Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse
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Threads, Meta's new microblogging platform, is updating its terms to focus on data collection from "Third Party Users".

Any Admin worth their salt is going to defederate anyways.

This will be the next shit storm when Lemmy.world doesn’t defederate with Threads and people get surprised. :)

This will be the next shit storm when Lemmy.world doesn’t defederate with Threads and people get surprised. :)

I wonder if those people use a mail provider that does not block GMail.

I imagine Threads is gonna defederate from a lot of instances on their own. Any instance based around NSFW content or which even allows discussion of piracy will be blocked pre-emptively.

Jay
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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?

db0
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They would would have to scrape through a custom means like a web crawler. If you’re defederated from them, content your instances won’t be sent to them via other instances.

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.

Jay
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Oh I’m sure they do but depending on what they’re collecting it’s a legally grey area, while this is pretty much giving them permission to do it. And I for one have no intentions of making it any easier for them to make money off me.

MentalEdge
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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.

Em Adespoton
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Yup; you’ll have to start watching where you post and only post on servers that don’t federate with Meta.

Jay
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They way it’s worded even upvoting/downvoting something would do it… you’re still interacting with it.

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.

gabe [he/him]
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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.

Shazbot
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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.

Or CSAM. Didn’t that just happen?

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