In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
I understand your frustration entirely. And for the most part, I agree with it. But for music producers, especially if they’re indie, they have no choice. Content creators trying to make a living off of their art rely on putting themselves out there on the biggest platforms to maximize the amount of exposure they’re going to get. The importance of social media with millions upon millions of users for an indie artist cannot be understated. It is the difference between them paying rent, and getting evicted.
As for the average user, as others have stated, they have friends, family, and content creators that they like to follow. Digital privacy comes at a cost. We cannot afford to create the misconception that acts protecting our digital privacy are free actions. And the level of cost and willingness to pay it varies from person to person. I don’t need Facebook to keep up with my parents. But many people do. For their parents and the rest of their family and loved ones. I was willing to make the switch to Linux, but it cost me some simplicity in my gaming; some titles aren’t just plug n play. Even ones that were on Windows. Switching to Lemmy was nothing for me, but for some people, they’re giving up subreddits they loved, or they have to keep using Reddit to access them. And there are some valuable resources there.
Privacy isn’t free. It’s invaluable and sometimes the price tag reflects that.
Tbh it’s not black and white. I’m sure a big corporation can extract a ton of information on us but there’s still a pretty big gap between having our real names and photos plastered everywhere on social media, or them just knowing where I live and that I spend a lot on steam games. Don’t take the small victories for granted.
Im in basically the same position since realistically the change needs to be at an institutional level. I can’t really change anything by myself without excluding myself from most modern services.
We need laws and regulations. But like you I fear it’s too late.
Me. I care I just…fuck. That ship has sailed. I don’t go out of my way to download the big offenders like Tik Tok but…still. Everyone is tracking me. Everyone is selling my information. God knows how many different companies have massive files on me.
It might not be. Plenty of US states are coming online with privacy rights. If you live in CA, CO, CT or VA you can submit requests to opt out of information sales and for sites to erase your data.
Same here, but that doesn’t stop me from trying where I have the time and energy. One of those ways is voting. So far the government has let these companies wipe their shit onto every corner of the internet, and the 5-10% of us switching apps or emails or… Whatever, aren’t going to change that. It’s not a short-term solution, but I’m starting to think it’s really the only way.
It is. They know everything about you. Even every store you have shopped at knows a lot about you. It really doesn’t take much interaction for a company to get a lot of info. It’s relatively easy to get an email and from there, if they wanted, they can get the rest of your profile from a 3rd party who has your data all matched up already. They can also build your profile pretty easily themselves as well.
You have the right to request access to inspect the personal information a company stores on you. At least, in the US. And I believe the UK and EU as well but I can’t speak as much to those.
If you want to be truly terrified (or enlightened, however you prefer to think of it), pick any big company that you’ve used and request all the data they have stored on you. The amount of data they’ll have is STAGGERING. Certainly hundreds of pages, possibly thousands. It’s insane.
you’d likely have to work for some marketing agency and can probably only buy user data in bulk amounts (based on region, or some other desired demographic) with a recurring business plan of course
it wouldn’t be financially beneficial for these companies to sell an individual thumbprint
If you’re in the US, you can demand a company release the information they have on you, to you, for inspection. It’s more data than you’d think. A LOT more.
I think personal data poisoning is going to become more prevalent among privacy communities, I would like to see some tooling for this in the next few years.
Even if you get them to care once you show them all they need to do to have a shred of privacy they shrug say something along the lines of “well I don’t have anything to hide anyways” and go back to their merry way. The path of least resistance will always win sadly
I literally just had a friend tell me he joined Threads and how neat it was, etc etc and when I explained why I wouldn’t be joining him, he basically just gave me the old “Well I already know they have all my information so it doesn’t matter”
…like wtf? So you just…give up having any privacy whatsoever? I just couldn’t respond to him after that, I don’t really know how to respond to that. There’s a disease spreading in the world unfortunately and it isn’t just COVID. It’s one called Apathy and too many people are coming down with it.
Honestly he has a point. I was born right before Y2K. My entire life has been online. I’m sure with enough digging this account can be linked back to my IRL identity. They already have any and every bit of information about me, what’s a little more?
