The Zuck suck is in full swing.
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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Ah, I see, there's the problem.
People left Facebook because it got overwhelmed with their parents and grandparents, not because they ever cared about privacy.
Idk, literally everyone I know has a Facebook page. They may not use it, buts it’s there almost like a listing in a phone book.
Facebook won't let me login to delete mine unless I send them a photo of my drivers license. Not gonna happen.
Happened to me. Had a fake profile to test some apps and when they asked for an ID, I literally sent a pic of my MIDDLE FINGER. They accepted.
Did you make sure to remove the EXIF metadata? It would be ironic if it has the image location coordinates in it.
They can get your location to various degrees of precision just from your IP address.
200 iq move by facebook, now they have the biometric reading from the nail on your middle finger
Seriously? I’ve never even given it an email I use, let alone phone number, where do they get off asking for ID?
He may also be an admin of a Facebook page. I was an admin for my job's (an absolutely important to no one but our community company) page, and Facebook suddenly decided one day that I was a 'high value person of interest' , which made me a possible hacking target. The wanted all kinds of personal info, including a copy of my ID, to prove I wasn't some hacker, or they would disable all my access. Fuck no I'm not giving you that, go ahead and disable me
Same here. I didn’t sign in for a few years, and next time I did, they demanded my drivers license. Why would I possibly send my ID to this shitty website? They way overestimate their importance.
Same thing was happening to me, tried again after a couple of days and it just logged in without asking anything 🤷♂️
The phone book was not a big tech corporation, which is why it was a suitable place to have your phone number.
It was owned by a big tech corporation, Ma Bell. And then it got broken up and there were just a bunch of smaller monopolies printing phone books.
I didnt know that.... thank you, stranger.
Big tech monopolies involved in everything, im just tired of it.
One of the advantages(?) of being old is you remember all the previous times corporations have fucked us over in various ways. The phone company monopoly which turned into mini-monopolies was just one more example unfortunately. At least that one's over now.
In the current age we don't even have to be that old to have been screwed by big corporations more than once. I guess anyone in their 20s would have by now gone through it at least thrice.
So what you’re saying is decentralization killed the phone book so Meta is actually saving us!? /s
I know not a single one who has that. My wife uses WhatsApp and Instagram though.
Has a lot to do with age demographics and the inability for Meta to allow a person to easily delete their page. Many if not most millennials have a Facebook page, but like myself, never use it and when asked if I have a Facebook, say no even though I technically have a one I don't log in to.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know over the age of 45 have a Facebook and use it regularly. I don't know very many zoomers, but the few sub-30 year olds I do know, never even made a Facebook account, but do use Instagram.
I had a person that hated me in high school create a FB page that said I graduated from Harvard and worked at a gay bar with a picture she sneakily took like a creep. Idiots believed it was my FB page and asked why I wasn't accepting their friend requests. Not sure if the page still exists, I had family ask to try and take it down but I don't use Facebook to know if anything happened.
Well, what we learned from those tech whistleblowers was that, even those of us that never even made a FB account have a profile made of us from pictures and things people said about us on their fuckin FB accounts. This probably goes for those of us born before ‘95, but I would assume that practice is only heightened by data scraped from Android devices, the expanded access via Instagram, the leaps in tech, etc for those born after ‘95.
So buckle up, folks. It’s all bad.
They're called shadow profiles. They were also using information from the contact information in your phonebook.
I have one haven't used it years. But don't delete it because of friends but now reminds me I need to delete it like asap.
I hate whatsapp, but I "have to" use it, because otherwise I would be unable to talk to 98% of my RL contacts.
I pretty much have to have some form of Meta account or else I'm considered "shady" by some people. I haven't even logged in in years, but just saying the username is appaeently enough.
I've seen goddamn ads for apartments that require sharing FB/Instagram contact info.
These people are so low info they don't even know Facebook owns Instagram
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 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!
Remember kids; assless chaps don't exist, it's just chaps. If they had asses, they'd be pants!
As a member of the local #42069 Union of Chapless Chaps, I waggle my fingers and blow a raspberry in solidarity.
Honestly that would make me sorta like him a bit. Especially if he did Eddie Murphy and wore a purple leather skintight outfit. Stupid sexy trump. Feels like I'm wearing nothing at all. nothing at all.
"Okay so it's basically Twitter, but with like... Facebook features..." Is literally a joke I have made about annoying app ideas people have when you tell them you're a software developer.
