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.
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.
Question, is this not how every activitypub server works?
Yes, but not every server is owned by Meta.
deleted by creator
Hi, I agree that there needs to be discussion.
But let’s be honest here. If meta made a lemmy/mastodon instance we would probably defederate them as well since every bit of data is for their financial gain and nothing else.
I don’t see how the worlds master manipulator and anti trust poster child is even remotely worth discussing about. We have established time and time again that „meta bad“. Why would we now not just accept the fact?
not because of any existing tangible evidence in this circumstance
Oh, we’re defederating exactly because of tangible evidence that Meta steals every information it can about you. I personally stripped Meta almost entirely out of my life, I definitely don’t want them crawling back just because someone else wants to use Threads.
And if you’re here and pretending to care about data privacy at least try to do the bare minimum in understanding how the Fediverse works.
Oh, I do. I’m my own instance admin, I work as a senior architect and grasped the concept of Fediverse quite fast.
deleted by creator
If you’re going to quote me I’d appreciate if you didn’t cut out relevant parts of it to fit your argument.
Sure, edited the comment to include it, it doesn’t change my argument at all.
The “you” in my comment was a generalized “you”, not you specifically.
Hard to distinguish.
Yes, this is why if you upvote a post or comment from Mastodon (and friends) from Lemmy/Kbin/etc it appears as a “Like” for them, as an example.
Sans the IP address, that would be of the server your account is on, not your personal IP.
Isn’t this just public information anyway, what’s the problem with them taking it?
It’s Meta. This is just the beginning. Stop them right from the start. Fuck these corporations.
Story of the punk bar bartender and nazis
based on @iamragesparkle;s tweets
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
Yes, by design: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/
IMO, the problem is not them taking the information per se, but in abusing that info to further the massive surveillance apparatus that harms society.
This and the constant lying while doing it!
Public? Idk, maybe. I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public. Comment and post stuff, sort of. But even if it’s public, I still wouldn’t want Meta consuming it.
I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s? Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network? That’d be crazy, so I assume that it doesn’t. Then Meta can’t find out your IP address.
Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network?
No this is not in the specification.
A malicious instance could in theory distribute this information but it would be non-standard. Of the 2 systems I’ve studied - Mastodon and Lemmy - neither do this.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s?
In this scenario they would be talking about the IP address(es) of the services.
Thanks for the clarification. That claim seemed really off.
I’ve assumed that what you see publicly is basically what’s synced. Obv. your instance can have a few more meta details on you, like IP, device info, possibly all the exif they’ve stripped from uploaded photos, but these things aren’t in the ActivityPub outbox
Isn’t this just public information anyway, what’s the problem with them taking it?
wake up man…
I’m wide awake, isn’t this just the information transferred when federating? But they just have to put it into a TOS because they’re an actual company with liability? I really don’t see the issue with them having this information.
They correlate the content of your posts with all the other data they have about you, taken from every app (besides WhatsApp, FB etc) that has FB trackers built in. Then that aggregated profile will be used with AdTech to serve ads and make money. I personally object to Meta making money with my personal data without me using their products.
That’s just how adtech works in general. Every ad company has a profile on who they think you are, well more technically a cohort of potential similar profiles. Also not all profiles can equated to a single person and a single person may have multiple. That’s how wishy washy the whole tech is. It’s good enough though. Way better than seeing those flashy “download these smiley trail mouse cursors” ads the old internet used to have. Still. I don’t see the problem here, it’s just about making ads more relevant to you. If you’re not the kind to let ads sway you anyway than what’s the big deal? And if you are the kind to be swayed at least they’ll be actually relevant to what you’re into.
The big deal is I help others make money of me without my consent or getting something back in return. At least not usefull to me. On top of that they track the hell out of me with surveillance.
Because fuck them. This is step one of their 20 step plan to do evil shit.
Won’t matter much in a democracy, but in a dictatorship or atcracy it means life & death.
