this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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I'm confused about what kind of data you want to protect. If you mean your posts and comments, they are already publicly availible on the Internet. Meta doesn't need to make a activitypub app that gets federated with Lemmy to aggregate and sell this data.
Is there an other kind of data that is visible only to server administrators?
I guess the fear is that they'll monetize others' content without giving anything back. Like imagine if there was Reddit2 that just took all the content from Reddit but didn't add their oc back to Reddit. Basically just leeching off and your average user would be incentivized to join "Reddit2" since it had all the content that Reddit has and more. They'd slowly drain users from Reddit to Reddit2 and THEN monetized turning everything to shit (you can use your imagination how'd that look).
Well, they could do that regardless of whether they're running an ActivityPub service. Nothing's stopping them from a technical viewpoint
Sure, but being "part of" the fediverse and providing (possibly) the best experience (because they have the resources) you can easily imagine a situation where they play the nice guy until they have accumulated enough users to monetize.
That's how I'd do it, anyhow.
Nothing stopping them, except, you know, the law... They can certainly display content that was not marked for public display. They will then proceed to get sued out of existence... If they do this automatically I'll just privately post a music file with copyright protected music. Which is perfectly fine to do if it is indeed hidden from everyone. If they then publicly post it that's on them and now I get to see the Music Industry fight the Zuck :D
Edit: Been corrected, the following is NOT how it works! Original Text follows
Someone correct me if I'm getting details wrong, but from reading this post it appears as if fediverse admins are provided both the username and email accounts registered by those users that have visited their instances.
If that's true, one problematic scenario I can imagine is when someone has registered on the fediverse with a pseudonym, but has an e-mail address they also use on their real-life Facebook profile. Visiting a Facebook-run ActivityPub instance while logged in would give Facebook enough data to link both the pseudonymous account (with past and future post history), and the real-life Facebook profile.
So, even if you're not signed up for Facebook's version of ActivityPub, engaging with it could still be giving Facebook a source of ongoing data for building personal profiles and targeted advertisement that people would not provide on their own.