Threads collects so much sensitive information it’s a ‘hacker’s dream,’ experts say
Threads collects so much sensitive information it’s a ‘hacker’s dream,’ experts say
The specificity and quantity of information the text and multimedia platform can access poses a risk to most users, if it falls into the wrong hands or is used to target them, tech experts agree.
“This is a hacker’s dream,” said Claudette McGowan, a longtime banking executive who founded Protexxa, a Toronto-based platform that uses artificial intelligence to rapidly identify and resolve cyber issues for employees.
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And yet some want to hear meta out before deciding whether to federate or defederate from them.
All of the data Meta could gather by federating is available to anyone who sets up their own server. The hacker would just need to know how to use docker. What's scary is the extra information Threads users give away by being on threads.
and that alone is worth not supporting such a gross company via never federating with them
It's not lurking I care about. I don't want to be interacting with them at all or providing any sort of comments for them to respond to. You know... Same reason people deleted their content from reddit so it doesn't provide future engagement to the platform through comment responses, upvotes/downvotes, and search engine results.
And I have way less issue with Reddit and chose to delete stuff to remove interactable content on their platform. And I actually do like reddit compared to Facebook, and still chose to burn bridges that way. So I think it's no surprise why I don't want federation with them. If they want to lurk and scrape public data that's fine. I don't want to be a contributor to Meta though more directly than I have to.
Yeah, that's fair enough. I just wanted to point out it's not our data that will be in jeopardy any more than it is right.
I never have an expectation of privacy when it comes to content posted on any public platform.
It's being part of the audience that engages and provides content that leads to feedback loop to stay in the Meta platform I'm so completely against. If people want to do a direct link to unfederated instances on Meta I'm fully for that to encourage people to make a non Meta account and maybe move towards joining those instances.
But, being actually part of the same interacting group that is choosing to feed into the value of Meta. No thanks.
that extra information is among other things:
The privacy policy Threads has embedded in Apple’s app store shows it may collect, and link to your identity, data including your health and fitness, financial, browsing history, location and contact information, along with the broad category of “sensitive information.”
I'm not sure what defederating from them solves in regards to this topic. If they wanted Lemmy, Kbin, & Mastodon's data, they could always just set up another instance with a different domain name and not publicly announce what that domain name is, and we would have no idea who to defederate from. Or they could just scrape the data from the web page, no federation needed.
I don't want to see their content, which is a valid reason to defederate (or block, if that were possible at the user level) imo. But defederating because we want to stop them from getting our data is not even slightly effective, so I think it makes an unconvincing argument.
It’s not lurking I care about. I don’t want to be interacting with them at all or providing any sort of comments for them to respond to. You know… Same reason people deleted their content from reddit so it doesn’t provide future engagement to the platform through comment responses, upvotes/downvotes, and search engine results.
And I have way less issue with Reddit and chose to delete stuff to remove interactable content on their platform. And I actually do like reddit compared to Facebook, and still chose to burn bridges that way. So I think it’s no surprise why I don’t want federation with them. If they want to lurk and scrape public data that’s fine. I don’t want to be a contributor to Meta though more directly than I have to.
You know how people keep talking about the Nazi Bar? Now say, you've been keeping your bar Nazi free for a while, and then, a massive venue opens up across the street that is way more inclined to cater to Nazis because they're huge and don't dedicate the resources in dealing with them. They reach out to all the bars in the area to and want to partner up by offering venue attendees one free drink at your bar. You can take that offer, and your volume of bar patrons goes way up even on slow days, but it will ruin the vibe for your regulars and you'll have to accept that it'll be a lot harder to keep Nazis out of your bar.
What does that have to do with the security of our data? I already said I didn't want them here and would all for defederating. I'm specifically talking about defederating to stop them from collecting our data.
They get much more data if you interact with them constantly than one profile of you from some point in the past that likely changed. And they want your participation to sell you shit, and control political discourse. They use your data for those purposes, and your participation is your data.
Serious question:
How much data does the ActivityPub protocol give out if it was to be federated and I was to, for example, reply to somebody on a Threads post using this account?
Or is the objection more that we don't want 99% of the Fediverse to be hosted on Threads?
I never have an expectation of privacy when it comes to content posted on any public platform.
It’s being part of the audience that engages and provides content that leads to the feedback loop to stay in the Meta platform I’m so completely against. Same reason people deleted their content from reddit so it doesn’t provide future direct engagement to the platform through comment responses, upvotes/downvotes, and search engine results. If people want to post a link or copy paste comments to Meta I’m fine with that. Meta users are welcomed to lurk or create separate accounts here to use non meta federate instances. Go scrape or set up an instance and get all the content for all I care.
But, being actually part of the same interacting group that is choosing to feed into the value of Meta is not what I want. I didn't come here to be a meta user and whether it's through their instance or indirectly through federation that people can reply to your comments like you did mine is enough to be part of the Meta user base at that point. No thanks. At least back on reddit you know you aren't directly contributing to the Meta platform and only interacting with the reddit user base.
Those are shills and likely getting paid by Meta to come in here and shill. You all really ought to go complain to the admins of the instances allowing it, and move to instances that don't.
I wish I had the money to set up one. I'd do it and ban those scumbags on sight, and defederate with any instance that refused to regulate them.