People don’t care and are never going to care. They can track us by anything already and don’t need you to give them any info. The algorithms that they use can identify you if you sign up or not.
It’s not apathy per se, it’s more resigned acceptance. There is no privacy anymore, even if you do everything in your power not to be tracked. Unless you live completely off the grid, cash transactions in places without security cameras only and no bank account/online accounts you’re going to be tracked by big tech.
Literally saw a comment like that yesterday. Drives me up the wall.
I’m in the process of accepting that the average Joe/Jane just doesn’t care about anything but their little bubble.
I used to spend so much emotional energy on trying to convince people to stand up for something greater or to at least think more than 2 meters ahead, but now I’m just done.
I’ll watch out for myself and the people close to me, everyone else can just evaporate for all I care.
What if I don’t want to immediately pigeonhole myself into one specific niche?
As a non-LGTB / non-furry / neurotypical / multiple-interest-having / boring-ass white guy in his forties, there really isn’t a sub-sub-microcommunity for me.
And picking these communities is like throwing a political sign in your front yard, saying, “HEY! I know there are some people out there who hate this stuff! Argue with me! Troll me! Make my experience here as terrible as possible!”
That’s a bit hyperbolic. You only do that if you join a heavily political instance or subscribe to tons of political communities. Most of the boards aren’t like that.
I think in Mastodon’s case it was less that you had to pick an instance, rather they were all instances from companies/people that they didn’t know. How many email providers does the average person know? The “my Mastodon admin can read all my posts” discussion also fits into this (they were fine with Twitter doing it). Threads will behave just like any other service in the Fediverse at the end, with all that “complexity”, but people will say Threads is easier, just because of the recognition factor and that they already have an Instagram account.
That last bit is part of it. One Instagram account means full access, full interaction. If you don’t have one there’s no approval process, either.
Plus it looks more fleshed out. Let’s face it, a clean and at least vaguely clear UI is far more trustworthy for 99% of people than a possibly sketchy one that seems to almost overcommunicate as far as they’re concerned.
Oh, and speaking of UI, the only app I have for Lemmy on iOS is through Testflight. Most people don’t have, want, or even need a desktop so if there’s no phone app then literally nothing else matters and that’s fair.
That’s the key, you have to figure out what instance is best for you. With a million choices you get choice paralysis mixed with FOMO and they just don’t bother.
IMO that’s probably the biggest problem with anything decentralized like this. The average person doesn’t care about the benefits and the above is by far a big barrier to entry.
The biggest advantage of a decentralized system is that none of the people who are unwilling to invest even the briefest amount of time into understanding something will end up using it.
Most of us don’t care what the average person has to say on social media, as demonstrated by what they average person has said on social media over the past 15 years.
I guess lack of choice makes choosing easy—you only have one option and that’s it, take it or leave it. Having to choose between vastly different options is also easy. But if you have a hundred similar, yet slightly different options to choose from, making the decision becomes psychologically hard, even if it doesn’t make a difference for your UX which option you choose.
That was not the case with lemmy. Most of the instances I tried required manual approval for signups. It took me going through like 4 different instances to find one that didn’t.
To be fair, most people reccomend lemmy.world now, and that doesn’t need manual approval. But there’s another problem, they can’t interact with Beehaw.
“Simply” picking an instance is not actually that simple. Most people just want to go to the site and sign up. Even with email, they know what Gmail and Outlook are. But on Lemmy, there’s no indication of what you’re supposed to pick. Even if you try to go with what seems like the “default” instance, lemmy.ml, you’re met with an announcement saying not to do thaf cause it’s overloaded.
People don’t want to have to make decisions, especially when they don’t have any information to go off of.
They’re also not mega corps tracking and selling your every move. It’s quite a bit different. What’s public here is what I explicitly make public, there’s no unwanted encroachment or permissions.
It’s because privacy is not a trivial matter, especially in those sites. You have to go through endless legal jargon to see how exactly the platform is using your data. Your average user has the attention span of a goldfish because of Tiktok, he/she would never read the platform’s privacy policy and will prioritize convenience over digital rights.
