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Thomas RicouardFor people afraid that Threads will "steal" your data / exploit it? Do you know that posting public posts, on a non private instance allow anyone to do so? Literally anyone can retrieve all your public posts and do whatever with them. Meta could do the same, and they don't need Threads for that. I really don't get the point.
Andrea Grandi 🦕@dimillian I can understand users, not knowing about this stuff. But I often hear lot of bs stuff from Mastodon admins and I wonder how can they manage an instance or keep their users data safe 😓
@andreagrandi I would not trust a smallish instance TBH.
Mathijs Booden@dimillian All posts on Mastodon are public, right? Even 'direct messages'.
@Mathijs Definitely not. Private mentions are private to your account, meaning you need to have an access token for your account in order to be them. When I say public is accessible without any login (like a private browsing window). Some instance don't allow public browsing (without an account on the instance). You could also post to followers only.
Mike@dimillian @Mathijs I found this blog post helpful for understanding the server side controls available for restricting access: https://hub.sunny.garden/2023/06/28/what-does-authorized_fetch-actually-do/
Knowing what you can enable to prevent anonymous access makes it clear just how public the defaults really are.
Joanne Stocker-Kelly@dimillian I don't care about my public posts, but the data the app wants isn't publicly available https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jul/05/meta-delays-eu-launch-of-twitter-rival-threads-amid-uncertainty-over-personal-data-use
Anders Puck Nielsen@joannekelly I think the concern @dimillian is referring to is a fear that Meta can suddenly harvest all kinds of data from your Mastodon account. This is a question I've seen a lot.
@anderspuck @dimillian Really? How would that work?
Loukas (They/Them) 🏳️⚧️@joannekelly @anderspuck @dimillian Threads can't steal data unless you're on Threads, so this isn't a Mastodon-Threads-federation question, it's just about your individual choice of social media.
@Loukas @joannekelly @dimillian Agree, it is a non-problem. But many people seem genuinely concerned that Meta will use Threads to get access to previously closed data in the Fediverse.
@anderspuck @joannekelly @dimillian I was concerned but then I interrogated the concern and found nothing there.
@anderspuck @Loukas @dimillian If that were possible, wouldn't any app or social network be able to do the same?
Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺@joannekelly As long as you don't use the app you should have no issue. Let grandmas and whoever else doesn't care about this and let's take advantage to bring everyone over!
@joannekelly @dimillian not really keen to defend Meta or anything, but two very reasonable things could be going on:
1) Meta need time to build the infra and tooling for GDPR compliance. Having the tools and process for forget-me requests, and having the infrastructure in place and tested to support data sovereignty is not an intractable problem but it takes time.
2) per the article there’s new legislation that restricts the sharing of data between platforms, and Meta need clarification on how that affects Threads which shares a lot of services with Instagram (identity being the key one here). Having been in debates around what counts as data in scope for GDPR before, I know stuff like this isn’t cut and dry and it takes time to sort out.
I do think Meta wants to grab all your data, I just don’t think delaying the EU launch is because the EU has legislation that will prevent that. It does have some pro-consumer legislation that means Meta has to work a bit harder to do it though.
Mike@joannekelly @dimillian fwiw, the things #threads claims to collect are all things that it *may* want to collect at some point. It would still have to contend with fine-grained access control that iOS (and I believe Android) has these days. Unless you explicitly grant threads the ability to see your health data or your location or w/e, it shouldn’t be allowed to. Thanks to modern mobile OS sandboxing and permissioning models!
@joannekelly @dimillian That said, Facebook has a history of doing fancy things to bypass these restrictions so stay weary.
@sass @dimillian Thanks for that explanation. I do like how iOS puts me a bit more in control of my data.
Chon Torres@dimillian I'm resigned to the fact that I'll need to block people who I know in real life, yet again on yet another platform. It is exhausting, but I will survive!
@chontorres I don't get that. What the problem if they're talking to you using Threads and you're talking to them using Mastodon apps?
@dimillian Right. There is no problem! Maybe that's some of the resistance, is that it is easy to mixup how all of this works.
Serhii Pryimachuk@dimillian As a former digital marketer, I can tell you: we have little power with this data. Some Illuminati might squeeze more out of it, but that’s another story.
D.B. Galeli 🔱 
Isn’t this just a version of the No true Scotsman fallacy wrapped in the mister gotcha meme?
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
People are allowed to be inconsistent and pick their battles while they weigh their principles against practicality
To pretend otherwise, is to accept that only people that live entirely off the grid are entitled to voice privacy concerns
People feel that we’re at a crossroads and that voicing their opinion might sway things
@dimillian
For some there is no difference and if they’d learn that Meta is already doing this they’d be equally outraged, making an accommodation by instances even more outrageous
I’ve seen hardcore privacy fanatics defend #Meta because they’d rather a company processes their data than a Mastodon instance because the former can be sued, how’s that for inconsistency
To say nothing about the false equivalency between access to public posts and a $700B+ corporation being able to correlate data
Personally I’ve got my principles, but by the looks of it, I might have to relent and become an unwilling participant of Threads given how many in my social graph already made the move, similar to how I was an unwilling participant of Twitter
Others will be willing participants because it might be the 1:1 Twitter replacement they’ve been looking for
The Savvy Millennial™ 
@dimillian I think that 99% of the time, the password protection on Word files is used solely to allow a user to feel like they have secrets worth stealing
surely it’s just a coincidence that I’m posting this as a response here
Pomegranate County Irregulars@dimillian I’m likely to pass on Threads; I’m not seeing a benefit to me.
But, as to your question, I think the concern on privacy is about the app and what it’s gathering when it isn’t busy with its nominal function. A secondary concern is that after an initial phase, the algorithm that controls viewability will be tweaked to favor Meta’s commercial purposes. A tertiary concern is, yes, public is public, but Meta’s info selling business is in overdrive.
Arthur 🍋@dimillian My data isn’t worth stealing so I’m not worried about it 😂