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Top-level
 "Will Meta be able to show me ads?" What prevents someone from liking or boosting sponsored posts from a generic sugary beverage company and that showing up in your timeline? It is a sad fact but true: people actually "like" and share ads. Even then, what prevents Meta from sending out ads in your friends name the way they do on their own platforms? X like this, so now we show it to you as well! 9 comments
@rra Mastodon.social isn't unblockable because of its size If anything, the opposite. It's so big that it's insufficiently moderated & many servers already limit/suspend federation with it for that reason There's no profit motive to drive servers to fight for eyeballs, no advertisers to serve, and a lot of discourse is based on false assumptions born from cut & pasting corporate, profit driven, commercial goals onto what are largely community & personal projects @rra nah let's just block mastodon.social. What's the point of the fediverse if it's just gonna end up as twitter with different css  @rra Hmm, I'm the person you don't want to tell, "Do whatever you want but you can't do that". Now I wonder how my TLs would look if I just blocked .social (and maybe .art as well) for a month?  @rra well, the Fediverse currently has a few million users. It's still kind of small. Currently you can not follow your friends on Instagram or twitter. If Threads federates and blocks your server, it's still like it is now, isn't it? So we don't loose anything really, or not? I understand your concern, but it could also be the other way around. Currently your friends loose their contacts switching from Instagram to Pixelfed. If Thread federates they can switch to Mastodon without loosing them. @rra I have also described a potential future here: https://norden.social/@duco/110665374817177327 We will see how it will turn out in the future. There are some realistic risks that Threads will damage the Fediverse, but there also chances how it can improve the Fediverse. The Fediverse is decentral, so everyone can decide how they react to it. We can not stop them from implementing the ActivityPub standard anyway. So let's wait and intervene when it turns into the wrong direction.  @rra @thenexusofprivacy one of my biggest "forgot to bookmark" regrets is a thread (I suspect it was on Twitter, so it's probably gone anyway) where someone tried to give an exhaustive overview of all direct and more importantly *indirect* ways that companies can track you. Especially the latter, where they don't even need to directly track you because they essentially can build a you-shaped silhouette through context clues, was a disturbingly deep rabbit hole of hard-to-avoid technologies. |
Gregory's Server
"Will Meta get my data or be able to track me?"
Yes Mastodon servers don't forward your IP to remote parties. However, Meta has several social applications that are widely used including Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and there is a good chance that someone in your household is using those and that this can be used to facilitate that. Meta's tracking famously relied on the decentralized web and webmasters implementing Like-buttons and such to create aggregate profiles and track individuals across the web. The core thing is, you don't have to be on Meta to be tracked.
In addition however, focusing only on IP-address is an intentionally narrow thread model to make it look less bad than it is. A more honest and complete answer to this question would look like this post https://privacy.thenexus.today/fediverse-threat-modeling-privacy-and-meta/ by
@thenexusofprivacy
"Will Meta get my data or be able to track me?"
Yes Mastodon servers don't forward your IP to remote parties. However, Meta has several social applications that are widely used including Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and there is a good chance that someone in your household is using those and that this can be used to facilitate that. Meta's tracking famously relied on the decentralized web and webmasters implementing Like-buttons and such to create aggregate profiles and track individuals across...