in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”
Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.
This is why they are called direct messages instead of private messages.
Not your keys, not your security.
I wonder if they count Whatsapp with that
If you backed up your phone with Google or iCloud pre backup encryption, which is most people, then yes!
I’ve never had Meta (anything) and I gave Netflix the boot a couple years ago. I encourage everyone to also flee. I think both are a waste and they fucking spy on you. I imagine those lengthy privacy statements gave them permission to do this, but sharing private messages is particularly egregious.
Remember this next time someone is arguing with you about how we should really not be so quick to defederate from Threads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platforms
Edit:
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/26/meta-gaza-censorship-warren-sanders/
What private info does Meta get through federation with other instances?
I suppose any DMs sent to Threads users?
My point here is not overtly about Privacy. It’s about recognizing that Meta has been a terrible corporate citizen for their entire existence. We shouldn’t be pretending they are some friendly geeky company that just wants to participate like the rest of us. Even if they were, that’s not possible when you are going to pour hundreds of millions of users into these fediverse spaces all at once.
They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.
That’s an excellent point that I don’t see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.
The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.
If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that’s still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.
