in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

    • null@slrpnk.net
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      7 months ago

      What private info does Meta get through federation with other instances?

      I suppose any DMs sent to Threads users?

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        My point here is not overtly about Privacy. It’s about recognizing that Meta has been a terrible corporate citizen for their entire existence. We shouldn’t be pretending they are some friendly geeky company that just wants to participate like the rest of us. Even if they were, that’s not possible when you are going to pour hundreds of millions of users into these fediverse spaces all at once.

        They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.

        • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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          7 months ago

          That’s an excellent point that I don’t see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.

          The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.

          If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that’s still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.

      • Liz@midwest.social
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        7 months ago

        Yes, although I think DMs are still visible to the instance administrator. I’m not sure if there’s a plan or what the timeline is for actually encrypting that information.