Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse
wedistribute.org
external-link
Threads, Meta's new microblogging platform, is updating its terms to focus on data collection from "Third Party Users".
wrath-sedan
link
fedilink
241Y

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?

Dangdoggo
link
fedilink
111Y

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.

wrath-sedan
link
fedilink
61Y

Thanks, this was the impression I got as well. It doesn’t make anything public that wasn’t already public, it just makes it easier and more likely for Meta to ingest the data more directly.

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 2.97K Posts
  • 74.6K Comments
  • Modlog