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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

#451

Post by dcow »

BizarroLand wrote: post #433
justsomeadvice0 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social media networks with over 100,000,000 daily active users should not be considered as "private companies with a right to free speech through censorship". They are effectively public squares that we have all elected and chosen to share. Right and left alike. Shouldn't this also apply to TV channels? Chat apps like iMessage? Popular newspapers, blogs, and email newsletters? And indeed, why stop at 100M DAUs - wh…

To be fair though, freedom of the press should be limited to things that at the time of publishment/boardcast were believed to be true by reasonable actors. They shouldn't get carte blanche to claim wild conspiracy theories and to turn people into figurative monsters and then claim 1st amendment rights to protect them from the consequences of their public agitating slander. On the other hand, reviewing and moderating…

I understand where you're coming from, but I'm not sure it matters. If you don't like the bad actors spreading "disinformation" then speak louder. You're 100% right that it's untenable to moderate "the news". We have laws preventing bad faith actors from spreading demonstrably false information that damages somebody. Anything else is just... insignificant to your life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness unless you aren't mature enough to ignore opinions that make you unhappy.

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

#452

Post by dcow »

krapp wrote: post #439
echelon wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is trans. By turning this into a game of sports and one-upsmanship, you're hurting us. Listen to the left and to the right. Talk with them. Engage them. Humanize them. Do this the Dr. King way, not the Malcom X way. You won't win hearts and minds if you're bearing your teeth all the time. People in the middle don't want deal with that. People that could be convinced are instead turned away. Maybe you grew up…

>Do this the Dr. King way, not the Malcom X way. You won't win hearts and minds if you're bearing your teeth all the time. You don't understand MLK if you think he was less radical than Malcom X[0]. He absolutely did not engage with and humanize his oppressors. He didn't patiently and calmly listen to what racists had to say and try to find common ground and a way to tolerate them. Read his "Letter from a Birmingham…

At this point I have come to the conclusion that you can find a King quote to support whatever argument you're trying to make. I'm not so ignorant as to subscribe to the rose tainted Martin vs Malcolm dichotomy. I understand they were contemporaries. I've read LfaBJ. Which is why I think it's a steaming pile to try and argue "Martin was just as radical as Malcolm".

Martin was a human being. He was frustrated with the speed of progress. He did not preach violence. And he rightfully criticized people who wouldn't lift a finger in support of his peoples' rights to share in the same liberty under the law as everyone else. That's justice.

There is a huge difference between allowing immoral/evil unjust racist oppression to exist because you're unwilling to stand up and say "that's wrong", and demonizing your fellow countryman because our scientific understanding of when a human life begins is ever-evolving, or because of differing views on whether tax money should be used to subsidize elective cosmetic surgery. (I'm not arguing one way or another, I'm just stating these examples rhetorically since they're what started this discussion.)

Point being, there's intolerable immoral oppression, and there's acceptable functional political "oppression" (speed limits are oppressive, for instance, but we agree they're generally a useful oppression, so we tolerate the oppression). Racism is the first category. The first world problems of today (save abortion, that one's fuzzy and complicated) fall squarely into the second. And regardless of which category of oppression you're facing, there's still wisdom in understanding that sharpening your edge will only cause the other side to follow and is rarely the way to change minds.

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

#453

Post by dcow »

542354234235 wrote: post #445
dcow wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Not even legally you don't… 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). This is literally the opposite of what you are saying now. Saying you legally have no right to restrict then trying to act like you were saying that, in some sort of practical sense, it would not be possible to enforce a legal…

I can see how my wording was confusing. Sorry. Just focus on this:

> So short of attaching licenses to every post you make, no, there's not a socially healthy, let alone even viable, strategy to control content distribution in the "fediverse".

I'm arguing that copyright in and of itself does not grant you the right to control how owned copies of your work are used. This is evident by the first sale doctrine.

You can choose to only distribute your work with an attached license that does not confer ownership rights. And because of the license I've agreed to I can't do anything with that work that would breach the license agreement. And because you didn't transfer ownership to me of an actual copy of the work, the first sale doctrine does not apply. And I'm not allowed to copy that work, because of copyright. The limits you've imposed on the work are because of the license not because of copyright.

There's no component of copyright that statutorily grants an author any control of the transitive flow of copyrighted content. It's all in the license.

