Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threads

blog.joinmastodon.org What to know about Threads

There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.

Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

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They didn't even address what will happen when Facebook starts aggregating data from instances federated with Threads:
Vote/Like data
Follow relationships
Text sentiment analysis
Behavioral patterns
Periods of activity
etc
Heck, not only did this post not address it, it seems like they tried to downplay it.
Facebook is an analytics company. Even if it's not mission critical to the function of Threads, they will scoop up data sent to Threads, they will use it to create profiles on every single non-Threads user they can, and they will sell that data.
It doesn't even matter if it violates privacy laws; the laws are toothless to companies as large as Facebook. They'll just be made to pay a fine and carry on as they are.
Yes, interoperability would be a win, but not when it comes from a company that has routinely demonstrated they abuse every crumb of data they can get their hands on.
- What should happen? That's all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.
  
  But it's probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they've tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.
  
  Meta isn't really in the data SELLING business. It'd be counterproductive to let their competitors have access to all the data they do - it's what keeps their advertising network competitive. Same goes for Google. They don't want third parties to have access to your data, they want to be THE company that sells targeted advertisements.
  
  Sell it in bulk to governments for large sums of money for which advertising isn't their interest.
  
  Oh what makes you think governments need to pay for that? Is free if you're a big enough market.
  
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-us-government-purchases-your-user-data-heres-what-it-does-with-it/
  
  I'm surprised that they pay for it. They could just demand it through all kinds of national security laws.
  
  Oh they definitely do that stuIf but when they do they have to disclose that to the senate or whomever oversees such things. This way they can quietly buy up a shit ton of data with whatever dark budgets they have access to.
  
  If it's public information why would it be illegal? If I understand correctly the only thing stopping anyone else from doing it as effectively is Meta's ability to aggregate the data and find the buyers, and perhaps morals.
  
  If the fine it's less than the profit they will do it anyways.
- I've posted this elsewhere in the thread so hopefully it doesn't feel spammy, but this is from their privacy policy:
  "Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
  We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
  https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
  
  to research and innovate for social good.
  Oh fucking please. What a total absolute load of rat shit, my dear fucking lord.
  Simple enough, based on their TOS we just block their instance and they can no longer create a profile/scrape our data. Anyone know how to go about that? If so, lemmy know
  
  Here is how to block meta from mastodon.
  
  So Meta can gather your profile information, likes and follows, as long as you instance federate with Meta’s instance and somebody follows you? Are your likes and follows available through the public api? If they are not publicly available then the federation with Meta gives them an easy access to you information
  
  What's worse their privacy policy states that they believe that being connected to their network gives them the right to monetize your data (messages, boosts, likes, and follower graph).
  
  jfc read the article. He addresses that.
  
  I am assuming you are referring to Eugene's post. The way he addresses it is actually fairly misleading. The Threads privacy policy explicitly states that they believe they have a right to monetize any data on any nodes connected to their network.
- Isn't all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don't need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.
  Frankly, there are other instances out there that I'm more worried about than Threads.
  
  Why use a crawler if you could spin up some camoflaged small instances and get the info right via the regular api?
  Or create accounts and get the info from the client api like apps?
  
  ... running a crawler would be far easier than running the largest instance in the fediverse ...
  
  I'm not sure about Mastodon, but at least for Lemmy, not every piece of information is available from the API or web interface. Some of it is only sent through federation. Namely, who, specifically, voted for something, edit history, probably a few other things.
  Does Mastodon just hand over a complete list of everyone who liked a post? Even if it has thousands of likes? That kind of data would be very valuable to a company like Facebook.
- They already can, everything you do on Mastadon is already public.

173 comments