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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

#361

Post by strogonoff »

xg15 wrote: post #200
strogonoff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

Regarding “mess”, it doesn’t have to be. Upon some research, there actually already seem to be protocols that try to address these issues in a reasonable way in spec and implementations (e.g., LitePub[0]).

Regarding dedicated “big players”, I will just repeat my point: they may still be able to do something but perhaps we shouldn’t make it easier for them, especially if it provides no benefit to an ordinary person (that is: excluding users such as corporate or government bodies, OSS projects, and so on).

If it becomes sufficiently difficult for them to gather intelligence, the effort required may actually be useful evidence in case of a lawsuit—it would show that one side cares about privacy and took measures to avoid being identified, while the other side circumvented those measures.

[0] https://litepub.social/overview

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

#362

Post by jdp23 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #338
jdp23 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lim…

I wasn't objecting to your point so much as you calling their summary a fair point. They stopped reading the article before they got to the example of non-public information in it, so mischaracteried it, which doesn't seem fair to me.

Agreed that if something's available encrypted on the web with no login required then usually the only protections you can put on it is security-through-obscurity like hard-to-guess links that don't show up on profiles (YouTube's "unlisted videos") or advisory like "noindex". But, although it's not something I talked about in this article, there are design choices. Mastodon (etc) could evolve so that a lot of what's currently "public" isn't available on the web with no login required.

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

#363

Post by Nursie »

sanderjd wrote: post #342
gowld wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 netwo…

Licensing != DRM though ... ?

You can have a very strict license without actually using any cryptographic 'protection' on the content.

See, for example, the way IBM used to in the 00s (still does?) release software. There was no copy protection, no license servers, no keys. But copyright was absolutely retained and you couldn't legally just give it to anyone.

If you were found to be running their stuff without the appropriate commercial license then their sales department will be along very shortly to work out a nice cost-effective plan for you, and failing that the lawyers will be involved.

Closed, licensed, but it's not DRM.

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

#364

Post by jdp23 »

drdaeman wrote: post #337
jdp23 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Yeah when there are multiple causes it's hard to know how much each contributed.

AcitivityPub's also meant to be extended, there are FEPs, and it's likely that the working group will come up with a new version as well. That said there certainly are differences between XMPP and ActivityPub, most people say the ActivityPub ecosystem is significantly farther along than XMPP was.

I could imagine Meta doing an open-source AP server (and with a fresh start it would be cleaner base than Mastodon). I also wouldn't be surprised if the release a app building toolkit / framework / whatever ... there isn't a good one now, they do that stuff well, and as they introduce proprietary AP extensions then they toolkit is a good way to get people to adopt them. But it's very hard to know at this point, it's also possible it's just PR spin and they won't really invest in it. We shall see.

Anyhow, good discussion, thanks much!

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

#366

Post by jayd16 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #358
jayd16 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right that DMCA will be effective but my guess is that meta will actually be able to federate just fine. As for moderation, they're already the best at it. They can simply allow or block federated content as they choose, just as easily as their own content.

But the content doesn't cease to exist... its just going to tell people "hey, join this better non-Meta branded Fedverse server, and look at all the banned content you want! And now Meta cant ban you for having opinions about things!" They have done the opposite of a moat... they built a bridge across the moat that is around the prison island everyone is trapped in.

It's like suggesting gmail would fail because they have spam filters. People actually want moderation. As long as it's mostly good or at least consistent, I expect Meta to find success. I also expect a wide variety of more lax/niche aggregators to also find success.

Meta's moat will be that they will be the largest home domain. They'll have the most user data and they'll have a secured user base even if the fediverse collapses.

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

#367

Post by vidarh »

boyter wrote: post #281
vidarh wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can potentially try to make changes to the protocol, and try to leverage their users numbers to force people to accept it. I think, though, that they'll find that a lot of us are stubborn and don't like them and will not react well to that.

Which is what mastodon already does. It has extended the ActivityPub protocol in a few places. Everyone copies because you must work against Mastodon to really participate.

Change is fine when they make sense and are made by a party people aren't extremely suspicious and at times hostile to. Even sometimes if you don't fully agree with every aspect.

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

#368

Post by helsinkiandrew »

> Threads has rolled out the welcome mat to Nazi supporters, anti-LGBTQ extremists, and white supremacists, including groups like Libs of TikTok that harass trans people.

It's hard to take the post seriously when they make statements like that, From the linked article:

> Fuentes, who claims to have been banned from Meta's platforms, announced in a livestream on July 6, “I signed up for it last night. I made a fake Instagram. I got on a fake Thread.”

I'd guess of the 100M users that have signed up lots of people that are banned, or post content that gets banned on FB and Instagram have managed to make accounts too. But I'm sure the same content moderation policies on FB/IG will apply once they start posting, some will get through, but that is far from being welcomed.

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

#369

Post by mock-possum »

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.…

Yeah I feel like maybe this is old fashioned of me but

If I don’t want other people to see something or to know about it, I don’t post it online. Or I don’t post it in a way that could be traced back to me. There’s absolutely no link from my HN account, for instance, back to me IRL.

Why open yourself up to the risk? What do you get in exchange?

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

#370

Post by fsckboy »

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…

> low quality pithy responses

pithy means the opposite of low quality, concise and meaningful

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pithy

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