this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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The specificity and quantity of information the text and multimedia platform can access poses a risk to most users, if it falls into the wrong hands or is used to target them, tech experts agree.

“This is a hacker’s dream,” said Claudette McGowan, a longtime banking executive who founded Protexxa, a Toronto-based platform that uses artificial intelligence to rapidly identify and resolve cyber issues for employees.

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (6 children)

And yet some want to hear meta out before deciding whether to federate or defederate from them.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (3 children)

All of the data Meta could gather by federating is available to anyone who sets up their own server. The hacker would just need to know how to use docker. What's scary is the extra information Threads users give away by being on threads.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

and that alone is worth not supporting such a gross company via never federating with them

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not lurking I care about. I don't want to be interacting with them at all or providing any sort of comments for them to respond to. You know... Same reason people deleted their content from reddit so it doesn't provide future engagement to the platform through comment responses, upvotes/downvotes, and search engine results.

And I have way less issue with Reddit and chose to delete stuff to remove interactable content on their platform. And I actually do like reddit compared to Facebook, and still chose to burn bridges that way. So I think it's no surprise why I don't want federation with them. If they want to lurk and scrape public data that's fine. I don't want to be a contributor to Meta though more directly than I have to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's fair enough. I just wanted to point out it's not our data that will be in jeopardy any more than it is right.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I never have an expectation of privacy when it comes to content posted on any public platform.

It's being part of the audience that engages and provides content that leads to feedback loop to stay in the Meta platform I'm so completely against. If people want to do a direct link to unfederated instances on Meta I'm fully for that to encourage people to make a non Meta account and maybe move towards joining those instances.

But, being actually part of the same interacting group that is choosing to feed into the value of Meta. No thanks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

that extra information is among other things:

The privacy policy Threads has embedded in Apple’s app store shows it may collect, and link to your identity, data including your health and fitness, financial, browsing history, location and contact information, along with the broad category of “sensitive information.”

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm not sure what defederating from them solves in regards to this topic. If they wanted Lemmy, Kbin, & Mastodon's data, they could always just set up another instance with a different domain name and not publicly announce what that domain name is, and we would have no idea who to defederate from. Or they could just scrape the data from the web page, no federation needed.

I don't want to see their content, which is a valid reason to defederate (or block, if that were possible at the user level) imo. But defederating because we want to stop them from getting our data is not even slightly effective, so I think it makes an unconvincing argument.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It’s not lurking I care about. I don’t want to be interacting with them at all or providing any sort of comments for them to respond to. You know… Same reason people deleted their content from reddit so it doesn’t provide future engagement to the platform through comment responses, upvotes/downvotes, and search engine results.

And I have way less issue with Reddit and chose to delete stuff to remove interactable content on their platform. And I actually do like reddit compared to Facebook, and still chose to burn bridges that way. So I think it’s no surprise why I don’t want federation with them. If they want to lurk and scrape public data that’s fine. I don’t want to be a contributor to Meta though more directly than I have to.

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

Serious question:

How much data does the ActivityPub protocol give out if it was to be federated and I was to, for example, reply to somebody on a Threads post using this account?

Or is the objection more that we don't want 99% of the Fediverse to be hosted on Threads?

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

I never have an expectation of privacy when it comes to content posted on any public platform.

It’s being part of the audience that engages and provides content that leads to the feedback loop to stay in the Meta platform I’m so completely against. Same reason people deleted their content from reddit so it doesn’t provide future direct engagement to the platform through comment responses, upvotes/downvotes, and search engine results. If people want to post a link or copy paste comments to Meta I’m fine with that. Meta users are welcomed to lurk or create separate accounts here to use non meta federate instances. Go scrape or set up an instance and get all the content for all I care.

But, being actually part of the same interacting group that is choosing to feed into the value of Meta is not what I want. I didn't come here to be a meta user and whether it's through their instance or indirectly through federation that people can reply to your comments like you did mine is enough to be part of the Meta user base at that point. No thanks. At least back on reddit you know you aren't directly contributing to the Meta platform and only interacting with the reddit user base.