In India, people have been imprisoned for posts & tweets for calling out Hindu supremacist Modi govt’s anti-democratic policies & communal acts, Some of them have been violently assaulted in their homes by Hindu supremacist thugs for their posts and tweets because the dictatorial govt has stooges in both Meta & Twitter who access the ip address which is tracked down by the state.
What if my instance says other services and instances can’t do that? Are meta then breaking the law?
If your instance says nobody can fetch its messages that just means turning off federation
Can we put terms as to how the data is used / not used? Surely that could put an end to meta’s dark move?
Yeah, that should be possible, back it up with the GDPR as well.
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
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.
deleted by creator
I don’t get it, third party users can’t consent to your stupid license agreement anyway. You’re still stealing their data.
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.
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.
… why? All of this is more / less public information about you? Even if you defederate, they could crawl and get all of this info (except maybe ip).
Exactly. That fact makes the mountains of defed stuff ridiculous because it makes no difference.
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.
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.
Agree
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!
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.
Mother fuckers are moving to take ownership of the fediverse by calling us “third party users”.
I’m pretty sure they mean respective to themselves and their own walled garden, but it definitely doesn’t scan well.
You’ll be able to call them third party users as well, if that’s something that you’re really super sensitive to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can’t speak for kbin but Lemmy doesn’t collect or store IP addresses at all.
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.
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
Any instance that federates with this garbage should be mass defederated
Yeah I agree. Can’t be federating with Instagram: comments section™, owned by Facebook®.
Defederating won’t stop this. Defederating means you don’t pull their data, not the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldnt it count for lemmy.world and other European instances because they are from Europe?
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.
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:
deleted by creator
@deadsuperhero Well, they have to collect this data to be able to federate. Question is only, what they are doing with this data. When they don’t block communication with European servers, they have to follow GDPR here. And these rules limit what they are allowed to do - and the fines for breaching the rules hurt even large companies.
One additional point: Most (all?) AP services perform signed requests when querying the profile and the profile related endpoints. So in the current Friendica version we already added a coding, so that unsigned requests only get some basic data that is needed for the communication, but nothing more. AFAIK some other services are doing so as well.
This coding can be extended so that signed requests from Threads will always result in only returning the basic profile data.
With the last court rule in Norway, Meta must ask your consent otherwise they can’t do anything. This is a huge issue for them on the fediverse. They must ask the consent of each European user what is nearly impossible. One solution is to filter were the instances are hosted. They don’t interact with the instance hosted in Europe. But, it doesn’t resolve the issue looking how the fediverse work. This is why Europe won’t see Thread.
To prevent, instances should migrate to be hosted in Europe. The second is to change how fediverse works. It’s fondamental to add options to ban some instances not just defederate. It’s the tactic of putting meta and instance that federate with them on the side.
This reminds me of the issue with some image content we spoke at the beginning of the week. I saw it like astroturfing. I would be surprised if this federation of Thread has a similar end.
There seems to be a general consesnus that feddiverse users don’t want anything to do with meta and that instances will defederate with threads. I’m curious if the majority will follow this trend to avoid yet another EEE, or if there will be some exceptions. I bet meta will be open to pay good money to instance admins for “colaboration” if the instance is big enough.
if there will be some exceptions.
lemmy.world and mastodon.social decided not to defederate threads.
Defederating wouldn’t prevent this. It’s not how the protocol works. Defederating simply means you don’t pull their data, not the other way around.
So they’ll grab what is needed to federate? The same stuff every instance grabs?
Ostensibly, yes. However, as a company whose business model is primarily predicated on sale of personal data and analytics, this does create something of a conflict of interest, especially because of Meta’s extensive involvement in surveillance capitalism.
Per the article, I really like Mike Macgirvin’s stance of “I’ll give you the bare minimum of data to make basic interactions work, but not one thing more.”
I mean yeah, I get the implications there, but all I’m saying is that they wouldn’t be able to federate without the info so it makes sense.
Spookbook is
. Everything you say and do on there will be held against you. The company is notorious for 
fishing expeditions.
