this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Threads is a company and it needs a legal document to describe how the social media site operates. A website needs to copy and distribute content in order to show content. Federated websites need to copy and distribute content from other federated servers and their own server in order to show content. This is how lemmy.world and blajah.zone can speak as if we are on the same server. Each fediverse should also include a similar privacy policy as it describes how their content is distributed on the internet. Facebook’s privacy policy likely describes how your content may be seen on other facebook products and in facebook apps. These legal documents spell out how systems operate. You assume a similar risk with each site you operate on.
(data, ‘data’,
data, “data”) are all the same term. Let’s use better terms:Facebook is evil for a lot of reasons but their original sin was the 3rd party tracking which, thanks to their assets (images) being put everywhere because site owners wanted better SEO and engagement with facebook users, facebook could send a cookie with a random id that specifes some user as it travels from site to site and then link that random id with the facebook user when that user logs into facebook. This allowed facebook to track its users everywhere on the internet. However, this didn’t allow facebook to identify non-facebook users like it could with facebook users. All facebook would end up with when tracking non-facebook users is information about what a random user viewed on the web - this isn’t great (and can only be stopped if you just block facebook at the router or browser level) but at least that user stayed anonymous. The motivation for this tracking was to push more targeted advertisements to facebook users, where facebook actual stands to earn a profit. There isn’t a lot of profit in just identifying users online if those users stay anonymous… except of course of internet advertising (programmatic advertisements). This is why it’s also important to interact with sites which do not have programmatic advertisements - these are most advertisements now a days, especially if that ad feels targeted specifically to you based on a site you’ve been to. You want to worry about tracking, look into how the programmatic ad industry works - of which facebook is a part but most importantly doesn’t involve federation because that’s something totally separate and something which actually protects against tracking.
Think of federation as a site downloading an image and reserving it to you. Tracking happens in the serving of an asset (image, video, etc), so if you are getting that content from the site you trust won’t track you, then .. you won’t be tracked. A nasty site that wants to track you cannot get your information via the fediverse, since the federated site simply copies and privately redistributes the copy to its users, leaving the nasty site only knowing that “this instance with thousands of users received our content” - not very useful for tracking, advertising or for ad revenue, doesn’t provide any data that would be valueable for data sellers either.
Please stop putting words in my mouth. I am capable of speaking on my own terms. Also, by your perspective, a server that receives and processes email from meta is part of meta’s ecosystem. That statement would be correct if you replace “meta” with “the internet”.
Also, why are we discussing this with Meta when there’s a log bigger threat out there (ABC/Google, search engines and scrapers)? And by “threat” I mean “how the web has always operated”. I feel like writing an application that showed users how easily they could be tracked on the fediverse even if that instance were not federated by any other servers.
Meta is a company whose business model depends on exploiting the data it gathers, and its privacy policies are carefully written to give it as much flexibility as possible. It's true that if you're on an instance that federates with Threads you're assuming that risk. If you compare their language to a policy that's written with a goal of privacy -- like eu.social's the differences are clear.
OK, then, speak for yourself: do you see instances that federeate with Threads as being part of Meta's ecosystem?
That depends on what you mean by “Meta’s ecosystem”. If we consider Meta’s ecosystem to contain only the entities which directly help Meta earn money in exchange for tracking data, then the answer is no, for reasons I have explained.
If you consider “Meta’s ecosystem” to be “ActivityPub federated instances which do not block ActivityPub data from going to Meta” then the answer is yes, but that’s an arbitrary definition. How does meta profit from this? By showing more and different memes to its existing userbase? You could argue that by giving meta more content, the engaged users on meta’s properties will be more engaged and more likely to see an ad served by meta’s property to the user, leading to higher time on site. It’s a weak argument if your concern is being tracked by meta, as ActivityPub doesn’t share tracking information between servers.
I personally define “Meta’s ecosystem” to be meta’s properties and I suppose by extension any site which helps meta do its tracking: any site which shows facebook buttons served directly from facebook, therefor allowing tracking in older browsers. I consider ActivityPub to be a protocol not that far off from RSS or even Email, although RSS is a better comparison as it also happens over HTTP[S]. I define it this way because of my work as a web developer who has also built tracking systems similar to how Facebook’s tracking works, though not as sinister (I used 1st party cookies and pixels, similar to Google Analytics, prior to GA being free years ago). I’ve also worked for some websites that relied on ad views, and learned how programmatic works (tl;dr: each ad you see is an action for your eyeballs based on the data collected by hundreds of other agencies you may not even know of). I’ve also worked for startups where a large part of generating a high valuation for the company involved simply having contact information of hundreds of users as well as some basic information about their preferences. A startup like that would then have data to sell to a broker for programmatic ads.
