So from my understanding, I can block an instance which prevents it from showing in my feed.
However, if the instance I post to (.world) is not blocked on the receiving instance’s end (Meta), they will still get my post (unless defederated)?
If so, doesn’t that open up the idea that Meta will be able to scrape and take ALL the data from ALL the (still federated) instances’ posts that are not blocked by the Meta instance(s)? How can I protect my information from Meta while still being federated, or is that not possible?
They can do it anyway, without threads being in the mix at all. Unfortunately the only way to be sure no corporation can scrape your data is to not be on the internet at all.
Ahh, very true, but aren’t there legal obligations regarding privacy if data is collected via a site vs the public web?
OpenAI is currently being sued because they used everything they could fin to train their AI models. We will see how that works out.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/28/tech/openai-chatgpt-microsoft-data-sued/index.html
Short answer is “no.”
Slightly longer answer is: “all of your public posts on Lemmy or Mastodon or any other federated platform are the Public web. So no, it’s not different.”
If you post something online, it is public and you have to assume someone or even everyone has already scraped and harvested the data.
It has always been like this.
If you come from an incumbent social media platform, perhaps you never got yo experience this lesson for yourself. But that data has also been harvested. They just gave you a bit of illusion of privacy.
The only thing online that is private is E2E encryption directly with a party you trust, and only if you are the only ones with a copy of the keys.
The benefit now is that one company can’t get exclusive access to your public data. It’s open to anyone that wants it.
Removed by mod
Always have been.
Push your local legislation to change the law in favor of consumer data protection and not infinite growing company profits.
Not more or less then they can already do by just using web bots.
…now?
sweet summer child.
They always could? These are public facing platforms. You’re being scraped by far more than just meta.
Yeah, absolutely nothing was preventing them from doing so already, without launching Threads.
Blocking Meta / Threads instances isn’t going to stop them, either.
What scraping can get is very little public information.
There’s a lot of information that servers keep contained such as IP addresses of where you are when you made a post. Other info such as your email address remains contained within your own instance. Meta cannot get at that information. No other Fediverse server can get at that.
This blog from Gargoron (Eugen Rochko) who essentially created ActivityPub that underpin all these Fediverse systems including Mastodon, Calckey, Pixelfed, kbin, Lemmy etc.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
What I wonder is how Lemmy handles this. He is writing about how Mastodon do things, not Lemmy.
If you post something public, people can access it. Corporations can access it. It’s one of the reasons I ditched all my social media that identified me directly. They can scrape my stuff, sure; but they won’t be able to link it to my actual name, face or existence in real life.