I have made this joke a few times, because it killed every time.
I'm stunned. Out of material, and stunned.
Had a dude tell me he wanted to 'disrupt' social media by creating a LinkedIn alternative that allowed posting videos.
He just needed a couple 'techies' like me to get it off the ground.
Haven't heard from him in a while. I hope rehab worked out for him.
Your responsible for this you willed this evil into the world I cast you out to the sea and rocks below to you and your twitter with Facebook features
Deleted
If you are already eating out of a dumpster, even the worst fast food looks appetizing.
There's a lot of dumpster divers out there, too. According to an AP article Threads "has drawn tens of millions of users since launching this week".
That's nuts. And depressing.
They probably funneled them in with an ad from Instagram.
What is Dril?
That's just the tip of the iceberg. I can't relate to anything in that comment.
Well the majority was clearly him being facetious
Hey now, Grimace can't feel sexy?! Let the purple monster be!
If your using facetious does it track you?
And *you're
My phones Swype function feels horrible.
A guy on twitter who's kinda funny.
I googled him/her/it just in case it was a leggy, smoking hot "influencer".
Yeah no. Maybe a kind of influencer?
It will be interesting to see how quickly companies will substitute the “follow us” troika of icons on their website and brochures from a blue f, camera and blue bird to a blue f, camera and stylised black T.
I assume that printing companies will make a packet reprinting all those brochures, or selling little stickers to cover up the little blue bird.
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 deleted my twitter account from 2009 once it was apparent what a clusterfuck Elron was going to make it. I never really used it that much until a few years ago, but I started in 2020 as it was the platform with the most recent and close to real-time news on what was going on with the riots and stuff (I was in downtown Portland when the Floyd protests started). I found a few niche communities I enjoyed and liked some of the humor accounts, like Roz Chast or NYT Pitchbot. I thought it was cool to see posts from people like Sandra Boynton. Buy yeah, no way I'm being on there in the Musk era.
I don't have high hopes for Threads either, of course, considering I don't like or use IG or FB and have very little respect for Meta as a company, and their weird-ass founder. The privacy concerns are horrifying - I will never install the app on my phone, so if there isn't web access I will literally never even try it.
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)
I'm not really sure, but then again I also didn't really understand the point of Twitter, so I'm a bit biased.
Latest news, with spirited discussion attached
I always say: Almost like Reddit, but instead of following topics, you follow idiots
Edit: I should add that reddit is now down the drain, that's why I'm here now, lol. Federated Internet for the win!
Social media fomo
There is a percentage of people who are fucking weird bro.
Yeah, about 9 out of 10.
Hate to be in that 1 or of 10 group, they're weird.
Umm... That's a fraction, not a percentage... /S
the sad truth seems to be that vast majority of people just don't care about the threats.
Even if you don't have Threads app installed. Meta is still a privacy threat for fediverse users. If there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta. And there are already millions of people who joined Threads in just a day.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
It works, unlike this place.
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 mean here is a screenshot of the data the Threads iOS app collects:
This checks literally every vector the app could collect data from.
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.
Not sure why anyone would install that garbage. Even a one off install to check it out means it will upload lots of data.
Some people simply do not care.
Is it really that hard to understand that some people like the idea of participating in a community with all their friends and favorite content creators, and find the idea of getting access to this for free at the cost of some privacy that they don't hugely value to be an acceptable enough trade?
"some" privacy lol
Zoomers don't value privacy at all, and that's a huge problem.
Maybe, but ultimately, that's a decision that every person gets to make for themselves.
It's easy to missjudge how much of our society are just mindless drones.
At this point I think it would be more informative to simply display the data they don't collect. My guess is "nothing".
Thank you EU!
Why anyone would try a ‘new’ Facebook product at this point is mind boggling.
Holy crap are you kidding? Mastodon IIRC requires zero priviliges/personal information to run.
Also, what the hell does it need "headphone status" for?
Bluetooth headphones have unique identifying information. Another data point for apps that the headphone jack doesn't provide.
Honestly not defending them because the android app can potentially track your credit score, but this is probably to pause videos when headphones unplug and perform similar actions.
But it seems like DuckDuckGo is blocking them, which implies the system that's tracking that is trying to upload that data onto a server, not just using it for pausing videos and stuff.
Right, it wouldn’t need to communicate to corporate, just to the app itself.