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

It's all about the money

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago

I'm sure the 2 billion+ instagram, facebook and whatsapp users will be absolutely shocked by this and stop using it /s

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

Oh no who could have predicted it?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

*man gets bitten by snake*

Hmm, I got bitten. That hurt

*man gets bitten by snake again*

Ow, that hurt

repeat

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

And not some random snakes around there, it's the exact same snake.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/DyaJ-C5mA2Y

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

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

I love this bot

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

To the suprise of... no one.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Blocked Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp and Meta on DNS. One day I checked the logs and saw Facebook so I started investigating and turns out many apps have trackers in it like Spotify host Facebook trackers. Blocked Spotify now.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sort of tangentially related to this... Today I was telling my mom about something I bought and I mentioned the brand + a general description of the item. About an hour later, she showed me a screenshot of her Facebook feed with an ad for the exact brand and item even though she didn't google it, etc. Makes me so uncomfortable. I'd feel a lot better if I knew specifically how they were getting the data so I could try to block it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Atleast she noticed so it's good. Most people dont even notice stuff like this. The only way to stop this is to stop using Facebook but boomers are the only one stuck on Facebook now because of some BS neighborhood watch community or something similar.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Outside of it being a Meta creation, the fact that it is inextricably tied to an Instagram account is enough to keep me away. Even if the app itself isn't collecting your data (it is, though), all of your information is bundled together in a neat little package, stretching across platforms.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Genuinely curious, and this really isn't meant as a gotcha or anything, do you also avoid all Google products then?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I really don't understand anyone who would choose to leave Twitter (an appropriate choice) to then join Threads. You've not upgraded or changed anything about being on a shitty service.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Twitter has rapidly been getting overrun by alt-right edgelords and crypto bros and is inextricably tied to Musk and his culture war of the day. Threads feels much more normal in comparison, and Zuck is smart enough to mostly be quiet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The vast majority of the people online don't give a shit about technology, they just care about what technology can do for them. So, if we are talking about a platform like Twitter/Threads, people want a platform that allows to them follow/interact with the people they want to follow or interact with. They don't care if it's open/closed-source, if it's harvest your data, etc. They just want to use it the platform, that's it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wait Hol'Up...."Keystroke Patterns"...??? Does that mean it is harvesting my password manager master password???

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Everyone freaking out every time they realize every fucking 'type ahead' or "predictive text" system is essentially a Keylogger. Android and Iphone keyboards, the chrome browser, etc are keylogging all your shit already, and any javascript typeahead predictive engine that has to ask a service "what comes next" has to by it's nature have the things that you're typing to predict the next thing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Predictive text isn't something I normally see in password fields.

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

you'd think it'd get disabled for all the things, but yeah....

If you had one or two of their plugins/options enabled in chrome it was smart enough to detect when you typed your google password outside of google and send you to change it.

Password manager feature maybe?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I still can figure out how the app would have any access to my photos, finance or health information if I don’t give access

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-play-store-apps/

This was back in 2019. Wonder how much permissions have improved to fully deny apps from attempting to collect data if permissions are denied.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah I am sure Meta collect it anyway. I heard they even have shawdow accounts for people who don't even use Facebook or ever would.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, shadow accounts seem easy since meta collects contact lists from people who use it, so they at least have names and phone numbers and possibly emails of people who haven't made a Facebook account.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The simple answer is: They can’t.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

So threads is basically Instagrams version of Twitter? I see no difference and it offers the exact same experience and features?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

A Zuck is gonna Zuck.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Why would anyone use Threads/Facebook/Meta, is beyond me. Big Social and especially Zuckland collects so much sensitive data, and it freaked me out when I first learned about it. After that, I moved to Fediverse and have been there since. And became a much more privacy-conscious user. Of course in our day and age, escaping from surveillance is difficult but at least avoiding the Big Social is an important step, in my opinion.

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