Has anybody considered the idea that boosts from non-Meta properties to Threads could legally be used to build ad profiles? We already know they do that sort of account association with non-fedi accounts.
EDIT: Looks like that’s absolutely the plan. From the privacy policy
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
EDIT 2: After doing a little more thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that the general narrative about Threads plan to steal users from similar federated services ignore the fact that it’s certainly cheaper to let the volunteers of the fediverse take on the moderation costs while they monetize the data. Though the two certainly are not mutually exclusive.
I fear that many people are not aware just how public everything in the fediverse is. Everything you post, every comment, every upvote, boost, favorite, like or other interaction is broadcasted to every instance where there is at least on subscriber/follower. Nothing in the fediverse is private. There is no real way to protect from this. You don’t even need a real instance for that. You could write a software that subscribes to everything and just takes the data. The fediverse is as public as it can be. It’s like standing on a market place and screaming out your thoughts. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing it down. And that is by design.
And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It is not really different from all the commercial platforms. They just take the data without you knowing it. Here you are very aware that you don’t control anything that you do in public.
The solution is to act accordingly. Use cryptic usernames and don’t post anything that can be traced back to you. Be aware that you are in a public space.
Just because it’s public does not mean they have the rights to sell it. Some over on Mastodon seem to think they likely would lose if it ever went to court (definite illegal in the EU but Threads is delaying launch there) but until then they plan to monetize your interactions.
If the fate of your posts is the concern, threads and whether or not it is federated with your server doesn’t matter. It never mattered
Anyone, anywhere on earth (including meta) can gather your public statements and do with them as they please. Legal or not, it’s a big world and the law doesn’t cross borders as easily as information does.
They don’t need threads to harvest and sell something you have posted online freely.
They don’t need threads to gather enough data to start associating your user name with a real name. Especially if you have an account on one of their services.
Just because data can be accessed that doesn’t mean it is legal to collect and process it.
Maybe it is useful to differentiate between what is legal and what is possible. And even if it not legal it is easy to harvest data from the fediverse. It doesn’t have to be meta. It could be a state government. It is public and everyone should act as if the data is already harvested.
Sure. I just think we shouldn’t turn this observation on its head to give the impression it’s somehow OK to break data protection laws just because there is no technical prevention.
That’s actually how some people think. Wasn’t sure if you were one of them.
If someone has a case it is a good idea to apply the laws. But you first have to find you that laws have been broken and by whom.