this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Genuine question here, it looks like most of the info they’re collecting here could also be collected via scraping that info from any publicly available instance (profile pic, username, etc.)
What added info would they get from federation that isn’t already something we are giving away ourselves by participating in a public protocol like ActivityPub?
Federation basically just means your instance will scrape Meta in turn and serve their content to you, whereas being defederated it will not. That means federated or no, without additional precautions by admins of particular instances, Meta will be getting the same info federated or no. Being defederated makes interacting with Meta's service much less likely though, which makes them scraping your data less likely. This update to the ToS honestly just sort of describes how the fediverse works anyway this isn't some special feature of Threads, all instances behave this way.
Thanks, this was the impression I got as well. It doesn’t make anything public that wasn’t already public, it just makes it easier and more likely for Meta to ingest the data more directly.