Fediverse privacy nightmare?

obosob, 10 months ago

pseudoymous, even

Kolanaki, 10 months ago

If you have concerns that your posts will be public on a public message board, you’re kind of fucking stupid. It’s like being concerned that you will be visible if you leave your house to go to the store.

SkyNTP, 10 months ago

Bloonface.com has been posting anti-fediverse propaganda for a while now. It’s time to stop listening to what they have to say.

ScreaminOctopus, 10 months ago

Brain dead take. Sums up as “Wah! Information you publicize is public!” This guy completely misses the fact the the privacy nightmare of corporate social media is the apps that scrape every piece of traceable information off your phone to sell, and the cookies and browser tracking so they can follow you all over the web. AFAIK fediverse sites aren’t doing this.

lemann, 10 months ago

apps that scrape every piece of traceable information off your phone to sell

The word “scrape” is a little bit generous IMO. Threads in particular with its endless scrolling list of required permissions is literally handing your entire phone to Facebook/Meta - saved contacts, payment information, fitness tracker and health information… half of those permissions I didn’t know even existed 😳

HughJanus, 10 months ago

This is 100% FUD. The content of your profile, and the posts you send out to the world are not supposed to be private. What’s supposed to be private is:

• Your IP address
• Your location
• Your email address
• your contacts
• your browsing data
• your health data
• your purchase history

Etc. etc. These are the privacy issues you should be concerned with.

cyanarchy, 10 months ago

It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable.

This guy is either actively trying to spread fear and doubt about decentralized services, or is somehow only now understanding what the internet is and how it works. Did I step into some kind of time vortex a while back and end up in a world where people ever believed that anything on the internet was private or revocable?

Kolanaki, 10 months ago

Most of these discussions on privacy I run into are clearly filled with people who don’t understand a damn thing about the internet. Many of which are on Facebook… Using their real name and real photo as a PFP. They don’t actually care about privacy. They just like being scared and angry.

norb, 10 months ago

I really think that the corporate systems we’ve all grown used to have tricked people into thinking their data was “safe” just because some big company was “taking care of it.”

Also possible this person works for Reddit or something 🤪

poVoq, 10 months ago

This is sadly a text written with much confidence about something they understand very little about. Especially the part about the GDPR is IANAL completely wrong.

Yes, DMs over AP are not secure. That’s why there is the big banner above it in nearly every AP implementation. The rest is pretty much FUD.

shrugal, 10 months ago

The author of this blog post just realized that things posted publicly on the internet are indeed public, and that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V exist.

This is not some special property of the Fediverse, it’s how the internet has always worked. If you post something publicly (say on your personal blog) then others can see it, make copies and redistribute them, even if you later decide to delete the original content. Companies like Google build massive indexes of everything posted by anyone ever, and there is nothing you can do about it if you want your content to be publicly accessible. If you share something with just a group of people, and someone decides to make it public, then it’s public. Nothing new about that.

The GDPR works in exactly the same way in the Fediverse as with the existing services right now. If you want something deleted you have to send a notice to every service that has your content. In reality you’ll just send it to the X biggest services, because they represent 99% of the users that could potentially see that content, and that’s usually enough. You can do the same with the X most popular Fediverse instances. Even better, we might be able to create a standardized and automated process for it, because they all run the same set of Fediverse apps using ActivityPub after all.

Afaik DMs work just like unencrypted (so regular!) emails. If you send your company secrets to john@we-leak-your-mails.com then you’re probably screwed, same thing with @john.