Hacker news is an algorithmically influenced discussion board, the comment voting system shared by both HN and reddit influences the way people conduct themselves, and not always for the better.
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