FYI, your email provider can read all your emails. This is not a mastodon specific problem.
@ajroach42 And commercial "free" providers do. It's their business model. Same goes for social media like twitter and facebook.
Hell, even the "can't delete" argument goes tits-up in comparison to facebook where you actually can't delete your account and it's the exact behavior they want, it's not going to get fixed EVER.
@ajroach42 Similar thing with the "federated content doesn't (currently) get deleted globally"
There's a plethora of scraping bots on centralized global media (independently of the tracking the social network does itself) that will keep your data, even if you "delete" your twitter/facebook account.
Its not that these problems don't exist on centralized social media.
They do at huge scale - just less visible.
@ajroach42 @phryk when you open up a house, you see the wires, the pipes, the dust, the soda cans the workers left. Etc.
Know enough, it's basically the same: data is passing through pipes other people control, and websites are designed to make information public. To move away from that to a privacy oriented world is almost incommesurable with the Internet. It's also arguable that a degree of sharing and a degree of a lack of privacy is essential to a workable community.
@ajroach42 @phryk Yep! And frankly, I always have felt more comfortable in systems where the reality of the situation is laid bare.
@ajroach42 @pnathan Depends on your definition of secure, I guess. Its decentralized nature will at least make it a good deal more resilient to disruption than centralized platforms. And you can always use PGP for your toots.
@phryk @ajroach42 There's huge money and secrecy in mining & scraping data off Facebook, LinkedIn, and more niche networks.
It's not talked about because it's just too technical and too scary.