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- cross-posted to:
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In the few short hours since I started using #Threads, #DuckDuckGo has already blocked over 200 data tracking attempts. These include things like “headphone status” and “screen density.”
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I started using #Threads
Ah, I see, there’s the problem.
Yeah for real… are these people fucking retarded? There was a mass Facebook exodus for a reason… does nobody remember?
People left Facebook because it got overwhelmed with their parents and grandparents, not because they ever cared about privacy.
Shit, did your phone extend a needle for a blood test?
There’s a reason it’s not allowed in the EU.
What I don’t understand is why people wound even want to use this app…
What possible appeal could it have?
Using Threads knowing it’s a product of Zuck, is like voting for Trump in 2024 cause he wore a different style suit.
The best comparison I saw:
Threads is Romney. Twitter is trump.
Romney can come across as downright sane in a lot of situations. Yeah, he is a batshit loon and sometimes says stuff, but mostly he has “decorum”. Whereas trump/musk are 5 seconds away from masturbating on stage while screaming about hitler. But at the end of the day? They all vote the same.
You say that, but if he went out on stage in a pink sequins suit with assless chaps because it would somehow “own the libs”, a tragically high number of people would be all over that.
The Proud Boys leader fucked a dildo to own the libs. So you’re not wrong.
Oh God I forgot about that lmao, what a fucking idiot. I wonder how many of his fellow Proud Boys tried it out too 🤣
Bro, put one up mine too! Come on man we gotta own them!
If you are already eating out of a dumpster, even the worst fast food looks appetizing.
I’d guess you have to like Twitter in the first place to understand the appeal. Some people like it, some don’t, but the Twitter format has been pretty popular over the years, and this comes at at time when Elron has been making twitter dramatically worse for anyone who doesn’t share his political views. Meta gives the appeal as “having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution”. At this point, even if I thought Elron was a great guy I sure wouldn’t invest much in building my twitter account as the future of the site seems shaky. Also though, on the other hand, who knows if this will be a success for Meta and whether they’ll still support it 3 years from now.
I do have a Twitter account but I almost never use it anymore because it has become such a cesspool…
I just don’t think another copy of that cesspool run by a different asshole is likely to really be any more interesting than the original.
I did have an account, until the API changes made Twitteriffic unusable and all the people I follow left. Then I started using Reddit.
Now I use Mastodon and Lemmy. I will not go back to using a Social network that does not have; A) an open API which allows my choice of third party apps. B) a way to migrate my data and content.
The exceptions are Apple Messages (for family and close friends), SMS (for family and close friends who do t have iPhones) and Facebook under a fake name, sandboxed in FireFox Focus.
We all have our exception (s)
It works, unlike this place.
- The name of your first crush.
- Your religious beliefs.
- Your innermost fears.
- That thing you did in June of 2007 that you must never speak about.
Hey shut up about the spaghetti incident
You just reminded me of the random surveys that used to sometimes come in the mail for my Mum back before the internet was a thing. I flipped through a couple and it asked things like if you have a pet and what brand of cat food you gave them and all this totally random shit. I wonder what benefit to the home owner there was for filling such a bullshit survey in.
These days, Facebook would probably just use some AI to scan your photos and figure out if you have a cat and what brand of food it eats. You’d never know, and you gave away any defence the moment you uploaded the image.
That tracks about everything it possibly can just for the sake of it. I despise Meta so much…
The list is just a list.
The VPN just blocked requests to Facebook domains and it says that it might have contained that data. But it has no idea what data was inside. Maybe was filled with tracking or maybe it was just requesting something else
I am also trying DDG app tracker out. This is what I got after opening Simcity Buildit. Not really surprised, because Fuck EA, but some of the requests might be the linking of account. Still, 930-- damnnnnn.
And then they’ll need another permission to access your photos, contacts, text messages… They’ll grab and run with everything what’s in your phone. Before your 1st day is over, they’ll know everything about you, your friends and family. It’s just another massive privacy/data grab. Fuck them (and fuck u/spez ofc).
It’s unbelievable that an app which collect this many data points, including voice, is legally allowed. Insane. Yes, people should not use it and should care, but come on… this is just mass surveillance and collection.
Well, that’s how Cambridge Analytica scandal happened
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
including voice
how else would facebook live and such work?
i mean some of these makes sense
but its also a question of … does the app use all these things, all the time?
do we know?
On my mac i have to allow discord to record my voice etc. if i dont, i can still use the app but i cant talk in a voice call, and such.
i’d like if apps did similar, on phones. they’d work but some functions would just be unavailable
deleted by creator
Actually, apps can check how many times other apps have been opened without any special permission. You can create a Work Profile with applications like Shelter and install all of these spyware there!
Looking at the data collection categories in the ios app store for Threads is terrifying. Similarly, mastodon collects nothing. General population doesn’t seem to care though given the number of signups that Threads has received in the last few days. People are happy to give their information away.
Okay I’ll bite. I work in product management for capitalist software companies. Every single software product you use has trackers built in unless if you’re hardcore FOSS.
Even if the company has no interest in selling your data, it’s still really hard to learn about user behaviours in the real world in order to figure out what to build next. Many of these trackers are UX tools, much more than selling your data tools. My previous employer fully anonymized and aggregated usage data, but we can’t necessarily say the same for other companies.
These trackers are the industry default and honestly, I don’t know where we’d be without them. We use them to measure the success of what we build and to look for surprises/opportunities.
