I do mean “we” as in “humans.” I think you’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to pivot permanently away from the most profitable set of activities his company ever engaged in.
You’re based on a Germany focused instance, I see. You’re probably more safe from the kinds of things Facebook gets up to than we are on our side of the Atlantic. Over here, Facebook paid $100,000,000 in fines for their behavior. This was 3.3% of the original fine. No regulatory changes were made. It’s unknown how much money Facebook made from data brokering with Cambridge Analytica, but they sold the data of 87 million users. Disturbingly, the number of users Facebook who directly participated in the app used to siphon this data was around 270,000. In other words, Facebook didn’t even need people to interact with Facebook directly to collect information about people, since they were using network connection information to build profiles about people.
THIS is my concern about why they’re so hot to get on the Fediverse right now. They don’t want a huge number of users to sign up for Threads. If numerous users do, that would help them greatly with what they do want, though. They want insight into the greater distributed network of the Fediverse. They want to collect information about Mastodon, Pelorma, Friendica, Calckey, Miskey, BookWyrm, KBin, and Lemmy users who interact with users on Threads.
I do mean “we” as in “humans.” I think you’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to pivot permanently away from the most profitable set of activities his company ever engaged in.
You’re based on a Germany focused instance, I see. You’re probably more safe from the kinds of things Facebook gets up to than we are on our side of the Atlantic. Over here, Facebook paid $100,000,000 in fines for their behavior. This was 3.3% of the original fine. No regulatory changes were made. It’s unknown how much money Facebook made from data brokering with Cambridge Analytica, but they sold the data of 87 million users. Disturbingly, the number of users Facebook who directly participated in the app used to siphon this data was around 270,000. In other words, Facebook didn’t even need people to interact with Facebook directly to collect information about people, since they were using network connection information to build profiles about people.
THIS is my concern about why they’re so hot to get on the Fediverse right now. They don’t want a huge number of users to sign up for Threads. If numerous users do, that would help them greatly with what they do want, though. They want insight into the greater distributed network of the Fediverse. They want to collect information about Mastodon, Pelorma, Friendica, Calckey, Miskey, BookWyrm, KBin, and Lemmy users who interact with users on Threads.
I’m not sure how much this will affect Meta etc., but it seems like the US gov is looking into data brokers at least: https://www.kanary.com/blog/the-cfpb-is-taking-aim-at-data-brokers-what-you-need-to-know