You both are probably right I forgot this was the android app. Meta has a habit of sending everything they could possibly ever get incase someone wants to buy it. Although I could see them using that for BI purposes to be like X Users were wearing headphones on these types of posts, but that may be giving them too much credit.
No - DuckDuckGo blocks the app from getting the data. It doesn't know if that particular data is being sent over the internet or not. Seeing headphone status in its list just means the app tried to check the headphone status, not that it tried to send it anywhere.
Determine if you're a candidate for headphone ads.
Could just be another piece of data that can build a more unique fingerprint for you.
That’s insane, well I know one thing. This is making me want to go download the DuckDuckGo browser.
In the same week switching to DDG browser and to Lemmy. God dayum I wish there was a good alternative for Gmail.
Protonmail is pretty great!
I tried Proton but it's so limited. Fastmail is much better, has free email addresses for masking, and a good (searchable) calendar.
I switched to protonmail. It's especially good if you have your own domain name like [email protected] because you can tie that to your protonmail account.
I like it a lot so far.
🦆
Shill🤖
Wow, first time being called a shill 😂 Guess there’s a first time for everything 🤷🏾♂️
What’s your preferred private search engine?
A public Searxng instance is a great way to get some privacy back. We can run searches against multiple engines and settings stay in the local browser. Image searches can be proxied as well if the particular instance allows for it.
Enjoy!
Personally, I just found out about the Brave one. Giving that a try and it seems pretty good so far. Has an AI summarize at the top of the results which worked pretty well when I searched for a news item an hour ago.
A lot of that stuff is pretty standard if you're doing logging and metrics on your service (which you should if you want to resolve outages). From the IP address and user agent you get rough location, os info, and network info. A few other things can be used for optimization (faster load times), and a Meta-scale, I wouldn't be surprised if they do that.
Why in the first place do you want to use that garbage?
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.
You get a lot of information out of one addon.
Just installed it, thanks. Looks good!
Cant get it to work alongside my vpn.
How is this compared to Blokada?
Holy crap, TrackControl is really good and informative! Scary to see which companies try to gather your information! Thanks for this. I thought Blokada was the best. Going to try out URLCheck as well. Any other privacy apps for Android or even for Windows hit me up!
Yeah, i've been using Revanced. Thanks!
Can't find it. Is it under a different name in f droid?
Edit: found it. Thank you
Good rec, thanks!
I've been using blokada 5 for quite a while and it seems pretty good although it's recently switched to a subscription service in version 6 (you can still use 5 for free)
I might look into Trackercontrol instead, thanks!
Nice addon, I've just installed it.
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.
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.
https://sponsor.ajay.app/about/
Hey, let’s not dismiss this technique out of hand. Sometimes, it helps people get elected President!
squints ...that sounds annoying. I honestly don't mind sponsors. It's a simple way for content creators to make money. I just ignore or skip.
You literally don't notice it. That's the point.
It's like it cuts it out using a scalpel
You get weeks of your life back from one add-on.
Yup, just checked Revanced and it's showing 851 segments totaling 8hr 31 mins saved.
Holy shit. I'd ask how the fuck is this even legal, but seeing EU's reaction I guess it really kinda isn't
Why did you download threads in the first place? Just scanned the app in exodus and the list of trackers is worse than all meta apps combined
Perhaps to inform us all? Recon style self infection and inflitration of the brainwashed megacorp corps.
Meta is still a privacy threat for fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
I thought they were browsing the threads website via duckduckgo.
Orientation? Why would Facebook need to know if my phone is gay? Jk, I know they really want to know my phone's political orientation. Joke's on them, my phone voted for Megatron.
It also wants to know how stupid my screen is for some reason??
In the name of Vectron I bring you greetings, ambassador. May the power of Vectron bring prosperity unto your house.
Damn, just straight up stealing other people's content. Very cool
Original post: https://writing.exchange/@kreig/110664764474921792
Original poster: https://writing.exchange/@kreig
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.
I've recently started taking a lot of international flights for work.
Now the ad algorithms thinks I'm some international jet setter and I get ads for luxury boats.
Hey shut up about the spaghetti incident
yep
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
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
That's your fault for using threads
You got a good point. I minimized my usege of Facebook to the
minimummaximum.Does that mean you maximised your usage? 🤔
Lol I meant the other way around ahah
Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
absolutely wild, was going to (naively) give it a go, but I work on telemetry for a big platform and cannot in good faith use this product.