On that note, for products and websites that I like, I sometimes intentionally turn off my ad and privacy blockers for them (as long as it’s not intrusive). It’s hard to do our work without that data.
Obviously there’s a difference between UX analytics and data collection the data vacuuming Facebook does.
Say you can justify each piece of data collected via a UX element. Someone said in the comments: low battery, charger ad. Where do you draw the line between data for the product vs data for profit? You don’t. It’s all embedded in the idea of “the product”.
This is a company that sells ads AND data. They collect everything. Consumers don’t seem to care. Tiktok is still popular. People see this post and will still download Threads.
It’s important for people to understand the industry justification behind data collection and why it’s so widespread across the industry so we can have this conversation about what “too much data” actually means. Serving me relevant ads like places near me for food? I guess that’s a feature. A face aging app that we train to feed a military database of faces to track down deserters? Not so much.
that sells ads AND data
Companies like Google and Facebook don’t sell data. That’s a common misconception. Having data that other companies don’t have is what makes the companies valuable, so it doesn’t make business sense to sell it. What they do is allow advertisers to target people using that data. Advertisers never actually see the data, nor the exact users their ad reached, just aggregate metrics.
Don’t they have partnership agreements and secondary products that repackages their data as insights? (I’m thinking Cambridge Analytica.) It’s not a direct sale, per se.
Repackaged data in the form of other products is one way to do it.
No. Cambridge Analytica scraped data via the Graph API, which was open for apps to use.
The original idea with the API was that apps could become more social - for example, Spotify had a Facebook integration that’d show which of your friends use Spotify, and their favourite playlists (if they chose to share them). To handle this, the API granted access to not only your data, but some of your friends data. Keep in mind, this was all public profile data that people chose to make visible to public or at least to their friends.
That was fine when people were legitimately using it, but there were bad apps that didn’t follow the rules. Cambridge Analytica scraped data via a quiz app. People would click a link and log in to a quiz app on Facebook. The log in page shows a list of the data types that’d be shared, but people still logged into it. They’d then scrape all accessible data for both the person that logged in, as well as the data their friends had shared.
The API is very locked down now. People that use the API have to have a privacy audit of some sort, and much less data is available. A lot of people don’t like the API being so locked down (for example, it’s impossible to make third-party Facebook apps), but there really wasn’t any other choice.
Thanks for taking the time to educate me (and any passing readers.)
200 in a few hours sounds like a lot (well, it is) but is small compared to some apps I use. Revolut tried to make tens of thousands of requests in an hour last time I looked! I expect that particular app is coded badly so when it gets rejected it just endlessly tries to repeat the request.
I highly recommend everyone installs something like the DuckDuckGo android app because it blocks tracking attempts in all apps. It’s a bit horrifying to see how often, how much, and what type of data all our apps are requesting.
What is the app called? Are you referring to their browser?
Yup, their browser. Had to check what apps were tracking stuff when I saw this post and for example Spotify was getting blocked twice every second while I was listening to music.
I have 24 000 blocked tracking attempts since installing the browser a couple of weeks ago.
Thanks! Can’t believe I haven’t heard about this sooner. Cheers
We need a third party app.
Ain’t gonna happen. This is the only reason they are releasing Threads. It is also the only reason Elon and u/spez have killed third party apps.
It is also why you can’t use Threads in a browser. (You can read other threads, but can’t post or use any of the other features.
Browsers are also trivial to track https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
Firefox Focus.
That makes you even easier to track since now you’re that one guy running Firefox Focus
II should be alright as long as I don’t expose myself, like posting on the fediverse… /s
People here complaining about Threads and TikTok (Chinese owned) being the defacto social network for an entire generation over there without outrage, and when it’s outrage about it people just say “at least is not the US” what kind of defense is that?
I’m so tired can you re explain what you trying to say
I usually don’t like these types of comments but here we go: Because in TikTok america bad memes are really popular. And TikTok is owned by the Chinese. What a coincidence.I don’t understand how TikTok is being defended here, its basically propaganda.Wasn’t there a case of like a huuge amount of videos critizising the chinese goverment removed?
Woah dude don’t get racial
This is why I use Privacy Badger
Not only does it show you what and where it blocks, but you can also whitelist blocking in case you play browser games.
I’ve been using Chrome with Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin for eons, now. Listening to youtube playlists without getting interrupted by ads is a real treat…
You’d LOVE Sponsor Block then.
It uses AI to cut out all sponsorships from within YouTube videos. Anything AI misses, the users can cut out.
So no more Raid Shadow Legends or Nord VPN interruptions. Just pure entertainment!
Is it AI based? I thought people add their own time segments with a label. I know I can turn the feature on to do that using Revanced.
I thought it was 100% human based. Never heard of any AI involved in it until today.
It’s AI based, but humans can put in the segments too.
It’s not AI based whatsoever and is entirely crowdsourced by users creating the segments. Not sure where you got the idea AI has any part in it other than a purely blind assumption that you’re now spreading as fact.
That seems so unnecessary. Why do they want to interfere with screen density??
Screen density is usually needed to work out the resolution of images to load. A high-DPI (“Retina”) screen uses higher-resolution images than a low-DPI screen.
opposite really… Notice “Screen Resolution” is on that list as a separate item as well…
Screen Density would tell you roughly how big the screen actually is. If you have a 4k panel… but it’s only 6 inches, you can probably serve up a 720p image instead of the full 4k one and the user won’t notice the difference since you’d have to hold the screen an inch away to see anything different.
