this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Pros: millions of users can interact with your instance
Cons: This is a super blatant attempt to consume all data. They have been doing this for years. “Log in with facebook” They see the value of the fediverse and aim to become the mainstream place for new accounts. Those users can then interact with any kind off community they want. Meta is not responsible for content on other instances. But they are harvesting all of it trough millions of clueless spies.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
But also sell your data.
-Meta
Mastodon does not have any of my data.
As a lemmy user i can click your name and scroll trough a list of all posts and comments you have made. Thats your data and its currently free for the taking to any corporation.
Eventually instances may develop ways to protect their users from this for example make posts only visible to verified human members that are members of a community. Now imagine a user joining such community from the meta threads apps. It wouldn’t be beneath them to fulltime record the app screen and ocr all the text the user sees.
They can, and do, scrape any public data I post regardless. As long as they cannot link it to my name, email address, phone number, bank account, social security number or health records, I don't care.
At some point meta tried purchasing anonymized patient data from hospitals.
We are also discovering there are many subtle way to identify a person, like grammar, spelling speech patterns (tor specifically warns against this).
Chances are high they already have some data on you, all they need is enough subtle unique things in your data to rule out anyone else. Based on the times your most active and references you might make.
Now i am not a zuck owned superai but to give you my human attempt for an initial culling:
A social security number is the name of the American name of such number. Purposely sounding American is a strategy on itself for non Americans but the act of trying to hide your identity by pretending to be from the us can be an identifier as-well. You also seem to be more on the political left so your your likely part one of 160 mil people (for convenience i am assuming a 50% split in left/right ideology in the us)
In most countries your isp have some of your personal details your isp is also able to see all the internet domains you visit. They cant see what you do on them but because every instance has its own domain they have a timestamped list of all federated instances you visit.
It only takes that info to be leaked/hacked or sold for the big corps to obtain it. Of course if you use a vpn your isp cant see the domain but if you do have a vpn congratulations cause its yet another identifier and they too can be hacked or be selling this data.
The best way and only (still not guaranteed) way to remain anonymous is by using tor browser in windowed mode. Refraining from interacting and if you post to run your speech trough an ai algorithm to generalize/neutralize any personality from it.
At this point, the pro is kinda pointless now because these users are slowly being uninterested and leaving since the algorithm is shit.
I cannot disagree. At first i was worried about how good lemmy could possibly be with just a fraction of the reddit user base. Nowadays i feel like we got to many people already. Centralized under only a few instances no less.