1y ago

Will Meta scrape and crawl through all our data now?

So from my understanding, I can block an instance which prevents it from showing in my feed.

However, if the instance I post to (.world) is not blocked on the receiving instance's end (Meta), they will still get my post (unless defederated)?

If so, doesn't that open up the idea that Meta will be able to scrape and take ALL the data from ALL the (still federated) instances' posts that are not blocked by the Meta instance(s)? How can I protect my information from Meta while still being federated, or is that not possible?

You're viewing a single thread.

23 comments

They can do it anyway, without threads being in the mix at all. Unfortunately the only way to be sure no corporation can scrape your data is to not be on the internet at all.
- Ahh, very true, but aren't there legal obligations regarding privacy if data is collected via a site vs the public web?
  
  If there are they are never enforced in the US. Court case after court case has sided with the scraper rather than the site. Though usually Facebook is the scrapee in these cases, not the scraper.
  I used to work in real estate tech so I know a lot of efforts the US's National Association of Realtors has made to stop scrapers of RE data. Some where via the legal system, some tried to push the onus on us as paying consumers of their data. Not a single thing worked - if anything they may have invoked the Streisand effect once or twice and gotten more of their data scraped.
  
  OpenAI is currently being sued because they used everything they could fin to train their AI models. We will see how that works out.
  https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/28/tech/openai-chatgpt-microsoft-data-sued/index.html
  
  Short answer is “no.”
  Slightly longer answer is: “all of your public posts on Lemmy or Mastodon or any other federated platform are the Public web. So no, it’s not different.”

23 comments