Privacy

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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.

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Meta gave Netflix and Spotify access to users private messages (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

52 comments fedilink hide all child comments

in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

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[–] null 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

What private info does Meta get through federation with other instances?

I suppose any DMs sent to Threads users?

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

My point here is not overtly about Privacy. It's about recognizing that Meta has been a terrible corporate citizen for their entire existence. We shouldn't be pretending they are some friendly geeky company that just wants to participate like the rest of us. Even if they were, that's not possible when you are going to pour hundreds of millions of users into these fediverse spaces all at once.

They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.

[–] leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's an excellent point that I don't see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.

The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.

If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that's still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.

[–] Syn_Attck@lemmy.today 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Let's not forget how similar Facebook is to a CIA program that ended from public scrutiny only a few years prior, and how much involvement Facebook now has with US Government entities.

If the CIA wanted to kill

1.) Budding decentralization concepts and

2.) Cause overload to the system while Facebook retains ultimate control once everyone gives up or only a few small instances are left

This is how it would be done.

[–] Liz@midwest.social 1 points 5 months ago

Yes, although I think DMs are still visible to the instance administrator. I'm not sure if there's a plan or what the timeline is for actually encrypting that information.