Has anybody considered the idea that boosts from non-Meta properties to Threads could legally be used to build ad profiles? We already know they do that sort of account association with non-fedi accounts.
EDIT: Looks like that’s absolutely the plan. From the 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."
EDIT 2: After doing a little more thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that the general narrative about Threads plan to steal users from similar federated services ignore the fact that it’s certainly cheaper to let the volunteers of the fediverse take on the moderation costs while they monetize the data. Though the two certainly are not mutually exclusive.
It states:
"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."
While I doubt this is as much of an issue for us, as it is for mastadon (the interaction is possible, but not really common I think) the following part:
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.”
Is the best argument for defederating from them right from the start IMO. They’re forcing their privacy policy on people that might not even have read it just because they interacted on a submission that happened to originate in threads.
Now, I know everything we do here is open. But I don’t think it’s OK in a moral sense to suck up data from users other than your own to be sold to advertisers. I doubt we have much legal power but we do have the power to stop delivering the data to their door.
I don’t fully understand—would Meta be able to serve you targeted ads based on your non-Threads fediverse activities? Where would these ads appear? How do they know it’s you just from your fediverse accounts?
They could only create a correlation if you let them. If your username is cryptic a ough and you don’t link to all your other social media it will be hard to profile you. And the ads would be on platforms where they can serve ads.
Wow! It’s so much worse than I can imagine. I just know they are motivated by the bottom line but I don’t have the insight on what they gain with federating.
I fear that many people are not aware just how public everything in the fediverse is. Everything you post, every comment, every upvote, boost, favorite, like or other interaction is broadcasted to every instance where there is at least on subscriber/follower. Nothing in the fediverse is private. There is no real way to protect from this. You don’t even need a real instance for that. You could write a software that subscribes to everything and just takes the data. The fediverse is as public as it can be. It’s like standing on a market place and screaming out your thoughts. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing it down. And that is by design.
And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It is not really different from all the commercial platforms. They just take the data without you knowing it. Here you are very aware that you don’t control anything that you do in public.
The solution is to act accordingly. Use cryptic usernames and don’t post anything that can be traced back to you. Be aware that you are in a public space.
Maybe it is useful to differentiate between what is legal and what is possible. And even if it not legal it is easy to harvest data from the fediverse. It doesn’t have to be meta. It could be a state government. It is public and everyone should act as if the data is already harvested.
Sure. I just think we shouldn’t turn this observation on its head to give the impression it’s somehow OK to break data protection laws just because there is no technical prevention.
That’s actually how some people think. Wasn’t sure if you were one of them.
Just because it’s public does not mean they have the rights to sell it. Some over on Mastodon seem to think they likely would lose if it ever went to court (definite illegal in the EU but Threads is delaying launch there) but until then they plan to monetize your interactions.
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What we should be doing is de-federating them en-mass.
Nothing good will come from having Facebook/Meta involved here.
Doesn’t all social media have this, unfortunately?
There’s absolutely no reason it has to or should.
Technically, no, but then they need another source of revenue, because servers at that scale aren’t cheap.
The issue is that they can legally monetize users that never signed up to Threads. That’s what makes this set of circumstances unique.
Isn’t Google or every other company doing the same thing by training their AI on publicly posted information.
Training AI and selling information directly are very different in the eyes of the law.
But doesn’t Meta build shadow profile on non users alredy?
They do but primarily through SSO services and platform partnerships. This is their bridge into monetizing the broader fediverse.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Further context from the Threads privacy policy.
It states: "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
With what part of the blog does that not match?
While I doubt this is as much of an issue for us, as it is for mastadon (the interaction is possible, but not really common I think) the following part:
Is the best argument for defederating from them right from the start IMO. They’re forcing their privacy policy on people that might not even have read it just because they interacted on a submission that happened to originate in threads.
Now, I know everything we do here is open. But I don’t think it’s OK in a moral sense to suck up data from users other than your own to be sold to advertisers. I doubt we have much legal power but we do have the power to stop delivering the data to their door.
What’s worse, they’ll do it if somebody from Threads interacts with YOU
I don’t fully understand—would Meta be able to serve you targeted ads based on your non-Threads fediverse activities? Where would these ads appear? How do they know it’s you just from your fediverse accounts?
They could only create a correlation if you let them. If your username is cryptic a ough and you don’t link to all your other social media it will be hard to profile you. And the ads would be on platforms where they can serve ads.
I absolutely do not think you can avoid the big social ad complex with a cryptic username.
Wow! It’s so much worse than I can imagine. I just know they are motivated by the bottom line but I don’t have the insight on what they gain with federating.
Killing a potential future competitor
I fear that many people are not aware just how public everything in the fediverse is. Everything you post, every comment, every upvote, boost, favorite, like or other interaction is broadcasted to every instance where there is at least on subscriber/follower. Nothing in the fediverse is private. There is no real way to protect from this. You don’t even need a real instance for that. You could write a software that subscribes to everything and just takes the data. The fediverse is as public as it can be. It’s like standing on a market place and screaming out your thoughts. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing it down. And that is by design.
And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It is not really different from all the commercial platforms. They just take the data without you knowing it. Here you are very aware that you don’t control anything that you do in public.
The solution is to act accordingly. Use cryptic usernames and don’t post anything that can be traced back to you. Be aware that you are in a public space.
Just because data can be accessed that doesn’t mean it is legal to collect and process it.
Maybe it is useful to differentiate between what is legal and what is possible. And even if it not legal it is easy to harvest data from the fediverse. It doesn’t have to be meta. It could be a state government. It is public and everyone should act as if the data is already harvested.
Sure. I just think we shouldn’t turn this observation on its head to give the impression it’s somehow OK to break data protection laws just because there is no technical prevention.
That’s actually how some people think. Wasn’t sure if you were one of them.
Just because it’s public does not mean they have the rights to sell it. Some over on Mastodon seem to think they likely would lose if it ever went to court (definite illegal in the EU but Threads is delaying launch there) but until then they plan to monetize your interactions.