Oh fuck no. The very first line is basically a HIPAA violation. It gets worse from there. We require less disclosure from Supreme Court Justices and Presidential nominees.
This is a trainwreck waiting to happen - even if Facebook itself doesn't abuse this level of power, you know that bad actors within the organization will. And once the information is collected, you know that tyrannical governments all over the world will be falling over themselves to get access to the data. This is a stalker's wetdream, an Orwellian orgasm of truly grotesque proportions.
Keep the Fediverse from Zucking. Just say no to Threads.
I'm all for the outrage, but what did people expect? It's the same amount of information already collected through the Facebook and Instagram apps, it's nothing really new.
ETA: just to be extremely clear, that's a bad thing.
It’s not a HIPPA violation. That law doesn’t apply to companies like Meta beacause they do not fit the definition of an entity that the law was written towards. This is just people freely giving away their personal health information and nothing more. From your own link:
The HIPAA Privacy Rule establishes national standards to protect individuals’ medical records and other individually identifiable health information (collectively defined as “protected health information”) and applies to health plans, health care clearinghouses, and those health care providers that conduct certain health care transactions electronically.
So … medical information is only protected if handled by medical professionals. If the abusive mega-corporation owned by a psycho billionaire wants to do whatever the fuck they want with it, good luck.
The gist of HIPAA is that the patient decides who knows their health status. If they want to announce every rash and sniffle on Meta and thus to every advertiser and government agent in existence, HIPAA won’t stop them.
Doctors are allowed to broadcast their own, personal health issues all over social media, but not anyone else’s.
HIPPA is a law that governs how people and companies within the healthcare system in the US are allowed (and required) to handle, protect, and share data. It was definitely needed, and rectified a lot of bad practices - health care providers were really very sloppy and cavalier about handling data - but even with that limited scope, it’s very complicated.
It doesn’t cover anybody else. Yes, health information SHOULD absolutely be protected more stringently so that OTHER major players can’t abuse your privacy, but that wasn’t the focus of HIPPA.
@Arotrios Why would I want an inferior version of mastadon? But seriously I will likely only end up with one if they auto generate it. (a few family use ig and fb as their only communication so it's checked occasionally via web with adblockers etc....ugh).
You know, that every post or comment you make on lemmy/kbin can be sent to every federated instance and stored (collected) there? And those comments/posts may contain any of the information from the list, especially when aggregated from different sources and with all the basic meta-data available.
A company as big as meta needs to explicitly state that or they will have serious legal problems.
Of course, we know that Meta will want to abuse that data to monetize as much of it as possible and they have means to do so. On the other hand rogue federated instances could also abuse our data. That is the cost of being open. Company providing closed service can better protect our privacy, but we cannot trust them to do so (especially when the make money by processing and selling data).
I think those problems cannot be solved by technology – open or proprietary, but need to be solved by regulations and law enforcement. And at the same time the regulations should not block all data sharing, as then fediverse could not exist (now I wonder if lemmy/kbin can even be 'legal' according to GDPR, but IANAL). Tough problem.
Ok and how is this worse than what Facebook already does? Or TikTok? Or Instagram?
You list all these things as if this new platform is going to be the first and only thing to harvest all your personal data. Like it’s shocking and new and so much worse
How is it worse? It’s the same bullshit. If you already have Facebook, and most do unfortunately, they are already doing that. And I would bet TikTok takes this much and more and has worse actors.
@bathrobe I don't know about tiktok, but I think that it is the same data that Facebook collects. And the worst is what we have at the end, "Other Data". That means, each moment Meta can decide to collect yet more things without to inform the user.
I am not condoning it happening here. I’m saying it’s really bad that they can see your DMs. And people are trying to brush it off as if it’s no big deal
It’s a HUGE fucking deal. And it’s not acceptable in the slightest. There is a reason I don’t have TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram accounts and have never downloaded the apps. And it’s not because I’m super cool with this stuff.
@snooggums i guess i was the only one that read OP that way. I was trying to say that it's more of the same, that it isn't novel or new, and we shouldn't be surprised. my impression was OP was saying "look at how crazy this is" as in "no one has ever done this before!"
The OP is trying to make it seem that it’s new and shocking when it clearly is the same shit almost all the other social media apps do. Try reading better or understanding context.
Fucking idiots all over the internet think that once you say one critical thing you’re immediately the enemy. Fucking grow up, kid. Why the fuck do you think I’m here?
It's worse because a large portion of people here are the people who don't use Facebook/instagram/tiktok. So while this isn't a new extreme in terms of privacy breaches, it is a new level in terms of what's potentially affecting us directly.
It's worth nothing because it's trying to come here, hungry, grasping, looking to wriggle its tentacles into our federated spaces and suck as much content and data and joy out of us as possible. This is a coordinated corporate effort, with the backing of millions of dollars, to bring centralized control to federated spaces. Their play is that once those spaces become reliant on the traffic that Facebook brings, they'll acquiesce to the weight of the corporate presence, particularly when it comes to developing new features or engaging data security.
Big tech companies do this all the time with promising new open source projects, gaining control of them in the growth phase through their support and audience, and then throwing their weight around once their presence becomes a necessity. Plus, its very likely that the federated nature of instances means that if you post content on your instance of choice, it will end up on Facebook if federated with them. Right now, if you want to avoid the Zuckening, you can do so by not having Facebook, Insta, Tinder, or any of the services that motherzucker runs. If #threads becomes a thing the Fediverse relies on, you can bet your bottom dollar it will zuck the life out of the place if it can't directly control it.
Absolutely. I completely agree. I have Facebook because I have friends and family that basically require I use that to contact them. Never downloaded messager or any other thing. Not that they don’t have everything from Facebook anyway.
