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Kev Quirk, one of the admins of Fosstodon (a Mastodon instance), destroys Meta in an email exchange. (fosstodon.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The exchange is about Meta's upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments.

I hate to break it to you, but the very nature of the fediverse (as a distributed network where posts and account information automatically get distributed to hundreds if not thousands of independent servers you may or may not be aware of, that do not necessarily have to honour your deletion requests) means that it would be absolutely trivial for either Facebook or any other random bad actor you could think of to have access to all of that, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

This is an example I've given a few times, but if Meta were really just wanting to suck down data for the evulz (why they would do this I have absolutely no idea because it's not like they could use that data for anything), they don't need to start an instance amid a blaze of publicity. They could just go on Mastodon.social, sign up for a no-name account, grab an API key and suck down the contents of the fediverse in real time and that's the end of it. The fediverse is not private and its very nature means that control over one's own data is not quite as secure as ActivityPub advocates would like to pretend.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

But that wasn't my point. It's not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it's that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.

We have different definitions for privacy. Since I'm active here, it should be clear that to me private doesn't mean hidden. I like how the EFF put it, in their article on the Fediverse:

[T]he default with incumbent platforms is usually an all-or-nothing bargain where you accept a platform’s terms or delete your account. The privacy dashboards buried deep in the platform’s settings are a way to tinker in the margins, but even if you untick every box, the big commercial services still harvest vast amounts of your data. To rely on these major platforms is to lose critical autonomy over your privacy, your security, and your free expression.