I really wish there could be a law that says that if they want people to use their platform so they can use their data they have to pay people for their data. Data is money, but only to the companies that suck up my data and use it to make money. If my data is worth money I want money for my data. If companies had to pay me for my data I would consider using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. if the price were right. This is no doubt a very impossible wish. They also say time is money and there is no law requiring people to pay me when they waste my time. But, I can dream. Imagine getting a nice check in exchange for signing up for Instagram.
That’s funny! Imagine being called “you data whore” hahaha! In all seriousness, though, if such a law existed and depending on the payment requirements, there might not be many data whoring opportunities. Depending on the legislation, it could discourage entities from tracking, storing, mining, and selling people’s data. It would require entities to keep track. With people using online services in the millions, that’s some serious accounting and legal representation. It might even cost more money to prove compliance to governments than the payments to the “data whores” would. Then, of course, there would be the fines to pay for non-compliance, and the lawsuits. That’s why this law I dream of will never happen. Depending on the law and its implementation it could cripple online industry and make companies like Meta totally non-existent.
What do you mean when you say “privacy”? Threads isn’t more or less private than using any other federated service-- they all share everything you do on them with everything else anyway. I guess federation doesn’t share things like your email and IP address, so there is some privacy-related concerns, so maybe that’s what you meant?
The big distinction between threads and, say, Mastodon is that Mastodon doesn’t have an algorithm. The minor distinctions are more along the lines of it being open source and not controlled by a giant corporation. I am not surprised that most people don’t care about (or maybe actively seek out) a service with an algorithm, let alone about the benefits of FOSS.
The average person definitely doesn’t imo. Threads is easy to get into and has a fast growing user base. Those make it more appealing then privacy ever would for the average person.
Just think of all those posts we see that go “so I looked in my Google history and see they’ve been recording everything for the last decade and holy shit this is creepy” oh-snap moments.
It’s just not something a normal person thinks about. I mean, just like a normal person wouldn’t consider the thoughts of a serial killer, similarly people don’t consider that stalking mega corporations could do what they do.
I think there has been a huge shift in the privacy concerns of the average people. 10-15 years ago we shared our (LIVE) locations constantly and everything defaulted to doing that. People tagged everyone on all photos (with locations) and initially there wasn’t even a way to consent to that. Today that sounds really extreme. Now many people will lock down their accounts and they aren’t sharing as much as they used to. You are right that the average person doesn’t care as much, but it’s not entirely true that people are completely careless.
My brother in law is like this. He keeps a yearly journal on google drive and his logic is that since he keeps it on google drive he doesn’t care if google know everything about him or not. The convenience of having it heavily outweighs any privacy that he might have. Though I wonder if him growing up in an authoritarian country has something to do with it.
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I understand your frustration entirely. And for the most part, I agree with it. But for music producers, especially if they’re indie, they have no choice. Content creators trying to make a living off of their art rely on putting themselves out there on the biggest platforms to maximize the amount of exposure they’re going to get. The importance of social media with millions upon millions of users for an indie artist cannot be understated. It is the difference between them paying rent, and getting evicted.
As for the average user, as others have stated, they have friends, family, and content creators that they like to follow. Digital privacy comes at a cost. We cannot afford to create the misconception that acts protecting our digital privacy are free actions. And the level of cost and willingness to pay it varies from person to person. I don’t need Facebook to keep up with my parents. But many people do. For their parents and the rest of their family and loved ones. I was willing to make the switch to Linux, but it cost me some simplicity in my gaming; some titles aren’t just plug n play. Even ones that were on Windows. Switching to Lemmy was nothing for me, but for some people, they’re giving up subreddits they loved, or they have to keep using Reddit to access them. And there are some valuable resources there.
Privacy isn’t free. It’s invaluable and sometimes the price tag reflects that.
deleted by creator
What about a watching self promotional videos that promote ads on an advertising company? Is that okay?
deleted by creator
That’s your dumb average person. Personally I am fine with it cause it’s a choice they make.
