- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Meta is moving forward with their plans for Theads and the Fediverse, and their adjusted terms reflect a new impending reality for Fediverse users.
You must log in or register to comment.
Provided that a Third Party User is followed by or following a Threads account, Meta will ingest these pieces of data specifically:
Username
Profile Picture
IP Address
Name of Third Party Service
Posts from profile
Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
So if you follow a threads user or even if a threads user just follows you, they pull all this data?
IMO this seems like reason to defederate across the board. Someone else can leak your info to Meta.
Most of this is just part of Federation. When I saw this comment my client/server didn’t have to fetch it from your server. It was pushed when you posted it so I had it locally.
expired
Yes, but if you host an image, and my client prefetches it, it’s going to exposed my IP to your image server. And if you have clauses saying you’re collecting IPs…
Meta basically invented this shit. They’ll do it again. It’s what they do.
If a Threads user is following you, they need most of this information. It’s literally how the Fediverse works. The only thing that isn’t is your IP address, and that’s something that I’m not sure they’d even get. That might be your host’s IP address.
Remember, the Fediverse isn’t a bunch of iframes looking at 3rd party websites. It works by mirroring remote content. A follow is literally a request to ingest posts from a user.
Yes, but many clients are going to go look up images manually. If it’s a Threads post, it’s likely hosted by Meta servers, and they can easily see your IP when doing that. And they’re saying they might collect IPs from you even if you’re not using their service directly.
Yeah, no shit, they literally can’t federate without this data, that’s how ActivityPub works lol.
Why do you think you can see lemmy.ca votes on lemmy.world?
No, if you’re on the fediverse and someone from a threads instance interacts with your instance.
The IP address is only of the instance server, not yours.
if any of the big corperate socmed sites were just standard fedi instances I’d defed from them in an instant for a litany of things. just goes to show how abused we are on them.
I don’t get it, third party users can’t consent to your stupid license agreement anyway. You’re still stealing their data.
Take a torch to em!
deleted by creator
I agree that this is nothing to panic over, but I want to clarify that Lemmy is not safe from this. Lemmy and Mastodon both use the same protocol (ActivityPub) and that’s also the protocol that Threads will use to federate. Just as Mastodon users can like, boost, and reply to Lemmy threads / comments, Threads users will be able to do the same. That’s why it’s important to defederate Threads on all ActivityPub-enabled instances.
deleted by creator
Defederating actually does stop Meta from accessing data (at least through ActivityPub) if you enable AUTHORIZED_FETCH / similar. That setting requires remote instances to authenticate themselves, which prevents blocked instances from querying anything. IIRC, Lemmy either already supports or plans to support that same feature.
Meta could, of course, just use web scraping, but that can be prevented with DISALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS. Although admittedly, I don’t think Lemmy has this feature yet.
deleted by creator
kbin includes a “microblog” feature which is a mastodon-like implementation of ActivityPub.
deleted by creator
I don’t use it, so I’m not super clear on it. It does feel like a bit of an afterthought.
I do know that I’ve interacted with Mastodon users in fediverse comment threads via kbin in the “regular, reddit-like” interface. My understanding is that APub is APub is APub, and the client implementations define the format you see content in, and implement or do not implement different APub features based on how the developer(s) want to shape their client.
Mastodon users can post on lemmy
Threads is not Mastodon. Both are microblogging, while Lemmy is better described as a forum or link aggregator.
It’s possible to interact with Lemmy from Mastodon. I do so regularly by tagging a community in myastodon post. Following a community from Mastodon is also possible, but the UX is rough.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Good job on W, but I’m pretty sure it’s L.
You can follow lemmy stuff via Mastodon accounts. 🤔 No? Do I not quite understand how and why that works?
Your point about slowing the fuck down still stands though.
deleted by creator
Ok, that was my experience. I haven’t found a great context/use case for it yet.
It does seem a client could be made that uses the functionality. Or a purpose deployed instance or community could make use of it too.
But I agree, it’s hard to imagine a good use. And your point still stands about how panicking is unhelpful.
Meta says, for Threads to federate, they access the same data any instance does when it federates.
Okay, but like, I don’t want Meta consuming that data? At least if they wanted to scrape through reddit to put that together, they’d be going out of their way. This data is now just coming through the same API “for free”.
If I didn’t mind Meta scraping through all this, why wouldn’t I just use Threads?
This is exactly the kind of shit that pushed me here - I don’t want Meta sifting through all my shit. Its unlikely that some other instance host is going to start building psychological advertising profiles on me and sell it to the highest bidder. But you bet your ass Meta will try.
If I didn’t mind Meta scraping through all this, why wouldn’t I just use Threads?
