This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Meta is moving forward with their plans for Theads and the Fediverse, and their adjusted terms reflect a new impending reality for Fediverse users.
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Provided that a Third Party User is followed by or following a Threads account, Meta will ingest these pieces of data specifically:
Username
Profile Picture
IP Address
Name of Third Party Service
Posts from profile
Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
So if you follow a threads user or even if a threads user just follows you, they pull all this data?
IMO this seems like reason to defederate across the board. Someone else can leak your info to Meta.
Question, is this not how every activitypub server works?
Isn’t this just public information anyway, what’s the problem with them taking it?
It’s Meta. This is just the beginning. Stop them right from the start. Fuck these corporations.
Story of the punk bar bartender and nazis
based on @iamragesparkle;s tweets
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
How does defederating them stop them from getting this public information if they want it?
Good point. I guess they could just fire up a shell instance and get all the good stuff. I wouldn’t be too surprised, actually.
They don’t even need an instance to get they can just scrape it, like anyone can with public info. They wouldn’t even need to make an account for the scraper.
Public? Idk, maybe. I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public. Comment and post stuff, sort of. But even if it’s public, I still wouldn’t want Meta consuming it.
I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s? Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network? That’d be crazy, so I assume that it doesn’t. Then Meta can’t find out your IP address.
If a Threads user posts an image, and Meta hosts it, and I scroll through my feed and see it, my client will hit their server for said image. And Meta can collect my IP.
Meta basically invented this shit.
Won’t matter much in a democracy, but in a dictatorship or atcracy it means life & death.
In India, people have been imprisoned for posts & tweets for calling out Hindu supremacist Modi govt’s anti-democratic policies & communal acts, Some of them have been violently assaulted in their homes by Hindu supremacist thugs for their posts and tweets because the dictatorial govt has stooges in both Meta & Twitter who access the ip address which is tracked down by the state.
Because fuck them. This is step one of their 20 step plan to do evil shit.
What if my instance says other services and instances can’t do that? Are meta then breaking the law?
If a Threads user is following you, they need most of this information. It’s literally how the Fediverse works. The only thing that isn’t is your IP address, and that’s something that I’m not sure they’d even get. That might be your host’s IP address.
Remember, the Fediverse isn’t a bunch of iframes looking at 3rd party websites. It works by mirroring remote content. A follow is literally a request to ingest posts from a user.
Yes, but many clients are going to go look up images manually. If it’s a Threads post, it’s likely hosted by Meta servers, and they can easily see your IP when doing that. And they’re saying they might collect IPs from you even if you’re not using their service directly.
Yeah, no shit, they literally can’t federate without this data, that’s how ActivityPub works lol.
Why do you think you can see lemmy.ca votes on lemmy.world?
Take a torch to em!
I don’t get it, third party users can’t consent to your stupid license agreement anyway. You’re still stealing their data.
if any of the big corperate socmed sites were just standard fedi instances I’d defed from them in an instant for a litany of things. just goes to show how abused we are on them.
No, if you’re on the fediverse and someone from a threads instance interacts with your instance.
The IP address is only of the instance server, not yours.
… why? All of this is more / less public information about you? Even if you defederate, they could crawl and get all of this info (except maybe ip).
Exactly. That fact makes the mountains of defed stuff ridiculous because it makes no difference.
If someone had any doubts about federation with Threads, they shouldn’t by now. Facebook is trying to turn Fediverse into Shittyverse and Fedizens should resist that
Lemmy needs an option for a user to block an instance.
If your local instance is not going to defederate with meta then an average user can’t do anything about it.
Yeah sure you can create a new user in other instance or selfhost an instance, but who would actually go through that?
Agree
Yeah sure you can create a new user in other instance or selfhost an instance, but who would actually go through that?
A lot of people
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim makes it two clicks
Defederation means you don’t see their posts. It does NOT mean they can’t see your posts.
I still don’t think federating with them is a good idea, but defederating won’t preserve privacy. It’ll just cut down on the “influencer” BS Meta promotes.
Everybody, please understand what defederating means. It will not stop the defederated instance from getting the data. It just means you don’t pull theirs.
If you want to actually control who gets data, you’d have to switch to a service like Streams. ActivityPub cannot prevent anyone from pulling data. It only allows an instance to decide not to pull from a specific location.
Everybody, please understand what defederating means. It will not stop the defederated instance from getting the data. It just means you don’t pull theirs.
I’m OK with that. If I wanted to talk to facebook users I’d be on facebook.
Ok, but the number of people that think defederation is in anyway going to prevent this is fairly high.
I see it less about preventing than about sending a clear “DO NOT WANT” message.
I’ve been around since the prevailing attitude across all common internet services was anti-corporate, anti-commercialism. You sound like maybe you have too. We lost that battle. It’d be nice to win this one, even if in a way that matters only to Fediverse users. I know at the end of the day Meta won’t care, and it won’t stop them from slurping up our data.
I still think there is value to the DO NOT WANT message, and when Musk or MS try the same thing, I hope we send the same message to them. Let there be one tiny corner of the internet that isn’t monetized and enshittified to death. Let the users who are happy to use those companies’ platforms use those companies platforms.
I get that this is tangential to your complaint here, and I get it. I don’t care what peoples’ reasons are though. Every instance should support the fedipact, and when Meta finally starts federating I’ll leave my comfy kbin.social home 30 minutes later if it doesn’t.
I hope each new revelation convinces more instance owners to do so, and more users to ask their instance owners to do so.
I’m just worried folks are putting too much faith in what defederation means.