I care. I’m just increasingly convinced it’s too fucking late.
Tbh it’s not black and white. I’m sure a big corporation can extract a ton of information on us but there’s still a pretty big gap between having our real names and photos plastered everywhere on social media, or them just knowing where I live and that I spend a lot on steam games. Don’t take the small victories for granted.
Im in basically the same position since realistically the change needs to be at an institutional level. I can’t really change anything by myself without excluding myself from most modern services.
We need laws and regulations. But like you I fear it’s too late.
Me. I care I just…fuck. That ship has sailed. I don’t go out of my way to download the big offenders like Tik Tok but…still. Everyone is tracking me. Everyone is selling my information. God knows how many different companies have massive files on me.
It might not be. Plenty of US states are coming online with privacy rights. If you live in CA, CO, CT or VA you can submit requests to opt out of information sales and for sites to erase your data.
Same here, but that doesn’t stop me from trying where I have the time and energy. One of those ways is voting. So far the government has let these companies wipe their shit onto every corner of the internet, and the 5-10% of us switching apps or emails or… Whatever, aren’t going to change that. It’s not a short-term solution, but I’m starting to think it’s really the only way.
It is. They know everything about you. Even every store you have shopped at knows a lot about you. It really doesn’t take much interaction for a company to get a lot of info. It’s relatively easy to get an email and from there, if they wanted, they can get the rest of your profile from a 3rd party who has your data all matched up already. They can also build your profile pretty easily themselves as well.
How can regular people buy this data?
Say I wanted to find out what my profile looks like?
You have the right to request access to inspect the personal information a company stores on you. At least, in the US. And I believe the UK and EU as well but I can’t speak as much to those.
If you want to be truly terrified (or enlightened, however you prefer to think of it), pick any big company that you’ve used and request all the data they have stored on you. The amount of data they’ll have is STAGGERING. Certainly hundreds of pages, possibly thousands. It’s insane.
I imagine “you” can’t
you’d likely have to work for some marketing agency and can probably only buy user data in bulk amounts (based on region, or some other desired demographic) with a recurring business plan of course
it wouldn’t be financially beneficial for these companies to sell an individual thumbprint
That makes sense.
So who wants to set up an marketing agency with me?
That makes sense.
So who wants to set up an marketing agency with me?
Live in the EU.
I do. Now what?
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/government-in-ireland/data-protection/rights-under-general-data-protection-regulation/
Yes. I would like this info as well if anyone has it .
If you’re in the US, you can demand a company release the information they have on you, to you, for inspection. It’s more data than you’d think. A LOT more.
It’s never too late. Sure, they already have a lot of data on you but you can keep them from getting more.
Definitely. I’m was trying to state that basic info about you is readily available to companies regardless of how you choose to interact with them.
I think personal data poisoning is going to become more prevalent among privacy communities, I would like to see some tooling for this in the next few years.
Even if you get them to care once you show them all they need to do to have a shred of privacy they shrug say something along the lines of “well I don’t have anything to hide anyways” and go back to their merry way. The path of least resistance will always win sadly
I literally just had a friend tell me he joined Threads and how neat it was, etc etc and when I explained why I wouldn’t be joining him, he basically just gave me the old “Well I already know they have all my information so it doesn’t matter”
…like wtf? So you just…give up having any privacy whatsoever? I just couldn’t respond to him after that, I don’t really know how to respond to that. There’s a disease spreading in the world unfortunately and it isn’t just COVID. It’s one called Apathy and too many people are coming down with it.
Honestly he has a point. I was born right before Y2K. My entire life has been online. I’m sure with enough digging this account can be linked back to my IRL identity. They already have any and every bit of information about me, what’s a little more?
People don’t care and are never going to care. They can track us by anything already and don’t need you to give them any info. The algorithms that they use can identify you if you sign up or not.
It’s not apathy per se, it’s more resigned acceptance. There is no privacy anymore, even if you do everything in your power not to be tracked. Unless you live completely off the grid, cash transactions in places without security cameras only and no bank account/online accounts you’re going to be tracked by big tech.
