in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”
Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.
This is why they are called direct messages instead of private messages.
Meta didn’t “give” anybody shit. They sold that access. Do you see the difference?
As always, users are the commodity.
Remember this next time someone is arguing with you about how we should really not be so quick to defederate from Threads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platforms
Edit:
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/26/meta-gaza-censorship-warren-sanders/
What private info does Meta get through federation with other instances?
I suppose any DMs sent to Threads users?
My point here is not overtly about Privacy. It’s about recognizing that Meta has been a terrible corporate citizen for their entire existence. We shouldn’t be pretending they are some friendly geeky company that just wants to participate like the rest of us. Even if they were, that’s not possible when you are going to pour hundreds of millions of users into these fediverse spaces all at once.
They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.
Not your keys, not your security.
And even if it is your key, if you can’t see how they made the lock then you can’t prove other keys won’t unlock it.
OSS FTW
Ugh and now it’s happening yet again with discord. Everybody seems to want me to be on discord. Just after I managed to get off everything. At least they seem kinda OK for now but we all know it’s just a matter of time until dr evil gets his hands on it.
Same struggle. Are you referencing a specific instance and if so can you link an article or something?
Nah I’m just talking
If you want private messaging - use Signal.
If you use any kind of messaging on commercial platforms, expect immediate loss of privacy. They call them “direct” messages for a reason.