In the few short hours since I started using #Threads, #DuckDuckGo has already blocked over 200 data tracking attempts. These include things like “headphone status” and “screen density.”
I started using #Threads
Ah, I see, there’s the problem.
Yeah for real… are these people fucking retarded? There was a mass Facebook exodus for a reason… does nobody remember?
People left Facebook because it got overwhelmed with their parents and grandparents, not because they ever cared about privacy.
Idk, literally everyone I know has a Facebook page. They may not use it, buts it’s there almost like a listing in a phone book.
Facebook won’t let me login to delete mine unless I send them a photo of my drivers license. Not gonna happen.
Happened to me. Had a fake profile to test some apps and when they asked for an ID, I literally sent a pic of my MIDDLE FINGER. They accepted.
Shit, did your phone extend a needle for a blood test?
There’s a reason it’s not allowed in the EU.
- The name of your first crush.
- Your religious beliefs.
- Your innermost fears.
- That thing you did in June of 2007 that you must never speak about.
You just reminded me of the random surveys that used to sometimes come in the mail for my Mum back before the internet was a thing. I flipped through a couple and it asked things like if you have a pet and what brand of cat food you gave them and all this totally random shit. I wonder what benefit to the home owner there was for filling such a bullshit survey in.
These days, Facebook would probably just use some AI to scan your photos and figure out if you have a cat and what brand of food it eats. You’d never know, and you gave away any defence the moment you uploaded the image.
Hey shut up about the spaghetti incident
What I don’t understand is why people wound even want to use this app…
What possible appeal could it have?
Using Threads knowing it’s a product of Zuck, is like voting for Trump in 2024 cause he wore a different style suit.
The best comparison I saw:
Threads is Romney. Twitter is trump.
Romney can come across as downright sane in a lot of situations. Yeah, he is a batshit loon and sometimes says stuff, but mostly he has “decorum”. Whereas trump/musk are 5 seconds away from masturbating on stage while screaming about hitler. But at the end of the day? They all vote the same.
You say that, but if he went out on stage in a pink sequins suit with assless chaps because it would somehow “own the libs”, a tragically high number of people would be all over that.
The Proud Boys leader fucked a dildo to own the libs. So you’re not wrong.
Oh God I forgot about that lmao, what a fucking idiot. I wonder how many of his fellow Proud Boys tried it out too 🤣
Bro, put one up mine too! Come on man we gotta own them!
I’d guess you have to like Twitter in the first place to understand the appeal. Some people like it, some don’t, but the Twitter format has been pretty popular over the years, and this comes at at time when Elron has been making twitter dramatically worse for anyone who doesn’t share his political views. Meta gives the appeal as “having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution”. At this point, even if I thought Elron was a great guy I sure wouldn’t invest much in building my twitter account as the future of the site seems shaky. Also though, on the other hand, who knows if this will be a success for Meta and whether they’ll still support it 3 years from now.
I do have a Twitter account but I almost never use it anymore because it has become such a cesspool…
I just don’t think another copy of that cesspool run by a different asshole is likely to really be any more interesting than the original.
I did have an account, until the API changes made Twitteriffic unusable and all the people I follow left. Then I started using Reddit.
Now I use Mastodon and Lemmy. I will not go back to using a Social network that does not have; A) an open API which allows my choice of third party apps. B) a way to migrate my data and content.
The exceptions are Apple Messages (for family and close friends), SMS (for family and close friends who do t have iPhones) and Facebook under a fake name, sandboxed in FireFox Focus.
We all have our exception (s)
If you are already eating out of a dumpster, even the worst fast food looks appetizing.
“Okay so it’s basically Twitter, but with like… Facebook features…” Is literally a joke I have made about annoying app ideas people have when you tell them you’re a software developer.
I have made this joke a few times, because it killed every time.
I’m stunned. Out of material, and stunned.
Had a dude tell me he wanted to ‘disrupt’ social media by creating a LinkedIn alternative that allowed posting videos.
He just needed a couple ‘techies’ like me to get it off the ground.
Haven’t heard from him in a while. I hope rehab worked out for him.
Your responsible for this you willed this evil into the world I cast you out to the sea and rocks below to you and your twitter with Facebook features
It works, unlike this place.
Damn, just straight up stealing other people’s content. Very cool
Original post: https://writing.exchange/@kreig/110664764474921792
Original poster: https://writing.exchange/@kreig
It’s unbelievable that an app which collect this many data points, including voice, is legally allowed. Insane. Yes, people should not use it and should care, but come on… this is just mass surveillance and collection.
Well, that’s how Cambridge Analytica scandal happened
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
including voice
how else would facebook live and such work?
i mean some of these makes sense
but its also a question of … does the app use all these things, all the time?
do we know?
On my mac i have to allow discord to record my voice etc. if i dont, i can still use the app but i cant talk in a voice call, and such.
i’d like if apps did similar, on phones. they’d work but some functions would just be unavailable
deleted by creator
Actually, apps can check how many times other apps have been opened without any special permission. You can create a Work Profile with applications like Shelter and install all of these spyware there!
That tracks about everything it possibly can just for the sake of it. I despise Meta so much…
The list is just a list.