Literally saw a comment like that yesterday. Drives me up the wall. I’m in the process of accepting that the average Joe/Jane just doesn’t care about anything but their little bubble. I used to spend so much emotional energy on trying to convince people to stand up for something greater or to at least think more than 2 meters ahead, but now I’m just done. I’ll watch out for myself and the people close to me, everyone else can just evaporate for all I care.
Congratulations, you now have your own little bubble.
Lol true but teaching people better ways is like swimming against the tie. Heck is even hard with people close to me !
People do, but ease of use will trump it every time.
And buzz. Don’t forget buzz.
It’s a bit of a shock that simply picking an instance and signing up like any regular site is such a hurdle to so many people.
Best thing Lemmy signups could do is ask “What’s your primary interest?” And randomly select an instance that has that category.
What if I don’t want to immediately pigeonhole myself into one specific niche?
As a non-LGTB / non-furry / neurotypical / multiple-interest-having / boring-ass white guy in his forties, there really isn’t a sub-sub-microcommunity for me.
And picking these communities is like throwing a political sign in your front yard, saying, “HEY! I know there are some people out there who hate this stuff! Argue with me! Troll me! Make my experience here as terrible as possible!”
That’s a bit hyperbolic. You only do that if you join a heavily political instance or subscribe to tons of political communities. Most of the boards aren’t like that.
I think in Mastodon’s case it was less that you had to pick an instance, rather they were all instances from companies/people that they didn’t know. How many email providers does the average person know? The “my Mastodon admin can read all my posts” discussion also fits into this (they were fine with Twitter doing it). Threads will behave just like any other service in the Fediverse at the end, with all that “complexity”, but people will say Threads is easier, just because of the recognition factor and that they already have an Instagram account.
That last bit is part of it. One Instagram account means full access, full interaction. If you don’t have one there’s no approval process, either.
Plus it looks more fleshed out. Let’s face it, a clean and at least vaguely clear UI is far more trustworthy for 99% of people than a possibly sketchy one that seems to almost overcommunicate as far as they’re concerned.
Oh, and speaking of UI, the only app I have for Lemmy on iOS is through Testflight. Most people don’t have, want, or even need a desktop so if there’s no phone app then literally nothing else matters and that’s fair.
That’s the key, you have to figure out what instance is best for you. With a million choices you get choice paralysis mixed with FOMO and they just don’t bother.
IMO that’s probably the biggest problem with anything decentralized like this. The average person doesn’t care about the benefits and the above is by far a big barrier to entry.
The biggest advantage of a decentralized system is that none of the people who are unwilling to invest even the briefest amount of time into understanding something will end up using it.
Most of us don’t care what the average person has to say on social media, as demonstrated by what they average person has said on social media over the past 15 years.
If you don’t appeal to the masses then lemmy will stay small, and pushes like threads will wipe it out in no time.
IMO that’s also mastodons biggest problem. They’re essentially trying to stay small an unsuccessful.
I guess lack of choice makes choosing easy—you only have one option and that’s it, take it or leave it. Having to choose between vastly different options is also easy. But if you have a hundred similar, yet slightly different options to choose from, making the decision becomes psychologically hard, even if it doesn’t make a difference for your UX which option you choose.
Technology is hard
That was not the case with lemmy. Most of the instances I tried required manual approval for signups. It took me going through like 4 different instances to find one that didn’t.
To be fair, most people reccomend lemmy.world now, and that doesn’t need manual approval. But there’s another problem, they can’t interact with Beehaw.
“Simply” picking an instance is not actually that simple. Most people just want to go to the site and sign up. Even with email, they know what Gmail and Outlook are. But on Lemmy, there’s no indication of what you’re supposed to pick. Even if you try to go with what seems like the “default” instance, lemmy.ml, you’re met with an announcement saying not to do thaf cause it’s overloaded.
People don’t want to have to make decisions, especially when they don’t have any information to go off of.
