Eugen is literally selling out Fediverse users to data collection agencies, not exclusively limited to users on Mastodon instances as they scrape public posts.
I don’t know how true the latter statement is, but even if it is, I don’t see what’s wrong with scraping public data, even for commercial reason. If the data was sensitive, it would not be public.
The statement it total hyperbole. Eugen accepted a paid job as a social media spokesperson and Fediverse advisor on a tiny university project that has some questionable goals and funding. Personally I would have not taken this offer in his place, but to be honest the goals of this university project are rather mainstream and in line with other such mainstream efforts to monitor social media for “extremist” content. And they would have probably scraped the public content anyways, so this way Eugen at least got some direct insight in how they are planning to use it.
The only thing one may be worried about in this whole EUnomia story is that no privacy warning was attached to the registration form to eunomia.social which apparently was sending private data to mailchimp and google. Note that an appropriate privacy policy was added since then. The letter does not even complain about that, rather about the fact that he sold public data.
“Sold”? I don’t think that is the right term in this context.
My last sentence was a reaction to
I don’t know how true the latter statement is, but even if it is, I don’t see what’s wrong with scraping public data, even for commercial reason. If the data was sensitive, it would not be public.
The statement it total hyperbole. Eugen accepted a paid job as a social media spokesperson and Fediverse advisor on a tiny university project that has some questionable goals and funding. Personally I would have not taken this offer in his place, but to be honest the goals of this university project are rather mainstream and in line with other such mainstream efforts to monitor social media for “extremist” content. And they would have probably scraped the public content anyways, so this way Eugen at least got some direct insight in how they are planning to use it.