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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Technology
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To be honest I don’t understand why people fixate on privacy in social media. The entire point is to accomplish the opposite of privacy. If you want privacy, don’t post personal stuff on the Internet, especially to sites explicitly intended to share it.
Well, more to the point they don't want their identities sold. They don't want to be a product for some corporation. When you are on a decentralized platform and somewhat anonymous, it is actually a greater degree of privacy.
Lemmy is definitely better.
But my point was if you don’t want to be a product for a corporation… don’t do that. Willingly productizing yourself and your engagement with social media, and then saying “what about my privacy,” seems entirely un-self-aware.
I think people don't always realize what they are sharing though. If an app tracks your location it means it also tracks what places you like to shop, what type of food you like, what doctor you go to and where you work. Now maybe this type of information isn't being used at the moment but toss all that Big Data into some ML and you can easily be targeted by other companies for a whole mess of things. Wait til health insurance companies buy that data off of Meta. Your rates could go up because they assume your lifestyle from your movements.
That's great in theory, but not everyone (like children and the non-technical) will understand the full implications of what sharing too much information can result in (like identity theft, targeted harassment, stalking, misinformation campaigns, etc). Stopping companies from putting people in a dangerous position is plenty reasonable, and is not some sort of abdication of peoples' personal agency (to be harmed?).
"I should have the right to have my information be n-times-resold to some shady third-party company where it will eventually result in fake student loans being taken out in my name!" - no one, ever.
No one chooses to "productize"/ commodify themselves for the benefit of Meta (as opposed to when people do so for their own benefit, e.g. streamers), but people have been forced to accept being commodified by large companies as a prerequisite to accessing online social spaces, and that's bad.
Then don't post your identity online.
Everything I post here is public. All of my information is public, whether there's some flag to say that the info is private or not. It's still public to the admins that run the server, and I don't trust them any more than I trust some rando Internet person scraping data.
Everybody seems to forget this, and pretend that large corpos are somehow obligated to protect your privacy.
But they're collecting more than just what you post. Have you seen the permissions they requested. Do you really want them to be able to track your location at all times? Or to access your phone's health information so they can sell that to advertisers and others?