Lemmy and Mastadon aren’t at all private, by any measure. Not sure what exactly you mean now.
They’re also not mega corps tracking and selling your every move. It’s quite a bit different. What’s public here is what I explicitly make public, there’s no unwanted encroachment or permissions.
So it’s about profiting off the lack of privacy. Not the lack of privacy itself. Now I get it.
Yes, but also how they are doing it. And to who they are selling the data. Etc. Etc.
It’s because privacy is not a trivial matter, especially in those sites. You have to go through endless legal jargon to see how exactly the platform is using your data. Your average user has the attention span of a goldfish because of Tiktok, he/she would never read the platform’s privacy policy and will prioritize convenience over digital rights.
It’s all jargon by design. You won’t use something that openly says they watch/listen to you shit.
You don’t even need to read the privacy policy most often it’s enough to look at the requested app permissions of the app you are installing.
Yes but those are only local permissions, they don’t cover how they are tracking your app usage
I really wish there could be a law that says that if they want people to use their platform so they can use their data they have to pay people for their data. Data is money, but only to the companies that suck up my data and use it to make money. If my data is worth money I want money for my data. If companies had to pay me for my data I would consider using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. if the price were right. This is no doubt a very impossible wish. They also say time is money and there is no law requiring people to pay me when they waste my time. But, I can dream. Imagine getting a nice check in exchange for signing up for Instagram.
Let’s call it data whoring.
That’s funny! Imagine being called “you data whore” hahaha! In all seriousness, though, if such a law existed and depending on the payment requirements, there might not be many data whoring opportunities. Depending on the legislation, it could discourage entities from tracking, storing, mining, and selling people’s data. It would require entities to keep track. With people using online services in the millions, that’s some serious accounting and legal representation. It might even cost more money to prove compliance to governments than the payments to the “data whores” would. Then, of course, there would be the fines to pay for non-compliance, and the lawsuits. That’s why this law I dream of will never happen. Depending on the law and its implementation it could cripple online industry and make companies like Meta totally non-existent.
Unfortunately it’s just not that much of a priority for most people. They value convenience much more than privacy.
What do you mean when you say “privacy”? Threads isn’t more or less private than using any other federated service-- they all share everything you do on them with everything else anyway. I guess federation doesn’t share things like your email and IP address, so there is some privacy-related concerns, so maybe that’s what you meant?
The big distinction between threads and, say, Mastodon is that Mastodon doesn’t have an algorithm. The minor distinctions are more along the lines of it being open source and not controlled by a giant corporation. I am not surprised that most people don’t care about (or maybe actively seek out) a service with an algorithm, let alone about the benefits of FOSS.
Issue with threads is the app constantly collects everything such as location, card details etc
Card details?
Sorry, i meant financial info and purchases
You mean through the app?
yes
You expect them not to track purchases through their own app?
They will indeed track everything they can.
The average person definitely doesn’t imo. Threads is easy to get into and has a fast growing user base. Those make it more appealing then privacy ever would for the average person.
People do, but have no clue.
Just think of all those posts we see that go “so I looked in my Google history and see they’ve been recording everything for the last decade and holy shit this is creepy” oh-snap moments.
It’s just not something a normal person thinks about. I mean, just like a normal person wouldn’t consider the thoughts of a serial killer, similarly people don’t consider that stalking mega corporations could do what they do.
I think there has been a huge shift in the privacy concerns of the average people. 10-15 years ago we shared our (LIVE) locations constantly and everything defaulted to doing that. People tagged everyone on all photos (with locations) and initially there wasn’t even a way to consent to that. Today that sounds really extreme. Now many people will lock down their accounts and they aren’t sharing as much as they used to. You are right that the average person doesn’t care as much, but it’s not entirely true that people are completely careless.
People have a lot going on in their lives.
My brother in law is like this. He keeps a yearly journal on google drive and his logic is that since he keeps it on google drive he doesn’t care if google know everything about him or not. The convenience of having it heavily outweighs any privacy that he might have. Though I wonder if him growing up in an authoritarian country has something to do with it.