Also remember this is useless without complementary security measures:
- Encrypt the storage on any device where these are installed (including your desktop/laptop drives if you install e.g. the desktop version of Signal).
- Lock your devices with pin or password, and store that pin/password only in your head (there's no such thing as telepathy at this point in time so they can't physically force it out of you, unlike biometric data like your fingerprints).
If you are relying on "Legally they're not allowed to," instead of, "They simply can't, despite all they might try," then you're not doing it right.
Google does not really offer a space where people can come together to create communities or discussion threads. However, with the introduction of Perspectives, it may do so later.
So—despite the dumbass title (article's fault, not OP's)—explicitly not an alternative to Reddit, where literally the whole point is to create communities and discussion threads.
All right. Well, let me rephrase: it's not a meaningful excuse which we should buy as justification for gross undermining of our privacy and our trust in organizations which allegedly exist to help us when we are in crisis.
Based on my experience in many privacy roles covering US, EU, UK and other countries, the sale of a company will likely be covered in Google's privacy notice and is not considered a sale of personal data considering customer's personal data will immediately be covered by the purchasing company's privacy notice.
Funny, because if I decided to go into business with Google by renting a service from them, that honestly shouldn't mean that I automatically decided to go into business with some other corporation at Google's whim.
But hey, capitalism really cares about personal autonomy. It's not like it just exploits our labor and treats us like commodities or anything. /s
I appreciate that the only JS scripts Beehaw seems to load are from beehaw.org. Usually NoScript shows like two full pages of domains, and (at least—you know, the obvious ones like xyzads4you.com) half of them are for ads and "analytics".
Out of 33 of these crisis center websites they looked at:
In follow-up tests, four organizations appeared to have completely removed the code. The majority of the centers we contacted did not respond to requests for comment.
Ignorance may have been an excuse prior to this investigation, but it's not an excuse now.
It's hilarious for Meta to invite some person who happens to run a server to an "off the record" conversation with "confidential details that should not be shared with others" anyway. LOL.
The only "confidential" information that's likely to be involved in such an exchange would be some kind of bribe for the person to shut down or assimilate their infrastructure with Meta's. It's not like they're going to reveal Meta's trade secrets to someone they believe to essentially be a competitor or anything.
Anyone who uses that platform is an absolute fucking zucker.
I'm more concerned with how the lettuce felt about it, TBH.
...and then a couple years down the line when people have come to depend on it and the code base has become simpler due to the platform capabilities that their hosting provides (nobody is self-hosting anymore anyway, because Meta hosting is so simple, easy, and cheap/free), they'll start exercising more control anyway. "Come into compliance with our corporate terms of service and Community Server Guidelines™ or you'll lose our hosting. Oh shit, there's nowhere else for you to go for hosting anymore? Gosh, gee, shucks! What a shame."
I agree with the first part. I completely fail to see how the analogy at the end applies. Capitalists and their corporations lobby the government to pass legislation that directly fucks the economy to make it worse for working-class people who use it (and, in fact, depend on it for their basic survival). So it's much, much more like Reddit where people have to use the one corporate system that exploits and oppresses them than like someone developing a piece of FOSS software that other people can use independently. In fact, if you try to build a separate economy, the state's violent enforcers (police and/or military, depending on the context) will come in and abuse and murder you and tear apart your independent economy and force people back into the fold.