I’m curious what precautions you have taken to prevent web scraping of your posts.
Probably none. For all he knows Meta already owns a couple small instances.
They admitted to federating for research back around bluesky’s announcement.
If you don’t want your data scraped you’ll need to use e2ee.
deleted by creator
If someone had any doubts about federation with Threads, they shouldn’t by now. Facebook is trying to turn Fediverse into Shittyverse and Fedizens should resist that
Lemmy needs an option for a user to block an instance.
If your local instance is not going to defederate with meta then an average user can’t do anything about it.
Yeah sure you can create a new user in other instance or selfhost an instance, but who would actually go through that?
Everyone should change their instance to one they agree with. If you don’t want to be federated to Meta, go to an instance that’s not federated.
User blocks are pretty much a simple filter, Meta will still have your data if you block them individually instead of defederating.
Sounds great, but in the end it just means everyone has to host their own instance. That could be interesting, but I doubt everyone would want to do that.
Not really? There are plenty instances which defederate from Threads. If that’s important to you, you should join one of those.
This isn’t exlusively about Threads.
They are still getting the data even if we defederate them, right? It’s only us who don’t get their data. This was my understanding on how federation works
Moving instances is easy, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do it. If you as a user block Threads then it’ll probably only hide their stuff from you, while still sharing your posts and comments.
Yes it’s easy but you need to erase all content you made in that instance first.
There is a ticket for moving profile between instances in lemmy, but it’s still open since Dec 10 2021.
Yeah sure you can create a new user in other instance or selfhost an instance, but who would actually go through that?
A lot of people
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim makes it two clicks
Lemmy needs an option for a user to block an instance.
Looks like they are working on it!
Agree
Defederation means you don’t see their posts. It does NOT mean they can’t see your posts.
I still don’t think federating with them is a good idea, but defederating won’t preserve privacy. It’ll just cut down on the “influencer” BS Meta promotes.
Everybody, please understand what defederating means. It will not stop the defederated instance from getting the data. It just means you don’t pull theirs.
If you want to actually control who gets data, you’d have to switch to a service like Streams. ActivityPub cannot prevent anyone from pulling data. It only allows an instance to decide not to pull from a specific location.
Everybody, please understand what defederating means. It will not stop the defederated instance from getting the data. It just means you don’t pull theirs.
I’m OK with that. If I wanted to talk to facebook users I’d be on facebook.
Ok, but the number of people that think defederation is in anyway going to prevent this is fairly high.
I see it less about preventing than about sending a clear “DO NOT WANT” message.
I’ve been around since the prevailing attitude across all common internet services was anti-corporate, anti-commercialism. You sound like maybe you have too. We lost that battle. It’d be nice to win this one, even if in a way that matters only to Fediverse users. I know at the end of the day Meta won’t care, and it won’t stop them from slurping up our data.
I still think there is value to the DO NOT WANT message, and when Musk or MS try the same thing, I hope we send the same message to them. Let there be one tiny corner of the internet that isn’t monetized and enshittified to death. Let the users who are happy to use those companies’ platforms use those companies platforms.
I get that this is tangential to your complaint here, and I get it. I don’t care what peoples’ reasons are though. Every instance should support the fedipact, and when Meta finally starts federating I’ll leave my comfy kbin.social home 30 minutes later if it doesn’t.
I hope each new revelation convinces more instance owners to do so, and more users to ask their instance owners to do so.
I’m just worried folks are putting too much faith in what defederation means.
Fair enough. I didn’t really intend to be arguing with you so much as spring-boarding off your point. 🙂
There’s nothing stopping them from scraping the data or getting it from the API already.
If you put something on the internet, it is public.
Looks like there’s a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can’t get with the spec as is.
First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a “public” activity stream. I don’t know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).
It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the “public” tagged activity streams:
In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special “public” collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.
Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.
This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get “public” tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as “public”. Many instances have this information tagged as “public” as a default.
Now, this system works fine if you’re dealing with small actors that don’t have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.
When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that’s already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it’s an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an “embrance, extend, extinguish” campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.
I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.
Instances that don’t allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.
Instances that don’t allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they’re sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.
I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that’s a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.
As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the “public” activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.
All in all, though, I don’t believe it’s going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don’t really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta’s audience enters the space.
We don’t know what they’ll do yet as there’s nothing in the article about what they do with the data or how the protect it.
Setting everything to private by breaks the fediverse pretty much. Imagine if everyone on Twitter was only private. It severely limits everything.
A “public” instance is just one that publishes to other instances if I understand correctly. So they would get the IP of the server instance. Which most instances actually do.