But the person I was responding to wasn’t making the point that everything Zuck touches turns to shit and a money grab that torches user experience. Or that they are trying to stop any potential competitor or subsume them.
They’re saying “look at all this data it’s going to harvest!!! Isn’t that INSANE?!?” When it’s literally the same almost every social media app on your phone does/has. There are a ton of arguments against anything zuck touches. Pretending the data harvesting is going to be new or groundbreaking is dishonest. Especially when, as I said, I would bet tiktok does all that and more. And it goes to a much worse actor.
They’re saying “look at all this data it’s going to harvest!!! Isn’t that INSANE?!?” When it’s literally the same almost every social media app on your phone does/has.
Just stopping by to point out that these are in no way mutually exclusive. Just because existing social media collects an insane amount of data, doesn't mean the amount of data being collected by threads isn't also insane.
Again the whole point of my comment is to express how UNORIGINAL it is what threads is doing
It’s terrible. I want no part of it. But we shouldn’t treat it as a brand new slew of invasions when it is most certainly the same invasions most people happily take.
But OP should make it seem like threads is going to be the first and only app that harvests that much, varied data. That’s dishonest.
I never got the impression that this was new or different from the comment OP, just that the level of data gathered was insane/over broad. Which I think we can all agree is the case.
Also, nothing in their post was incorrect, it's a stalkers wet dream, have wild potential for government abuse, and people within the org would abuse it - both things that we know are factually accurate given the shit that's gone down over the decades.
ALSO also, just because the current apps gather an insane amount of data doesn't mean the public is aware of the Faustian bargain they've agreed to. With new products/platforms being created, it's best to point out to everyone just how much they're giving up to join. I know I was one of those who had a Facebook for a while and bailed once I found out just how bad it was.
i think we can all agree with everything you said there.
I definitely got the impression from OP that you did not, but I am more than happy to admit I am not perfect, and I can take wrong meanings from things with the best of them.
cause i think we are all saying the same thing - this is fucking horrible, and no one should use any app of platform that harvests data from you this way. I just wanted to make it clear that this level of harvesting is not new. it's not, like, going beyond a new threshold. this is what everyone signs up for when they get tiktok or facebook or even messenger.
we should be angry but not act shocked. you know what i mean?
no definitely not installing it or opening an account.
I’m not against federation tho, I’d be in favour of showing people you can get all the same content through another channel. defederating means that people will have to use it if there’s content from someone they like on there. I don’t want to give people a reason to install that shit.
Only issue with federating is allowing Meta/Facebook to create shadow profiles for everyone posting on other ActivityPub services. Currently, the fediverse is free real estate for data collectors.
I hope that there would be alternative servers/apps for federating with the main server, then it may worth a try. However I doubt that Meta would make it that easy.
It doesn't have to come to EU to get this data though, all it has to do is start federating. I'm really curious how is that all going to work out, legally speaking.
Not totally true, the real value is combining data from different sources, but since the data they get wont have your email /ip/device/contacts etc it will be a lot harder to harvest usefully for advertising. Maybe they will figure out things to use it, but what they can use is already quite public, so they don’t really need to federatie for that
I’m on Instagram and have a bunch of followers, around 200K.
SO - My plan is to squat as the IG users pick up Threads. Most people will just follow the same people from IG (Meta encourages it and it fills your feed fast).
My follower count on Threads should grow just from that alone, right?
THEN - Facebook finally federates, right?
THEN! Facebook allows for account migration to Mastodon.
First… I migrate my @renwillis account to Threads.
Finally… Immediately migrate all my followers from Threads back to mstdn.social.
Suddenly potentially 200K are following a Mastodon account!!! MWUH-HAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!
Unless you are making money from sponsorships due to the high number of followers or your life depends on entertainment im curious to ask why would you feel so dependent of the number of followers? :0
Unless you are making money from sponsorships due to the high number of followers or your life depends on entertainment im curious to ask why would you feel so dependent of the number of followers? :0
I would wait with your master plan, until you know that Meta allows you to move your account to Mastodon. Oh yeah, and you should use a burner phone without any personal data (medical history, contacts, location, financial information, whatever “sensitive information” is, etc.) when you install the app.
I’m interested to see how Threads connects with other social media platforms (like Mastodon), but I’m not using an app with such an invasive privacy policy.
I dunno if I'd use the app itself, but I am hopeful it gets traction among "normal" people because I miss following my friends on Mastodon. Threads seems to be the best way to get average non-techy people to accept the fediverse.
Now, I don't trust Meta at all. But I hope I can at least follow my friends' Threads from Mastodon or here on Kbin.
Not until they add some basic features and we get some answers on the data collection.
It doesn’t even offer a reverse chronological list of posts with only people you follow. That is basic, day 1 level functionality for me.
I don’t think I’ll use it in any serious way. I left Facebook years ago now. I have an Instagram but never use it. I’m just not a user of Meta’s products. But I’ll reserve my handle and if Twitter itself finally craps the bed at least I’ll have one more off ramp.
I think I’m a bit of an outlier here, because I tried it (I already had an IG account) - but the bombardment of influencer-types, big-name brands, and having zero-control over my feed gave me more than enough reasons to leave for good.
I said I would never join facebook. Or msn messenger. Or Discord. Or Twitch. Or Twitter. But then everyone and their grandmas started using them. And despite knowing already back then they would use me as the product, I hesitantly joined.
So if they manage to release an EU-legal version, and everyone-ish joins, and mastodon becomes barren, I might join. Again. Its not like they dont know everything about me already.
The cynic in me have realized most people jumps on whatever is advertised to them and is cheap, and call anything that isnt advertised enough or too expensive for “difficult” or “looks stupid”. Those who claims ads doesn’t work on them are extra prone to jump on anything commercial while downtalking better and free’er options. So we can’t win this way.
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