this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Kinda sucks because now you really have no control over who gets your data. No need to scrape pages or embed trackers when the fediverse just broadcasts your activity to anyone.
Even if your instance defederates from threads, doesn’t mean they defederated from yours, so anything you do is fair game for Meta’s data collection. That’s at least as I understand it.
You are posting publicly online. It's all scrapeable.
Yes, but I doubt Meta scrapes Reddit or Lemmy, for instance. With this change we’ll just be delivering it to them on a platter. And, knowing Meta, they’ll find ways to use the data.
Even if Meta doesn't do it themselves there are likely hundreds of companies that do, and Meta can pay them for the data they want.
If it's visible, you're best assuming that Meta, Google, Amazon, the CIA, everyone, has a copy of it and are linking it all together behind the scenes.
At least this way they don't get your IP address or linked advertising cookies. Here you're just a username and whatever you post. Unless you browse and post directly on threads that is. Those guys get all their milkshake drunk.
Why do you doubt that?
If it's on the darkweb or deepweb then MAYBE they are not, but the reason the rest of the web is not considered part of those groups is because Google/Meta/Microsoft/etc scrape it, categorize it, and process it.
If they don't scrape Reddit, it's because scraping Reddit costs money. Because they closed down their free-of-charge APIs, remember? Which they did because people were scraping their data for free.
Scraping Lemmy is free, and most probably will always remain that way.
Welcome to the internet? We've been here the whole time
Then why are you posting publicly on the internet? Anything you post here is fair game.
Also, Meta's data collection is from their own clients so they can target ads to you. This information is basically useless as you aren't on their platform so they cannot take sensitive data and cannot target ads at you
The point isn't to combat data collection.
Fediverse admins have had their first taste of power, and they're clinging to it like most corrupt people would.