The instance owner determines what’s on their “public” tagged activity feeds. If they remove the “public” tag from a post or user account, it’s restricted from non-authenticated requests from outside servers. You’re correct that this shouldn’t grab user IP addresses, but they could if an instance owner is including that information in what they mark as “public” profile feed data. I should reiterate that I know of no instance that does this, but the capability is there in theory (and I do know that certain forum software packages outside the Fediverse collect and publish this level of information, although it’s a dying practice).
I’m not advocating instance owners turn everything private, but it’s clear they’re going to have to examine what they’re providing through their feeds to Threads if they’re serious about their users’ security and privacy. The safest bet is to defederate from Threads until it’s clear what Meta’s intentions are (aside from their rhetoric, which is always deceitful when it comes to user privacy).
As to what Meta will do, they absolutely will scrape that activity data for marketing use, if they aren’t already. It’s what their entire business model on Facebook is built around - targeted ads based on user activity. Anything they say about protecting that data is lip service at best given their past performances and lawsuits. It also very likely that they’ll merge it with their existing data hoards, and do their best to de-anonymize accounts so that they can increase their data accuracy and thus their profit margin.
Pretty much wanted to say similar. Ip address isn’t known beyond your local instance (and any retention time and purposes should be stated in their privacy policy).
The rest is standard data any federation app will collect upon seeing content from a user.
It’s also worth noting that in general the user URL (which provides this user data) is generally also public. So if you know the user url you can get this too.
Having said that, I do wonder how much they can monetize third party data about people that have not agreed to their privacy policy that grants such uses. It’ll be interesting to see.
@deadsuperhero @r00ty @Arotrios Concerning the IP address: I have the hope that all systems in the fediverse use some proxy mechanism, to redirect for example picture requests, so that the users will always fetch the pictures from their own server that then fetches it from the remote system.
Can’t speak for kbin but Lemmy doesn’t collect or store IP addresses at all.
will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.
How could this be done reliably?
One idea I have is that if you look at posts from their instances, they could embed images or other content that tracks you the same way the Facebook Pixel does.
@maynarkh But when you click on a post there, this won’t reveal your Fediverse handle.
deleted by creator
Technically, yes, you save metadata of all of those things. However: you are not a company that profits from vast amounts of data ingestion.
deleted by creator
However: you are not a company that profits from vast amounts of data ingestion.
The entire current Fediverse isn’t vast data by Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple standards.
You aren’t making the point you think you’re making. Sure, at somewhere between 8 to 11 million accounts, the Fediverse is a small pond. Meta is a gigantic whale. Ingesting the entire graph of everyone on the network would be relatively trivial for them, storage-wise.
Yes, but do you analyse this information to sell it to advertisers? Will you start posting sponsored content based on this information? And will the money you collect benefit the community you live in, or will it buy you another politician?
deleted by creator
Altering the language of a service policy (or, writing a new one) is usually a good indication that something is indeed about to change at a larger level.
It’s also an indication they’re following US law. They can’t collect data without stating it.
I’m gonna play Devil’s Advocate here…
What’s to stop them from scraping the Fediverse without federating? If they really want the data, they could very well find a way. At least they’re spelling it out here and announced an attempt at proper federation.
The article discusses this, a bit. One of the other platforms is considering an enhancement to require request signatures on non-ActivityPub APIs, I.E. Meta can make unsigned requests, where the server doesn’t know who they’re from, but only get minimal (or no) data back, or Meta can make signed requests, and instance owners get to decide what data (if any) they’re okay with sharing to Meta, based on Meta’s privacy policies. Beyond API’s, you’re talking about web scraping, which is something the industry has been handling for decades.
It also says exactly what they’re planning to collect for starters. That was news to me.
deleted by creator
It still news to me.
Ip address is only sent to a users home server though.
deleted by creator
I wouldn’t put it past them to put tracking images into posts though. Either way… I wouldn’t be happy on a server that is connected to threads.
Speaking of which… I see lemmy world see still hasn’t defederated from Threads. I guess it’s time for me to kill my account here.
deleted by creator
I might end up using a personal instance as well. But in that case I’ll probably end up with an instance whitelist, rather than defederating from disliked ones.
deleted by creator
Ah, bummer. I thought I’d be in the clear because we’re having this conversation on Lemmy.ml. Thanks for straightening me out.
Wtf. Can’t they just be defederated. Get that shit outta here.
A server admin can block any other server, including Threads.
I don’t know what you’re getting excited about here; this is all publicly available information which Facebook could scrape at any time they wanted (federated or not), even right this very second.
Shhh, I train my AI here.
They probably already do.
No, they don’t. Please leave the click-baity bullshit out of here.
