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ward2k

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ward2k ,

No offence but isn’t a very similar policy about banning end-to-end encryption also in talk in the EU

Absolutely don’t agree with it, will be the beginning of the end for privacy but this is more of a European wide (and even world wide) push for a close to e2e encryption

ward2k ,

I use Firefox (librewolf) on desktop and Brave on mobile, its privacy respecting (with the right options) and has a quite a few things built in to block ads and trackers

ward2k ,

Exactly this, the only real reason that Meta would care about the rest of the Fediverse is free extra content for their users and extra data to exploit

Defederating doesn’t stop either one of these things, content is still viewable (defederating only stops other users on other instances being able to comment, vote etc) and the data is still their for the taking

It feels like half the posts/comments at the moment don’t understand the way that defederating works

ward2k ,

Defederating won’t do jack shit to meta, they can still view your content and view data to their hearts content

All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads

The two things Meta likely cares about is content and data, both of which they can still get

ward2k ,

Nope not at all, this is where the misconception is.

Defederating works kind of like a one way block, you stop your instance (Server A) from being able to see content from the other (Server B)

Server A can no longer see any content from B

B can still all the content from A, however users of B can no longer comment, upvote, downvote etc the only thing they can do is read the content of A

This is the same for Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon

Defederating is for when you don’t want your users to see harmful content (bots, extreme ideologies, problematic posts etc), if you just don’t want to see the posts then fair enough that’s the way to do it

If you care about the privacy aspect of Meta seeing your comments/posts or about not wanting Meta users to see your content then no, defederating won’t achieve anything

Edit: I don’t like Meta, my point is that lots of users are calling for defederating without actually understanding anything about how it works

ward2k ,

I don’t think we do, at the end of the day this is kind of the point of being a decentralised service. You pick a server you like and one that defederates the way you want.

If you try to do it like a two way block situation you could very easily end up with larger servers deciding to just Defederate smaller ones to completey kill them off since the majority of content would be hosted on larger servers

If your issue is with the privacy aspect or Meta taking your content potentially to be used with advertisers then unfortunately this is going to happen regardless, any publicly viewable content you have to expect is going to live on the internet in some form forever and will be used by advertiser’s to the best of their ability

The solution is to join an instance that has defederated Threads (if you don’t want to see content from them) and be cautious about the information you post. This isn’t exclusive to the Fediverse either, any public forum your comments and posts should try to keep you as anonymous as possible (if privacy is your concern)

ward2k ,

In all honesty I don’t really believe that Meta will take data from other servers for advertising since that seems to sit in a very grey area legally (might honestly be straight up illegal in some countries)

I guess my point is more about OP wanting to Defederate to stop Meta profiting (which I don’t think it really would)

ward2k ,

I’m not too sure what you mean, for their own users yeah they can use whatever their users agree to. Phone numbers, IP address, name, email, device, whatever they like really. They can then easily have that all linked up with their relevant Instagram and Facebook profiles for advertisers. Adversisers then kind of build up profiles about users across different services which is why often if for example you look up cats on one app you might see a cat food advertisement in another

Target for example is great at building profiles up (automatically) of their shoppers, a while back there was a huge story about them predicting a pregnancy Forbes Article

Other users not on Meta I’d say no, this sounds like it would be illegal honestly at least in some countries though I don’t know enough about privacy law to say

That said, instance owners could definitely sell off your data to advertisers if they wanted to and it was in the TOS of that instance

ward2k ,

No worries at all, there’s a lot of misconception around defederating and the number of posts and comments I’ve seen really made me second guess myself to the point I had to start up some accounts across different instances to test

I think the Meta/Threads news really hasn’t helped with people spamming it like crazy

ward2k ,

Honestly if you’re using Lemmy all this information is already publicly accessible, any public forum isnt privacy friendly

ward2k ,

Sorry misunderstood your comment, yeah Threads/Meta is god awful for collecting data wouldn’t want to touch them personally

There definitely is money in it for Meta though, just yesterday there was quite a popular post showing the types of data that is available to both users and instance owners. If one wanted to they could use things such as your upvotes and down votes to build a sort of profile about you, your political affiliations, interests etc

Meta isn’t just a problem, ad companies can easily set up an instance to start collecting data from other servers

ward2k ,

It absolutely shouldn’t be possible compromised or not for someone who has gained unlawful access to start pushing malicious code to production as long as proper security is in place

ward2k ,

You absolutely should look about moving away from LastPass and to something such as Bitwarden/1Password

LastPass has had major security breach a while back and plays very fast and loose with it’s security. It is not recommended

ward2k ,

Few critiques, not personally towards you at all but I really don’t think people should follow this approach

People can have hundreds of different passwords across various sites this really isn’t achievable

Human memory is terrible as well, it’s not a matter of if you forget it’s when

Storing in a standard notes file is absolutely terrible security, it’s also extremely unusable once you have more than a couple passwords

I really suggest to people using a password manager, most of them have apps for your phone and plugins for your web browser to allow you to autofill. They also allow you to randomly generate passphrases/codes for different sites and the autofill means you never have to remember a single one whilst having extremely strong passwords

I’d recommend looking into either Bitwarden or 1Password

ward2k ,

Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error

It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google

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