Threads Monetization Fears
Threads Monetization Fears
Has anybody considered the idea that boosts from non-Meta properties to Threads could legally be used to build ad profiles? We already know they do that sort of account association with non-fedi accounts.
EDIT: Looks like that's absolutely the plan. From the privacy policy
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
EDIT 2: After doing a little more thinking, I've come to the conclusion that the general narrative about Threads plan to steal users from similar federated services ignore the fact that it's certainly cheaper to let the volunteers of the fediverse take on the moderation costs while they monetize the data. Though the two certainly are not mutually exclusive.
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While I doubt this is as much of an issue for us, as it is for mastadon (the interaction is possible, but not really common I think) the following part:
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good.”
Is the best argument for defederating from them right from the start IMO. They're forcing their privacy policy on people that might not even have read it just because they interacted on a submission that happened to originate in threads.
Now, I know everything we do here is open. But I don't think it's OK in a moral sense to suck up data from users other than your own to be sold to advertisers. I doubt we have much legal power but we do have the power to stop delivering the data to their door.
What's worse, they'll do it if somebody from Threads interacts with YOU
That's true, but given the numbers it is far more likely to happen the other way I'd expect.
In the long run it probably isn't their plan. They likely want to start gobbling up mostly mastadon (I'm guessing that is their target audience, I never had a twitter account or used mastadon) users to their service. Federation is just a recruitment tool I suspect.
I honestly don't think they want to steal users long term. Much easier to let things remain federated and let the volunteers eat the moderation costs while they monetize the data.
That's not how I understand it'll work though. Each instance is moderating their local users. So they will need to have moderators enough for their own users. The home instance can moderate their users and those actions propagate. Remote admins can moderate remote users but, they will only effect their own instance. I could be wrong, I've not used mastadon. But for kbin/lemmy I've seen edit/delete messages coming through from the owning instance.
If other instances choose not to honour deletes and edits from moderation, then yeah they need to moderate themselves. But I think that's going to be a rare case.
Important to note that right now they have zero in house moderation.
Eeeeeeeeh, how can you launch something you know is going to blow up like this and not be prepared to moderate?
The vibe I get is things were rushed out the door primarily as a shot across the bow to twitter.
I doubt most current mastodon users would want to use a Facebook product lol
I think the people that are on fediverse applications because they want to get away from these corporate operated megaliths aren't likely to go anywhere. But that's not all the current users, it's probably not even most of the current users. Those people are likely to move if all their friends are there and they cannot see each-other any more via mastadon.