• t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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    7 months ago

    ad-free spy-free platforms that give you actual control over what appears in your feed

    You won’t know any of those are ad-free or spy-free (which is not true anyways, fediverse instances are absolutely being scraped), or know you could control those if you left Threads.

    All you’ll know is, "I like this (Beehaw) thing I’m seeing in Threads, so to see more of it, I should use Threads more.

      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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        7 months ago

        Scraping public data is entirely different from collecting your contact history, location history, web browsing traffic, decrypting WhatsApp traffic, etc. etc. and on and on.

        Fediverse instances can also do most of this. They know your IP and email, and the stuff you reveal about yourself. You could de-anonymize many users with those 2 plus the info they share about themselves on here, with a bit of OSINT work. Any fediverse apps could also get access to contacts or other locally-stored info on your phone.

        “But I wouldn’t use that app.” Well then you wouldn’t be someone using Facebook either. People using Facebook would also be the people granting shady fediverse apps undue permissions.

          • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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            7 months ago

            I’m not arguing they’re comparable; I’m the one out of the 2 of us arguing not to have any interaction with Meta apps, including via federation. I’m arguing that you shouldn’t be trying to sell a false sense of anonymity with fediverse instances. You said they’re “spy-free”, not “far less intrusive than Facebook”. The latter is true. The former is not.