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.
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.