this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Privacy Guides

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[–] Steve 45 points 1 year ago

I'm kinda torn here.

On the one hand, this is Meta we're talking about. Fuck'em.

On the other, this is all public info on insecure social media. It can all be scraped by anyone who wants to anyway.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 43 points 1 year ago

TLDR - anything the fetty verse sends via activity pub will be recorded by meta.

[–] AdminWorker@lemmy.ca 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't ActivityPub just an application protocol? To my knowledge there's no ActivityPub inc. licensing the usage of the protocol or anything like that. A web protocol is just a series of guidelines everyone has agreed on following, you can't attach terms and conditions to it.

[–] Laitinlok@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The thing they could do is block the servers of Meta or route to tor for anything sent to meta.

[–] Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com 2 points 1 year ago

Eh, it still wouldn't be "free software" at that point. "Free" also means freedom to send your data to Meta if you want to.

[–] squid@feddit.uk 4 points 1 year ago

This is a good shout

[–] cedarmesa@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)
[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Please read the article. The data in question, besides the IP that I don't see how they can get since it's coming from your instance and not the user directly, is the bare minimum that's required for AP to even work, and it is the same data that every federated instance is already storing and propagating. The author of the article says as much.

Facebook is a shit company but the privacy of this data is not one of the issues with it. As has been said before already, all of this is already very public, very easy to scrape and it is impossible to prevent it, if you want to keep your profile picture, username and comments private then dont upload them to a federated social network... or well, any social or network at all.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 8 points 1 year ago

If somebody else's federated with them and you comment on a discussion hosted by them, then meta will have your post information

[–] nixfreak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

You have to block all thread domains and instances.

[–] scottmeme@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Everyone needs to defed from them

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

Why, because they otherwise would get the same data that every other instance already gets?

This is a big nothingsauce. “Meta gets access to public fediverse data when meta joins fediverse” should be the title.

[–] Mane25@feddit.uk 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

None of that is particularly the thing that worries me - Meta could be crawling Lemmy right now and getting all that information even if they weren't planning on supporting federation, but it's on the public web intentionally to be read, so it's just like anyone else reading it. The only piece of information I'm surprised would get shared is IP address, and without knowing the technical reasons I'm wondering how/why they would get this and if it's something Lemmy could fix in software.

The main thing that worries me is still if the toxic culture of Meta's social networks floods into our communities.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The main thing that worries me is still if the toxic culture of Meta's social networks floods into our communities.

That's exactly why I moved my account to lemmy.ml. lemmy.ml has defederated Threads.

[–] Mane25@feddit.uk 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nothing is federated to Threads, they haven't switched it on yet.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

World intended to allow them to be federated, ML publicly stated that they will defederate them. Given that signups to instances are being restricted, I wanted to be sure I'm on an instance that defederates them. I also like the overall sentiment of publicly giving the finger to Zuck

[–] Mane25@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago

Sure, I wish them nothing but failure, but I'm intending to wait around and see what happens first. From what I've heard Threads isn't going well for them anyway. I still worry that even if there's mass defederation it would still poison the pool, because it would influence the culture of instances that are federated with it and isolate those that aren't.

[–] Resistentialism@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago

Is there any way to see which communities are defederating? I'm really hoping mine are.

Everyone that hasn't defederated them by now should now.

[–] hellfire103@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Would it be possible to blacklist Threads, but also whitelist specific accounts? I don't want any more to do with Meta than I already do, but I'd also like some way of sending questions into The Last Leg.

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

How does Meta/Facebook get access to IP Address information of the user. Is that public in ActivityPub spec?