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

#454

Post by Matumio »

paxys wrote: post #241
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…

> Blocking Threads from federating is just a short-term patch over mastodon's bad privacy controls. It's not a patch at all. Facebook (and literally anyone else) can still scrape or otherwise access that data in a hundred different ways. Blocking Threads is simply some server admins making an anti-Facebook statement, nothing more.

Not related to privacy, but the main point of blocking is to never host their content. Not listing it, not caching it, not hosting their interactions with your users's posts. It's more than a statement.

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

#455

Post by XorNot »

xigoi wrote: post #443
XorNot wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote I was responding to in the top: > Many amongst the left obsesses over what the right is doing (and vice versa), which tells me people enjoy rubbernecking rather than tuning out. It's a game of "neener-neener" high school football rivalry. This is a complete failure to understand that politics is real and has real consequences for real people. If your think that "actually none of this matters, why can't we a…

I'm not saying that politics don't have real consequences. But by pointing everyone who even slightly disagrees with you as literally the incarnation of evil, you're only making things worse. Do you think Fundamentalist Christians are less likely to support anti-abortion laws if you keep being toxic to them?

Why would fundamentalist Christians change their mind about a core belief? That's the point of being a fundamentalist.

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

#456

Post by echelon »

XorNot wrote: post #455
xigoi wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that politics don't have real consequences. But by pointing everyone who even slightly disagrees with you as literally the incarnation of evil, you're only making things worse. Do you think Fundamentalist Christians are less likely to support anti-abortion laws if you keep being toxic to them?

Why would fundamentalist Christians change their mind about a core belief? That's the point of being a fundamentalist.

I grew up in that kind of church and over 30 years watched the entire world around me change: I have zero connection or desire to be in that world, my family mellowed out, the tv preachers all died.

Recent social media trends lead to far left liberals are attacking conservative people on social media directly, and vice versa. There's no opportunity for de-escalation on either side. Every confrontation is personal.

Conservatives don't respond to the vitriol. They have the exact same response you do to their hate. They put up barriers and become protective of their beliefs rather than engage in direct, vulnerable dialogue. They tune you out entirely and focus simply on defending and attacking. That's the only discourse left.

Do you realize the rich spectrum of conservative beliefs? Or do you see it all as a single position? There's so much opportunity to change hearts and minds, but it's all being squandered (and perhaps permanently so) on these petty fights and turf wars.

The other side is human, just as you. If they'd had a different life journey, they might stand beside you now. If you'd had theirs, you might be in their shoes.

I assume you've experienced a lot of change in your personal life. Understand and appreciate that everyone can take new paths.

All I'm asking is that you don't engage in petty attacks, as it's pointless, embittering, and drags out the battle. You can fight for what you believe without belittling.

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

#457

Post by dcow »

lakomen wrote: post #396
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…

Of course I can say who can't use my work. It's my creation, I get to make the rules. If I explicitly deny Meta to use my work, then that is my wish and I can sue them.

> It's my creation, I get to make the rules.

As has been explained multiple times, that's now how it works. If you sell me a copy of your work, you do not have any authority after that to dictate how I use your work.

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

#458

Post by XorNot »

echelon wrote: post #456
XorNot wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would fundamentalist Christians change their mind about a core belief? That's the point of being a fundamentalist.

I grew up in that kind of church and over 30 years watched the entire world around me change: I have zero connection or desire to be in that world, my family mellowed out, the tv preachers all died. Recent social media trends lead to far left liberals are attacking conservative people on social media directly, and vice versa. There's no opportunity for de-escalation on either side. Every confrontation is personal. Co…

Attacking them for what? This isn't theoretical, I'm connected to giant global database where the public availability of this information is well known. Attacking them for what?

If your moral compass is "someone was mean to me on the internet, now I don't support abortion rights for rape victims" then there was no causative effect, you're just doing what you were going to do anyway.

Because it makes the priority pretty clear: these aren't hard to find stories[1]. The victims aren't "the far left" they're just people[2]. It isn't hard to empathize with them, but apparently the conclusion you reach is that they deserve what's happening to them, because an unrelated group of people might've been mean to you on the internet.

"People are mean to me on the internet" is a lie used to deflect from the data. Because someone is always saying something shitty on the internet. Because someone, somewhere on the far-left might tell someone they're an asshole. But then the far-right will rock up to what they think is Obama's house[3]. But then here you are, telling me the only reason conservatives don't support my issues is because someone is mean to them. I don't know who that person is, I don't know why they were mean, but because they were that's all the justification needed to support denying healthcare to women.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/16/rightw...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/11/15/1135882...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/30/capitol-atta...

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