Ultimately, websites (and instances) require money to stay up. Money comes from volunteers, donations or ad revenue / subscriptions. Programmatic ads can be included inside any website or app, and most importantly, an instance owner could choose to provide tracking data to facebook and other data brokers just to show advertisements, all while choosing to defederate from Meta’s fediverse properties either knowingly or unknowingly. It’s kind of like adding high-security locks on your doors and then leaving your windows open. If the end goal is to provide an instance which respects privacy of its users, that instance needs to choose to show ethical advertising (not programmatic, databroker-based ads which require sending the user’s data with each ad visit). Federating or defederating from meta’s properties won’t send any data to meta’s properties that every instance owner doesn’t already get as a part of ActivityPub federation.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I agree that it depends on whether "Meta's ecosystem" is defined as including "ActivityPub federated instances which do not block ActivityPub data from going to Meta”. I do, and I originally said that "you don’t seem to see it that way." You objected that I was putting words into your mouth ... but after your last post I'm pretty sure that I accurately described your position: your definition of "Meta's ecosystem" only includes sites that help Meta do their tracking, and you had previously said don't consider federating data there as tracking.
Like I said, we're not going to convince each other. I understand your position and why you think that way, I just disagree. It's true that defederating from Threads while still federating with instances that use Meta's services doesn't help, it's true that federating with Threads just sends them the data that goes to other ActivityPub instances, it's true that Google's also a threat -- this is all part of why I frame things in terms of surveillance capitalism, not just whether or not to federate with Threads. We just come to different conclusions about the privacy impact of defederating from Threads. Restating our arguments another time won't change anything.
And in any case, that's not even the reason that most instances are defederating from Threads! Concern about harassment from hate groups there is a much bigger deal. So, as interesting as this conversation is, is it really a good use of our time?
I’d like to understand your definition of tracking, in that case. What is your biggest concern regarding tracking when federating? Am I correct in assuming that you also don’t want to be tracked by other data brokers? I have these conversations because I want to try to steer these conversations in a productive direction. I don’t need to convince you, but it would be interesting to understand the tracking concerns people have with federating. I’m also entertaining the idea of creating a website which shows people what data they share on the fediverse so they can understand where the real risks are (e.g., we probably should reject instances which choosed to use targeted advertising, as it sends data not only to facebook but to data brokers, etc..)
There are good reasons for defederating from instances, such as harassment, hate, lax moderation policies, etc, as you mentioned. I’ve discussed that topic a lot too in other posts, mostly boiling down to “yeah it’s going to be really hard to say ‘yes’/‘no’ to what amounts to being one instance with millions of users”. Personally, I like the decentrialized nature of the internet, the fediverse and the freedom with which that brings. I don’t really have any interest in being on an instance which federates with meta properties, but I also don’t really take a strong stance for or against it. I personally see more conversation about defederating from threads and less concern with a route that some instance owners may be forced to head in: targeted advertising. After all, the tactics meta uses are the same tactics any web developer can use.
The only positive I’ll say about federating with Threads is that some people have a lot of friends who are stick in facebook, and this would be a way for people to stay connected. I think that’s probably why they’re moving towards that direction, especially if they are seeing those users migrate away to ActivityPub. But someone else will need to make that empassioned argument - and I’m sure there’ll be a non-zero number of instances who choose to federate, and users will decide which ones they want to engage with at what time in their life. Choice!
I’m certainly not going to make the argument that people should federate with any instance. You don’t like the instance, you server the connection. That ability was built in for a reason and should remain.
A website like that would be very helpful. A lot of people I talk to think that unlisted gives more protection than it actually does (they're used to how it behaves on YouTube where it's harder to discover), don't realize that it's still likely to get indexed by Googe et al even if they haven't opted in to search engines (because their post may well appear in a thread by somebody who has opted in), don't understand the limited protection of blocking if authorized fetch isn't enabled, don't realized that RSS leaves everything open etc.
Yes, I think in terms of protecting data generally, not just from Meta but also data brokers, Google, and other data harvesters -- as well as stalkers. Meta's a concrete and timely example so it's a chance to focus attention and improve privacy protections, both for instances that don't federate and for instances that do. I agree that most (although not all) of the information Meta can get from federating they already can by scraping and they certainly could scrape (and quite possibly are already scraping) most if not all profiles and public and unlisted posts on most instances, and so could everybody else ... it's a great opportunity to make progress on this. https://privacy.thenexus.today/fediverse-threat-modeling-privacy-and-meta/ has more about how I look at it.
Specifically in terms of data that flows to Threads through federating that isn't otherwise easily scrapable today, three specific examples I know of are
That said this isn't based on a full analysis so there may well be other paths. As far as I know the draft privacy threat model I did last summer is the deepest dive - And the software is buggy enough in general that it wouldn't surprise me if there are paths that shouldn't exist.
In terms of concerns about tracking others have about federating ... like I say for most people this isn't the top concern. To the extent it is about data going to Threads, for a lot of people it's about consent and/or risk management, full stop. They do not want to give Meta or accounts on Threads easy access to data from their fediverse account, even if Meta can get it without consent now (and even if they have some other Meta accounts). There's also a lot of "well Eugen said it's all fine", and especially from techies a lot of "well they can scrape it all anyhow, whatever" and "everything is public anyhow on social networks".
Thanks for this. I’ve checked out your site and you’ve given me a lot to think about here. I also just found this site today which might be helpful for folks like us. not lemmy related, but data broker related. https://databrokerswatch.org/