Stupid question, couldn’t instances just say they don’t allow scraping specifically from Facebook in their ToS and then report them for GDPR violations if they do?
As in say that have the ToS says that “we’ll give your data to other instances because that’s how the Fediverse works, we won’t give your data to Facebook” and also “Facebook is not allowed to federate, and is not allowed to pull data”.
Then just say that your data subjects don’t consent to any data pulling by Facebook, and Facebook scraping your system even through ActivityPub is a violation of GDPR.
But GDPR is the European thing, and Threads isn’t even available in Europe.
If there service is affecting a service in the EU then they will have to abide by Gdpr. Fact is if your server is in the EU and they scrape it they are active in the EU.
GDPR is a protection that applies to European citizens, regardless of where they’re situated. companies don’t get a pass because they blocked IP addresses coming from Europe.
now, enforcement outside the EU is a challenge, but the law is written in such a way that it covers the personal info of every EU citizen regardless of location.
Wouldnt it count for lemmy.world and other European instances because they are from Europe?
They’re literally just taking data they need to federate, like all the other instances. Eventually people around here are going to get sick of this paranoid “fuck Meta because it’s Meta” attitude because people keep posting lame misinformation like this. I know I’m getting sick of it.
Whether they need it to federate or not, it’s still reasonable to not want an entity as large and powerful as Meta to consume this data. Fuck Meta because it’s Meta, which has a history of being particularly heinous with user data.
If that’s your opinion then great, that was always allowed. What I’m sick of is spinning facts and narratives to suit biases, regardless of whether or not I agree with those biases.
If you don’t want Meta having this data you should not post it. They vacuum up everything.
Of course, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t allowed to distain making that connection closer.
I don’t imagine Meta is bothering to scrape Lemmy instances anyway. The signs would be pretty obvious I’d imagine.
I don’t imagine Meta is bothering to scrape Lemmy
Why not? Citation needed.
It’s not just because it’s meta, it’s because they are going to scrape up all the data they can get (even if it’s just normal fediverse stuff) and pipe it into their data mining operation. They could probably easily do it without us noticing, but if we know they’re doing it… then it’s worth talking about. And reasonable for people to dislike.
deleted by creator
Do they get my IP if I reply to somebody or a post on Threads?
I was under the impression that I submit to my instance and then that passes the message along.
I had a quick look at the posts and comments bits of the schema and it doesn’t appear to list an IP address field, unless I’m blind. Which is always possible.
Normally not, but depending on how your Fediverse instance handles images they might get it that way. For example on Lemmy (since there is only limited image caching) they would probably get your IP, because your browser would load images from the threadsnet server.
But no real way to link that IP to the profile data they can scrape from any Lemmy site, I assume?
Not directly no, but Meta has perfected the art of creating indirect profiles, so I would assume they can figure it out if they want. For example correlating the IP from image downloads to comments from profiles should relatively quickly tell them which Lemmy profile belongs to which IP.
Yeah, this. If you comment on a few different image posts, they just have to look for the IP that is in all of those pools. It’s not that hard and this is basically metas bread and butter.
Petition your instance admin to defederate from Threads!
This wouldn’t matter. Defederating means you don’t pull their data, not the other way around.
The article is just describing how ActivityPub works. What would be more important is how they claim to use that data. But that they collect that data is inherent to how the protocol works. They’d have to mention they collect it legally.
Defederation actually does work both ways if the instance enables
AUTHORIZED_FETCH. That setting requires 3rd party systems to prove their identity before they can retrieve any data, which allows an instance to block defederated domains. I don’t know if Lemmy or Kbin supports that, but practically all of the microblogging fedi software does (that being Mastodon / GlitchSoc, Pleroma / Akkoma, Misskey / FoundKey / FireFish, and GoToSocial).Except that means you defederate from everyone but whitelisted instances in that scenario. If I recall, it doesn’t work as a blacklist, but as a whitelist.
You’re thinking of LIMITED_FEDERATION_MODE, which is different from AUTHORIZED_FETCH.
Looking into it, aren’t both of these only Mastodon and not part of ActivityPub itself? I can’t find details on them outside of Mastodon.
And what prevents the post from getting published to other instances from different sources?
They are mastodon-specific, but most fedi software has a similar feature. Or at least, all of the mainstream microblogging software does, as well as some of the image / video sharing platforms. I’m unsure about Lemmy and Kbin. Here are the equivalent settings for FireFish:
All instances should start blocking them. Lemmy.world Admins should be on high alert but something tells me they won’t block meta.
Guys, everyone move to small instances so that all the power doesnt go to one instance. I joined aussie.zone just for this reason.
