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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Technology
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How is it a win for me if I specifically signed up for a fediverse account to get away from data-hoarding, money-driven corporations like Facebook? I don't want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments. I think you're missing the point about who this company is and the extent to which it is willing to go to get people's data.
Fucking thank you. Are people really this gullible? Maybe I have a different perspective because I've been free from Facebook for like 15 years now, but do these people really think that Meta/Facebook wants to be nice to its competitors? Suddenly they're going to give up the business model that has made them one of the biggest, most profitable corporations that has ever existed on this planet, and do the exact opposite of what they did to get there? LOL.
I'm honestly questioning if TheYang is reading our comments or if they are just spewing the same talking points regardless of the arguments presented to them. It's baffling to see people so willing to embrace a corporation that has done nothing but exploit its users and their privacy.
I hate to break it to you, but the very nature of the fediverse (as a distributed network where posts and account information automatically get distributed to hundreds if not thousands of independent servers you may or may not be aware of, that do not necessarily have to honour your deletion requests) means that it would be absolutely trivial for either Facebook or any other random bad actor you could think of to have access to all of that, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
This is an example I've given a few times, but if Meta were really just wanting to suck down data for the evulz (why they would do this I have absolutely no idea because it's not like they could use that data for anything), they don't need to start an instance amid a blaze of publicity. They could just go on Mastodon.social, sign up for a no-name account, grab an API key and suck down the contents of the fediverse in real time and that's the end of it. The fediverse is not private and its very nature means that control over one's own data is not quite as secure as ActivityPub advocates would like to pretend.
But that wasn't my point. It's not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it's that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.
We have different definitions for privacy. Since I'm active here, it should be clear that to me private doesn't mean hidden. I like how the EFF put it, in their article on the Fediverse:
Your posts and comments are public. Everyone, including Meta, already has access to them.
That's not the problem. The problem is that Meta will control and ultimately destroy the Fediverse.