The VPN just blocked requests to Facebook domains and it says that it might have contained that data. But it has no idea what data was inside. Maybe was filled with tracking or maybe it was just requesting something else
I am also trying DDG app tracker out. This is what I got after opening Simcity Buildit. Not really surprised, because Fuck EA, but some of the requests might be the linking of account. Still, 930-- damnnnnn.
And then they’ll need another permission to access your photos, contacts, text messages… They’ll grab and run with everything what’s in your phone. Before your 1st day is over, they’ll know everything about you, your friends and family. It’s just another massive privacy/data grab. Fuck them (and fuck u/spez ofc).
We need a third party app.
Ain’t gonna happen. This is the only reason they are releasing Threads. It is also the only reason Elon and u/spez have killed third party apps.
It is also why you can’t use Threads in a browser. (You can read other threads, but can’t post or use any of the other features.
Browsers are also trivial to track https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
Firefox Focus.
That makes you even easier to track since now you’re that one guy running Firefox Focus
II should be alright as long as I don’t expose myself, like posting on the fediverse… /s
Okay I’ll bite. I work in product management for capitalist software companies. Every single software product you use has trackers built in unless if you’re hardcore FOSS.
Even if the company has no interest in selling your data, it’s still really hard to learn about user behaviours in the real world in order to figure out what to build next. Many of these trackers are UX tools, much more than selling your data tools. My previous employer fully anonymized and aggregated usage data, but we can’t necessarily say the same for other companies.
These trackers are the industry default and honestly, I don’t know where we’d be without them. We use them to measure the success of what we build and to look for surprises/opportunities.
On that note, for products and websites that I like, I sometimes intentionally turn off my ad and privacy blockers for them (as long as it’s not intrusive). It’s hard to do our work without that data.
Obviously there’s a difference between UX analytics and data collection the data vacuuming Facebook does.
Say you can justify each piece of data collected via a UX element. Someone said in the comments: low battery, charger ad. Where do you draw the line between data for the product vs data for profit? You don’t. It’s all embedded in the idea of “the product”.
This is a company that sells ads AND data. They collect everything. Consumers don’t seem to care. Tiktok is still popular. People see this post and will still download Threads.
It’s important for people to understand the industry justification behind data collection and why it’s so widespread across the industry so we can have this conversation about what “too much data” actually means. Serving me relevant ads like places near me for food? I guess that’s a feature. A face aging app that we train to feed a military database of faces to track down deserters? Not so much.
that sells ads AND data
Companies like Google and Facebook don’t sell data. That’s a common misconception. Having data that other companies don’t have is what makes the companies valuable, so it doesn’t make business sense to sell it. What they do is allow advertisers to target people using that data. Advertisers never actually see the data, nor the exact users their ad reached, just aggregate metrics.
Don’t they have partnership agreements and secondary products that repackages their data as insights? (I’m thinking Cambridge Analytica.) It’s not a direct sale, per se.
Repackaged data in the form of other products is one way to do it.
No. Cambridge Analytica scraped data via the Graph API, which was open for apps to use.
The original idea with the API was that apps could become more social - for example, Spotify had a Facebook integration that’d show which of your friends use Spotify, and their favourite playlists (if they chose to share them). To handle this, the API granted access to not only your data, but some of your friends data. Keep in mind, this was all public profile data that people chose to make visible to public or at least to their friends.
That was fine when people were legitimately using it, but there were bad apps that didn’t follow the rules. Cambridge Analytica scraped data via a quiz app. People would click a link and log in to a quiz app on Facebook. The log in page shows a list of the data types that’d be shared, but people still logged into it. They’d then scrape all accessible data for both the person that logged in, as well as the data their friends had shared.
The API is very locked down now. People that use the API have to have a privacy audit of some sort, and much less data is available. A lot of people don’t like the API being so locked down (for example, it’s impossible to make third-party Facebook apps), but there really wasn’t any other choice.
Thanks for taking the time to educate me (and any passing readers.)
That’s insane, well I know one thing. This is making me want to go download the DuckDuckGo browser.
Shill🤖
What’s your preferred private search engine?
A public Searxng instance is a great way to get some privacy back. We can run searches against multiple engines and settings stay in the local browser. Image searches can be proxied as well if the particular instance allows for it.
Enjoy!
Orientation? Why would Facebook need to know if my phone is gay? Jk, I know they really want to know my phone’s political orientation. Joke’s on them, my phone voted for Megatron.
If you block them from collecting even one of those things, they’ll lock you out of your account until you show them your ID and SSN. It should be illegal for social media to spy on you THAT invasively.
Ah, so it’s a stupidity test.
How do I get duckduckgo to block tracking attempts?
Okay I think I have it. I just installed the duckduckgo app and enabled the tracking protection in settings. And right now I am shocked. The amount of tracking attempts in the last 30 minutes has been mind boggling. 300 attempts and counting! Is this normal?
I enabled it just now and got a massive list from opening the memrise app. In total, 212 so far over 3 apps. I’ve been using ddg for ages, I never really gave a second thought to the optional features. Thanks to everyone who’s been posting screenshots of it!
Edit:
Droplets is literally a kid’s app.
Is this the ddg browser? Are you seeing what it blocks through the browser or does it somehow block on the phone outside the browser like firewalls?
