The fact that Harvard bent over for a “donation” is just pathetic. They have a $50bn endowment. What is even the point of having that much money if not to be uncompromising on academic freedom?
Imagine how damning their behavior must be that they paid half a billion to cover it up. 10,000 people in the US could live comfortably for a year on this single hush money payment.
Well, it has been criminal in several uniquely terrible ways for an incredibly long time. 500M to save on 1B in fines is reasonable being that Facebook is nearly dead in Europe and needs the US far more than it used to.
The poison of personal data collection is too great for any company with any amount of tech to ignore. Profit on data sales must have crazy high margins or it must be so easy to do that you might as well. We needed regulations on this 20 years ago. Now who knows how many dark hats know you fucked Shelley in the back of your 2020 Subaru. It should have never gotten here in the first place. Now it will take some C Suite with way too much power and not a shred of responsibility to have his vile conversation on how poor people should die and women are objects for this to get 1/3rd of the regulation it should have.
That's all well and good, but if you think that Facebook isn't mirroring all data from the Fediverse, and any other network it can touch, and then correlating what it can back to whatever individual/digital/personal profiles it can, you'd be mistaken.
The only solution here is a political one with significant judicial punishment as the enforcement mechanism. FYI I'm also including the guillotine in the list of nonviable solutions, as the problem is too large and geographically vast to behead our way out of it, even if it would be cathartic.
while I agree they are probably doing this and we should have better data privacy/ownership, the scope of the data they can pull from the fediverse is substantially less than what they get from their platform.
when you're on Facebook, they control and track everything. which posts you see, which you don't, and in what order, how long you looked at a given post, whether or not you scrolled through comments, every movement of your mouse, everything you typed and deleted in that text box, where on the screen you touched while you dragged to scroll, what text you highlighted, absolutely everything.
the only data they can probably pull from the fediverse is posts, comments, and like/dislike. maybe which posts you clicked into if that's public and I'm pretty sure they can't get which posts were shown to you without owning the instance you're on.