Genuine question: what made you work on that if you see telemetry as a threat?
If I based my concerns off of what I worked on, I'd actually probably be cool with it. Things are generally taken very seriously and the general discourse around how things are handled (at least to my knowledge) are wildly exaggerated. However, knowing just how things work end to end and how Meta tends to handle things, I think accepting something like the terms they lay out will give them freedom to do whatever they want with whatever they want.
That might seem obvious to most folks but I guess it's more just be saying yeah they'll take as much as you can give them.
Remind me of that scene in The Dark Knight when Lucius Fox has all the screens with all the data from every smartphone around.
The only way I'll use Facebook nowadays is in a browser sandbox. And before you ask, it's pretty much Events and Marketplace nowadays; the main feed is unusable and horrifying nowadays, and everybody I know has moved on from Messenger.
Hermit browser does a good job of sandboxing random apps like that. Wish it had more than 5 sandboxes though, it severely limits its usability.
Everyone I know pretty much uses fb messenger exclusively, it's the only reason I still have it. If there was a reliable way to hook into messenger from another app I'd switch in a second, but still the reliance on messenger is there.
It's really good for group messages
Run it in a Sandboxie sandbox. It can run any application in a Sandbox.
Or just spin up a lightweight VM. Could even run it in a Docker container.
That’s insane
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.
From what I've heard the number gets so high because duckduck blocks the app from gathering data. The apps keep pushing requests since they're not getting any response. In reality the non-blocked requests are less frequent. Don't quote me on this, just a thing I read on reddit.
But yeah I have duckduck as well and it freaks me the F out seeing what apps are trying to gather. It's sickening.
Tidal is the worst for me. Made 1000+ attempts in less than an hour.
I didn't know DuckDuckGo had the app tracker feature. It was just a browser the last time I gave it a go. Thanks for the tip! I've been using NextDNS for my Private DNS on Android for awhile. I had to temporarily disable it for DuckDuckGo to identify the trackers. It looks like NextDNS was doing a good job blocking them.
It might be surprlus to your requirements then, I've seen in a few discussions on here there's lots of alternatives. Some apps it 'breaks' so I just disable it for that app. Nuts though the level of tracking that's going on in our pockets all day!
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
Yes, it looks like there is an App Tracking setting in it.
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
Post complaining about Meta collecting too much data from its users but Tiktok which has much more users than Threads and almost the same as FB doesnt get the same amount of complains, and when it does people shrugged off saying "at least is not owned by an US company" implying some would rather give their data to a chinese company.
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?
"America bad" is a popular genre in literally every social network, just not in 'murican bubbles. It's almost like the entire world hates the US about as much as China.
Pretty fair point but I just feel like its turned up to 11. The amount of memes about 911 and other stereotypical stuff on my friends feed is not comparable to other sosial media.
Woah dude don't get racial
American isn't a race!
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).
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.
Funny enough the screen density thing could just be display optimization, did some web development and that would've been useful. But hoy shit the rest is really bad. Good thing I live in the EU and won't be tempted.
It’s likely used for fingerprinting, not optimization.
Instagram in app browser user agents include your devices resolution and colour info, so I think you’re right on those features.
And for a video app checking if headphones are plugged in is actually useful (Apollo used to deal with this well).
Needing your health days in the permissions though???
Yeah, screen density or screen resolution is fairly common to track specifically because it's useful for sorting out UI problems.
"People with 1080p phones use the app once and never come back" is useful information from a product development standpoint. It's not super useful for most user profiling purposes.
Unless you're selling cell phone ads, that is. And, well, Meta's an ad company.
The latest in data collection technology also happens to have some social features.
And if it's anything like Twitter was, it won't be very social
Mother fucking mother fuckers
How do I get duckduckgo to block tracking attempts?
Okay I think I have it. I just installed the duckduckgo app and enabled the tracking protection in settings. And right now I am shocked. The amount of tracking attempts in the last 30 minutes has been mind boggling. 300 attempts and counting! Is this normal?
Yes, very normal for social media platforms, specially Facebook, anything related to Facebook, and even apps and third parties that use things like sign in with Facebook.
Same. Then I looked for an alternative app that comes on on boot. Found one called Karma FW on fdroid
I enabled it just now and got a massive list from opening the memrise app. In total, 212 so far over 3 apps. I've been using ddg for ages, I never really gave a second thought to the optional features. Thanks to everyone who's been posting screenshots of it!
