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Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid - Meta can (and will if they actually care enough) just rejoin undercover. I agree with the rest of your post bu
by joe_the_user 3y ago
Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid - Meta can (and will if they actually care enough) just rejoin undercover.
I agree with the rest of your post but I suspect that in this instance Meta, a large public company, that might leery about doing something that potentially embarassing.
But your basic point remains true. A wide variety of companies, many bad actor, are going to be scraping, processing and connecting any data anyone makes puts online and that will happen whether Meta joins the fediverse or not. If Meta wanted fediverse data bad, they'd likely just buy it.
Indeed, all the hand wringing about Meta in particular in the article and here seems deeply confused - of course Meta isn't the only problematic actor out there. Indeed, the anonymity-problem of all the walled-gardens is that they explicitly attempt to stop online anonymity in various overt ways. But everywhere entities are trying to deanonymize covertly and these can be at least as bad.
The main thing is that anyone wanting anonymity needs to take active measures to achieve it. And these measures vary on how visible you are and effectively how much your enemies are capable and interested in you. Those talking anonymity would do best educating people in this.
- kevinventullo 3y agoMeta, a large public company, that might leery about doing something that potentially embarassing. I don’t know, they did depend on Onavo analytics for a while: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
- joe_the_user 3y agoYeah, the (less-important, subsidiary) point is they'd be happier to use some other source than engaging deception overtly and results would be the same.
- jdp23 3y agoI should have been clearer about how this relates to general issues. I added a sentence "Of course, Meta's far from the only threat out there, but as I discuss in 'Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy', looking at Meta-related threats also points to solutions that increase privacy and safety in the fediverse more generally." Here's a link to the longer post (still a draft). https://privacy.thenexus.today/fediverse-threat-modeling-privacy-and-meta/ https://privacy.thenexus.today/fediverse-threat-modeling-pri... And agreed, it doesn't scale for Meta to infiltrate people into every single fediverse instance -- although threat actors who are targeting specific people or communities might well do this, so it's also something to take into account.
- hackernewds 3y agoMeta has walled gardens at least with privacy settings that cannot be scraped.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- callmeal 3y ago>I agree with the rest of your post but I suspect that in this instance Meta, a large public company, that might leery about doing something that potentially embarassing. I wouldn't say that the company directly responsible for the state of online discourse today as being leery of doing anything. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-... It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional contagion". ... One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' "positive emotional content", resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to "negative emotional content" and the opposite happened.
- joe_the_user 3y ago>...the company directly responsible for the state of online discourse today... The company, huh? Not Twitter, not "us", not the properties of online discourse, the polarization of American and world political ideologies... Anyway, this "hating on" FB doesn't change the situation.