Hey here's something about the Fediverse that some people don't take into account:
I see on "hacker" "news" that there is currently discussion about Scuttlebutt and the very clever opinion is that oh no, distributed social is worse than FB/Twitter because nothing is stopping BigScaryCorp from scooping up all your public posts.
Ignoring the fact that you can very easily have a locked account or even one that has public AND non-public posts... 1/
This also ignores the MASSIVE vulnerability from FB/Twitter apps.
Apps mean not only are you giving those companies your posts, but also your call logs, possibly SMS data, details of all the other apps on your phone, phone number, contact details, usage data, full social graph, detailed location data, ability to read phone storage, microphone access, access to your calendar, activity recognition (are you walking, driving etc), view network connections, etc etc
2/
That's a lot of data people never consider when thinking about this stuff and it's important.
Your posts are what you choose to share, the rest of that data is not and can give a very detailed overview of your life
3/3
Another piece of hugely valuable data that EvilCorp misses when you use federated social media is who you are.
They know your username which gives an idea of who you might be, but without your cookies, email address, browsing history (through web beacons etc), credit card purchases and so on they cannot link you to the existing huge profile that may exist for you.
This is a killer. Posts on their own are almost nothing.
@paul this! So very much this!
This is missing from these discussions all the time, perhaps because it's one of the less obvious (but more sinister) issues with the Microfacegoopple.
Everyone should at one point or another run Mozilla Lightbeam:
https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/lightbeam/
@paul oh, I didn't know about Facebook buying credit data.
Link?
@rysiek https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/30/facebook-buys-data-on-users-offline-habits-for-better-ads/
and recently they were in talks with hospitals to get people's medical data too. They only put that on hold because of the CA scandal
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/05/facebook-medical-research-data-sharing
@paul this is damn scary! thanks!
@david_ross @rysiek Yep. As with most of this sort of thing people either don't know about it or don't realise exactly how the data can be used. I guess it's only in the last few years with all the other data sources that this has become a big threat
@rysiek Agreed. The worst bit is FB will have your purchase data, income bracket, social graph (from any FB using friends), phone and sms logs (again from friends), browsing history (unless you use uBlock or similar) and in the future your medical records even if you never sign up to Facebook.com!
@rysiek Indeed. the data Lightbeam exposes is scary and that only shows you the 3rd party stuff your browser is doing. Companies like FB are buying up data from credit card companies, Experian etc and there's no way of seeing that at all.