Fair enough. I didn’t really intend to be arguing with you so much as spring-boarding off your point. 🙂
Yeah, I can get behind this “DO NOT WANT” plan. Sounds sensible. Most of the other comments here sound like a knee-jerk reaction without any understanding of the way fediverse works, just panicking mob mentality.
But then again I don’t understand shit about the fediverse myself, so I’m not putting too much stock into my own impression. We’ll see how things shake out.
There’s nothing stopping them from scraping the data or getting it from the API already.
If you put something on the internet, it is public.
Mother fuckers are moving to take ownership of the fediverse by calling us “third party users”.
I’m pretty sure they mean respective to themselves and their own walled garden, but it definitely doesn’t scan well.
You’ll be able to call them third party users as well, if that’s something that you’re really super sensitive to.
Looks like there’s a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can’t get with the spec as is.
First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a “public” activity stream. I don’t know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).
It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the “public” tagged activity streams:
In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special “public” collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.
Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.
This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get “public” tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as “public”. Many instances have this information tagged as “public” as a default.
Now, this system works fine if you’re dealing with small actors that don’t have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.
When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that’s already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it’s an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an “embrance, extend, extinguish” campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.
I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.
Instances that don’t allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.
Instances that don’t allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they’re sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.
I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that’s a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.
As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the “public” activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.
All in all, though, I don’t believe it’s going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don’t really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta’s audience enters the space.
We don’t know what they’ll do yet as there’s nothing in the article about what they do with the data or how the protect it.
Setting everything to private by breaks the fediverse pretty much. Imagine if everyone on Twitter was only private. It severely limits everything.
A “public” instance is just one that publishes to other instances if I understand correctly. So they would get the IP of the server instance. Which most instances actually do.
The instance owner determines what’s on their “public” tagged activity feeds. If they remove the “public” tag from a post or user account, it’s restricted from non-authenticated requests from outside servers. You’re correct that this shouldn’t grab user IP addresses, but they could if an instance owner is including that information in what they mark as “public” profile feed data. I should reiterate that I know of no instance that does this, but the capability is there in theory (and I do know that certain forum software packages outside the Fediverse collect and publish this level of information, although it’s a dying practice).
I’m not advocating instance owners turn everything private, but it’s clear they’re going to have to examine what they’re providing through their feeds to Threads if they’re serious about their users’ security and privacy. The safest bet is to defederate from Threads until it’s clear what Meta’s intentions are (aside from their rhetoric, which is always deceitful when it comes to user privacy).
As to what Meta will do, they absolutely will scrape that activity data for marketing use, if they aren’t already. It’s what their entire business model on Facebook is built around - targeted ads based on user activity. Anything they say about protecting that data is lip service at best given their past performances and lawsuits. It also very likely that they’ll merge it with their existing data hoards, and do their best to de-anonymize accounts so that they can increase their data accuracy and thus their profit margin.
I don’t know what you’re getting excited about here; this is all publicly available information which Facebook could scrape at any time they wanted (federated or not), even right this very second.
Shhh, I train my AI here.
They probably already do.
Wtf. Can’t they just be defederated. Get that shit outta here.
A server admin can block any other server, including Threads.
They’re literally just taking data they need to federate, like all the other instances. Eventually people around here are going to get sick of this paranoid “fuck Meta because it’s Meta” attitude because people keep posting lame misinformation like this. I know I’m getting sick of it.
It’s not just because it’s meta, it’s because they are going to scrape up all the data they can get (even if it’s just normal fediverse stuff) and pipe it into their data mining operation. They could probably easily do it without us noticing, but if we know they’re doing it… then it’s worth talking about. And reasonable for people to dislike.
They 100% could already be doing that far easier without threads. It’s not actually worth doing it though.
Whether they need it to federate or not, it’s still reasonable to not want an entity as large and powerful as Meta to consume this data. Fuck Meta because it’s Meta, which has a history of being particularly heinous with user data.
If that’s your opinion then great, that was always allowed. What I’m sick of is spinning facts and narratives to suit biases, regardless of whether or not I agree with those biases.
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Can someone please explain why this matters. Almost all madtadon instances are public and can be data mined by any company. Why is it such a large concern if threads is able to see a portion of the posts on the fediverse like any other mastadon instance. To me the only thing threads federation changes is allowing me to view posts on threads without the amount of MS my cursor is over the podt being data mined to know what food Ill be craving in a week.
So if I read this right, no big deal as long as you don’t interact with threads stuff on the fediverse?
It’s definitely creating more of a case to defederate from it if it ever tries to federate
That’s not how I read it, but I’m not going to claim to be a fediverse expert. That post specifically says:
Provided that a Third Party User is followed by or following a Threads account, Meta will ingest these pieces of data specifically:
To me, this reads as, even if a Threads user follows you, your info gets chewed up by Meta.
In other words, if you post somewhere on the Fediverse, and some Threads user bumps into it, they can follow you, and that will send all that data to Meta. And it looks to include data well beyond the post the Threads user saw.
To me, this is a “sound the alarm” moment. If you came here to avoid Meta’s data harvesting, this sounds like you at least need to be on an instance defederated from threads, but I’m not sure even that’s enough.
Correct. Though interaction also means, a Threads user following you or replying to one of your comments or posts.
So they’ll grab what is needed to federate? The same stuff every instance grabs?
Ostensibly, yes. However, as a company whose business model is primarily predicated on sale of personal data and analytics, this does create something of a conflict of interest, especially because of Meta’s extensive involvement in surveillance capitalism.
Per the article, I really like Mike Macgirvin’s stance of “I’ll give you the bare minimum of data to make basic interactions work, but not one thing more.”
I mean yeah, I get the implications there, but all I’m saying is that they wouldn’t be able to federate without the info so it makes sense.
Like tentacles of a blood sucking octopus…