Edit:
Droplets is literally a kid's app.
Is this the ddg browser? Are you seeing what it blocks through the browser or does it somehow block on the phone outside the browser like firewalls?
It enables a local vpn on your device. Yes, it's in the ddg browser, but it's blocking it from the actual apps.
Are you using Threads on the duckduckgo browser?
Wait, they're trying to check the status of your headphone? That's way too far. Why do they need to know if the headphone's plugged in?
That's actually a very informative data point. If you use headphones, you probably like to use music/video streaming services or play games. The longer they're connected, the likelier you are to pay for your media consumption. You probably also have a bigger connection to your media device (a source of entertainment and happiness), so you likely also use and pay for other related products or services. If your headphones use Bluetooth, you have a newer device and set of headphones, so you probably like to keep up with tech trends and buy more expensive hardware, especially if your listening time is long.
That's all from just looking at your headphone and Bluetooth status. Combine that with your device & vendor ID, contacts, location, medical and financial information, and all the other "sensitive information" they collect, and you can imagine how much information they can actually infer about you. That is their product: tailor-made targeted advertising and manipulation.
Disclaimer: I don't want to do advertising for surveillance capitalism, so I would also like to add that the data they infer about you (political ideology, sexual orientation, etc.) can be completely false. However, there is no way to verify that (only you can do that anyway). Meta doesn't care if the data is perfect. All they care about is that advertisers continue to believe that they provide the best dataset.
Maybe they increase the likelihood weight of ads you'll see from headphone companies, or groups in that space.
It's also just straight up a datapoint about you that someone out there will pay Facebook to collect so they can profile you and upsell you on more shit.
That's how all this crap works unfortunately.
Just for fun. 🤪
If you block them from collecting even one of those things, they'll lock you out of your account until you show them your ID and SSN. It should be illegal for social media to spy on you THAT invasively.
Ah, so it's a stupidity test.
Yep
They clicked "select all" when choosing what to gather, it's easier.
I hate Zuck, but I'm happy to see him destroy Muskrat.
Jesus, man! Do they want my birth certificate as well?
Kinda unironic here and I do not know why, I stared at the preview of this image and for a spilt second I felt literal fear. I couldn't read the words, I just saw "Facebook", a long list and it is a phone screenshot. And I felt some voided terror rising within as I clicked on the link. Now that I take a closer look, I can understand why my "gut sense" was warning me.
What does Threads do that Mastodon doesn't? Aren't they basically just a different app for the same thing? What am I getting wrong here?
the brand and million of dollars for ads. They'll push it as the main hub to browse mastodon content and then slowly try to make it a walled garden.
I'm trying to figure out if there's content there you can't access via Mastodon or what's the catch. They say it's not ActvityPub compatible yet however it's still somehow up so what's going on.
It's so they can say "Look, we LOVE competition, we even follow a protocol!" in court
looking at the app it seems it's launched with just local content feed with a promise of being mastodon compatible in the future. I guess specifically to generate some unqiue content so people join.
FYI here's how you can block threads from Mastodon:
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/110661775869857597
Threads automatically adds all your instagram follows so for creators they don't have to try and rebuild their audience on a new platform where as for users they don't have to find all their friends/family/and creators on a new platform, its just there. There is also the ease of signup, if you have an instagram account you just log in, if you don't it's really simple. For Mastodon there's different servers to pick and then you have to find your favorite creators again and it's another login to remember.
TLDR people are lazy so go with the option that is easiest for them
FeDiVeRsE hAs NoThInG tOo WoRrY aBoUt
That's egregious, not even trying to hide it lmao.
Those infos are different for everyone. It's like your extensions in web browsers, it creates a fingerprint.
And that is actually illegal in the EU
I guess it's why Threads isn't released in EU.
Duck duck go as well?
How did you block all that? Can duckduckgo block apps from accessing that data? There's no website version of threads yet right?
Edit: nvm. Duckduckgo has an app tracking blocker built in these days. Coolcoolcool
This is what I got after 5 minutes.
I understand getting location because the big companies have country specific websites that have different pricing and products but why boot time?
If they collect enough metrics and link it to a single user they can use that as an id to tell if that user does things outside of their app. So they collect all the data and build a device finger print then they offer tools to website developers for marketing (Facebook tracking pixel, like buttons, etc ...). Those developer or marketing teams or whoever add it into the other apps you use and Facebook can track you without you being logged in.
my guess is so google can use this data for analytics for their operating system since it collects OS version too
Mine doesn't seem to be blocking anything
Yikes. Install an app to monitor what's happening.
