Any Admin worth their salt is going to defederate anyways.
How much would that help? If even one instance doesn’t defederate, fb is still going to scrape all the data they can through that instance, negating all the other instances that did defederate. (Unless I’m misunderstanding something)
As an example: I’m from .ca and lets say they defederate. I make a comment or post (or upvote/downvote) on another instance like .world that didn’t, am I not a “third party” and opening myself up to them collecting everything they can about me and my account?
They setting themselves up for a major GDPR suit, as well other lawsuits for violating privacy policies of other services that never opted in.
I wonder if there’s a way to fuck with the info that is sent to Facebook in some way from instances, kind of like an obfuscation method. So instead of us defederating, we force them to due to spamming their fetched content with nonsense.
I wouldn’t advise it. We don’t want to set precedent that you can shovel garbage at whatever federated site you disagree with. It would be funny to append all Threads requests with Zuckerberg photoshopped as neckbeard Cesar. It’s less funny when bad actors use unsuspecting users to spread misinformation or bigotry.
Yup; you’ll have to start watching where you post and only post on servers that don’t federate with Meta.
As far as I understand federation, you should be OK as long as you don’t interact with instances that are federated with meta garbage. Blocking an instance is one click but it’ll hide comments from their users and make you click a button to read them. Its not that big a deal though
I don’t know if interacting with users of those federated instances would be safe or not, but your exposure I assume would be limited to whatever you reply to them.
They already can and do scrape literally every website. If you’re putting data on the internet thousands of different companies and governments are collecting it.
If you look at your profile from another instance, your user history there will only contain stuff that that instance is federated with. Users looking at your profile wont see comments and posts you’ve made onto communities that aren’t federated onto the instance they are looking at your profile from.
One comment onto an instance that federates with threads would leak that one comment, not your entire user account’s worth of data.
It’s still bullshit.
This will be the next shit storm when Lemmy.world doesn’t defederate with Threads and people get surprised. :)
Threads is dying. Give it time
Genuine question here, it looks like most of the info they’re collecting here could also be collected via scraping that info from any publicly available instance (profile pic, username, etc.)
What added info would they get from federation that isn’t already something we are giving away ourselves by participating in a public protocol like ActivityPub?
Federation basically just means your instance will scrape Meta in turn and serve their content to you, whereas being defederated it will not. That means federated or no, without additional precautions by admins of particular instances, Meta will be getting the same info federated or no. Being defederated makes interacting with Meta’s service much less likely though, which makes them scraping your data less likely. This update to the ToS honestly just sort of describes how the fediverse works anyway this isn’t some special feature of Threads, all instances behave this way.
Here is the Threads Supplemental Privacy Policy referenced in the article. Some relevant excerpts are:
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).
And further down…
If you are a Third Party User, our ability to verify your request may be limited and we may be unable to process your request. Please note, however, that the interoperable protocol allows Third Party Services to automatically send Threads requests for deletion of individual posts when those posts are deleted on the Third Party Service. We make reasonable efforts to honor such requests when we receive them. Contact your Third Party Service to learn more.
Thats a nothingburger and a half.
This just lists the info that is auto shared through federation, in legalese. The second one explains how federated deletes work, also in legalese. This is the info any instance would handle if you interacted with it.
Apart from the list of items being somewhat generic and IP address just being unobtainable as someone else pointed out, it’s just saying that they get data about users by means of the normal functioning of federation. It’s ok in the same way as the server that originally hosts this community we are posting to (lemmy.ml) necessarily getting user data from our “home” servers we are posting from (feddit.de, sopuli.xyz), is ok. This is how we want it to work.
because every other instance does the same.
this comment is content, it’s now stored on the instance I share it with, and all the instances it federates to, along with my username and so forth.
the above is just a legalese explanation of how the fediverse works.
It’s worth thinking about what you’re putting out there, but you’re right. This isn’t a Threads specific thing.
You’re putting these posts on the internet. You should expect everyone to read them, including Threads and Google and Putin and Kim Jong Un. That’s kind of the idea of public posting. They don’t even need an API to do that.
First one: “we will take as much as we legally can”
Second one: “we will give as little as we legally can get away with”
Can’t instances defederate preemptively?
Defederating doesn’t prevent them from seeing what you post. It only prevents you from seeing them
