What a non-story. The username, profile picture, posts from profile, and post interactions are all required for displaying the content that the Thread’s user has subscribed to. The IP address is required for connecting to the service to retrieve that content. Facebook doesn’t get any more access to your data than necessary nor do they get any more access to your data than anybody else. This is just fear mongering.
What a non-story.
Lemmy project set wild unrealistic expectations on GItHub project: 1) "high performance’, maybe the Rust code but PostgreSQL logic is the ORM madness. 2) “full erase” while sending all your public comments and posts to ActivePub without agreement on concept of delete.
But remember, they intend to monetize this information by building it into your ad profile.
On an individual (“you”) level, the data mining is only a tiny bit concerning. Sure, Meta will hoard any sort of data that you share with the Fediverse, and then share it with its “business partners”, so everyone can profile you, and then fly on circles around you, like vultures, with targetted advertisement. However:
- The amount of data that Meta can harvest from you this way is fairly limited. Because unlike in Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, they have no way to force you to yield more info about you than what you’re comfortable with.
- This info is already publicly available, and Meta can already profile you, with or without Threads. And regardless of being in the Fediverse or elsewhere, you should be conscious on what you’re sharing.
Even then, I like Macgirvin’s take on the matter, on a collective (“the Fediverse”) level. It’s basically telling Meta “people here ara quite hostile against data vulturing, you won’t get much out of it”. It helps quite a bit against the actual threat - that Meta might try to Embrace, Extend and Extinguish the Fediverse.
Remember to block metas ip ranges and not just defederate. Make data scraping as hard as possible for these weirdos
Then all they need to do is spin up an instance of mastodon on any random VPS and scrape away if they really want to get the data.
But the 1,000,000 odd mastodon users would pale to their user base
I said this in a different post’s comments about Facebook scraping data:
Can activity pub change it’s terms to say that all crawlers that use this must be gnu open sources and all information crawled must be open to the public on gnu open sources software (no crawling to a private enterprise)?
My understanding is all the big tech companies are scared of what happened with router software (openwrt) and they don’t want to be forced to let competition be a foss community via gnu licensing.
I share your sentiment, but personally I don’t like the GPL’s Borg-like assimilation of anything it touches.
How about "every crawler using the API must provide the same API free of charge for "?
Meta has no problems providing API access free of charge, since their income comes from other sources.
I have also thought this is a good idea. I think that the ActivityPub standard should have a required field that lists a copyright license. Then a copyleft style copyright should be created that allows storing and indexing for distribution via open-source standards, and disallows using for AI training and data scraping. If every single post has a copyleft license then it would be risky for bigtech to repurpose it because if a whistleblower called them out that could be a huge class action suit.
A good question is if a single post can be copyrighted. I think it could. Perhaps you would consider each post like a collaborative work of art. People keep adding to it, and at the end of the day the whole chain could function as a “work”. Especially since there is a lot of useful value and knowledge in some post threads.
If that worked, we could have easily prevented AI companies from vacuuming up data from personal websites and separately hosted git repos. We could put a condition that if they train their models using our data, then the model and its weights would automatically be under the same license as our content. Of course, those psychopaths are going to use their money to defeat such arguments in court.