What app so you recommend?
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
Delete them? Just dont install the damn app, stop using facebook!
Is this the duckduckgo browser?
Yeah it is
Nice, thanks!
"They trust me" "Dumb fucks"
Disgusting
That seems so unnecessary. Why do they want to interfere with screen density??
Even if you do not provide a real fingerprint from your browser if you allow it to collect so many information it's still able to uniquely identify you because noone is going to have all those info the same as you
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.
Doesn't screen density usually mean the pixel ratio? Or is it something different on Android?
So they can build a better profile of you.
It's useful as tracking data
Oh no! the rats are eating each other.
I don't care if this app becomes the new norm, I ain't risking all that metadata. Fuck Facebook
This is why I only ever access Facebook through FireFox Focus and use a fake name.
Youtube has done it now. The internet fighting is on. Truly not able to see Youtube now with blockers.
Well this fuckings sucks. Hard.
"sorry, our dev uploaded debug version as production release"
in best BfME2 goblin voice: The Eye watches!
wow, it really sucks
The fight is on. Youtube just started playing this game.
Almost certainly this is for fraud detection purposes. It’s the same reason it’s used at tiktok. Scammers try to spin up fake devices to spam content but very often don’t have the correct screen density for their faked device in the early stages of a platform.
wtf do they even need charging status, headphone status, volume, direction rotation accelerometer wtf
They coded for "everything they can get" and just figure they'll use it all eventually. Must be a GDPR nightmare for them, if they even honor it vs. just not being caught doing bad actor things.
It's not currently available in the EU I believe.
They likely coded it all in quickly in a messy fashion that they didn't think about ways to disable any of the tracking in the EU and that's why is not available there at launch. While Meta has plenty of software engineers to get jobs like this done the speed they supposedly went to get it done(Being start in January launch in July) likely means things got rushed as it supposedly wasn't planned to launch till later this year but with twitter imploding Meta wants to get as much of the existing marketshare moved over quickly with instagram being the perfect way to make moving seem easy.
To advertise. If your battery is at 17%, they're gonna advertise a wireless charger. If you listen to headphones at max volume and are jumping up and down at a concert venue, they're probably not gonna recommend you earplugs.
hell naw
I'd guess that rotation is probably to rotate the video player when you rotate your phone.
Accelerometer is likely for the feature where you can shake the phone to report a bug.
Headphone status may be to pause videos when you unplug your headphones? Unsure.
if i understand correctly this isn't just grabbing info for functionality but rather is info being permanently collected and stored, so this shouldnt be it otherwsie there would be no need to keep it
How would DuckDuckGo know the difference between grabbing the info temporarily vs permanently? The app would still be calling the same APIs.
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.
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.)
Other than GPS coordinates, what's the problem?
It's pretty standard stuff that every app collects.
I'm actually asking what specific thing is the problem.
The problem is the "why". Why does it need headphone status? Why does it need to know "music playing" status? It uses all this information to build a larger picture of the user. If the user is browsing sad memes standing in McDonalds while listening to music, there's a chance they're in a vulnerable state. So let's show them ads related to weight loss or even the opposite - something to entice them so they might feel good momentarily. That's the kind of headfuck these guys have already built using their machine learning models. So no, you should totally reject any and every app collecting this information.
BTW, "every app collects" is a bad precedent. Partly because not every app needs this information and partly because they are all selling to Google and FB and even more spurious third parties in the end.
Why do you want them to know all this stuff about you? Also, all this data set on a timescale can be used to triangulate who you are in other data sets they have that are "anonymous". It's trivial to identify you based on a few converging data points.
ITT: Users not having any fucking clue what's going on, and laughing at a client that was clearly released in a few days. As if it's not blatantly obvious they are going to add the reddit and Twitter features later. Threads is going to own fediverse, deal with it.
So much Threads panic, yet we're apparently willing to just believe whatever DuckDuckGo says, even though the company has a pretty terrible track record.
Go look at the permissions Threads is granted. Mine has Notifications and nothing else. Android won't let it have access to most of the information in that list.
"Known to collect" - this app is sending data back to Facebook and we've made some wild ass assumptions about what that data might be in order to scare you into getting all your friends to download our browser. Worked pretty well, huh.
Oh cool, the bots are here.