"It's okay when a major American company does it." - FBI/DOJ

Fixed it for you. Guarantee if they found TikTok doing this that ban would be going through today.

Let me correct you: "It's okay when a major AMERICAN company does it."

There's no doubt they have an ulterior motive. The way they're federating right now is very one-sided and basically tells people they can just post on Threads and get the best of both worlds as they reach both audiences.

However, I see no harm from this to the dedicated Mastodon users who boycott or avoid Meta. They now get to follow Threads accounts without sharing their phone number or other personal information with Meta.

The data collection argument is weak, since everything you post on Mastodon is already public.

That pink background, ugh. #6F89B4 goes much easier on the eyes and still keeps both black and white fonts perfectly legible

Lovely to see how crazy long that list was!

Quite simply: "Feda is always betta without meta"

Seems like a textbook case of violations of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. They should be criminally charged.

@ExtremeDullard

@throws_lemy

Facebook paid kids $20 a month to run this app: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-research-vpn-minors-data-access-apple

These kids most likely didn’t see it as a VPN at all

it was a free app, wasn't owned by Facebook from the beginning (they've acquired it in 2013), and it offered data saving, so it was a tempting install for people with small data plans.

And so you have to wonder: who in his right mind would buy a VPN service from effing Facebook of all companies?

I constantly wondered the same thing about sensor-laden VR HMDs, but here we are.

At this point I wonder how many people wouldn't bat an eye if their Facebook account was their national ID.

The penalty, if any, would be the equivalent of you promising, someday, to pay half a penny... If you can find one, but don't rush... You know what, just forget about the whole thing and apologies for your troubles

There is zero doubt in my mind that Google VPN is a honey pot for ad mining.

You'd have to be a complete fucking moron to get your VPN from any surveillance capitalism corporation.

Hahaha, why would Google need a VPN to spy on you? Google keyboard tracks everything you do.

Of course they're doing the same thing! How much of a patsy do you need to be to think otherwise?

They have money. Period. End of discussion. Money equals do what you want. Having “fuck you” money equals do what you want to whoever you want without consequence.

This is the world we live in and it’s not going to change while half of an entire country’s voting body is willing to elect an insurrectionist that’s guilty of rape among ninety some-odd other things.

Best to just accept this and look inward to you and your own and do your best to keep those things happy and healthy.

It's not spying when you directly give them access to monitor your communications. Says section 632 subsection VIIXVVIIX Subsubsection D in the 69 fine print 42. Isn't everyone a lawyer with hundreds of hours to spend reading Eula's?

Also fuck this noise. It's made legal because people click agree to 10000000 pages of contract.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-execs-decrypt-rival-apps-usage-snap-youtube-2024-3

This is a 'man-in-the-middle approach,'" the email said.

Yep, this article has more details about it

…what?

This was one company spying on the users of its competitor via unofficial means. Even in the furthest stretch of the corporate boot licking bullshit that “you signed up for the app so you deserve to be spied on” exists in, I don’t see how this scenario is covered.

It's a proprietary platform .... what do people expect?

It's visiting someone's business and you are in their property and you are watching TV on their TV set. You are reading newspapers and books that are on their property. And everyone acts surprised when the property owner keeps track of what you watched and what you read on their property.

You have no rights to do anything on their property .... other than the rights they give you, which they can also take away, or just kick you out.

Are you under the impression that Facebook owns Snapchat? Because they don’t. Nothing about this little “blame people for using proprietary services” rant is actually relevant to what happened. At all.

You should read the article because you clearly didn’t. Hell, all you’d have to do is read the first paragraph to understand they were spying on the users of a competitor.

What I really dislike in this way of thinking is that when Facebook is doing it, the reaction is what do you expect and when TikTok are doing it, people are outraged and call for banning the whole platform.

So why the double standards?

~~I think you are thinking of Instagram. Facebook doesn’t own Snapchat.~~

Oh it’s Onavo. Onavo was the “Facebook VPN” software they shuttered in 2019. So it had access to network traffic on-device before it was sent out.

Seems like it was more than a VPN, and put its claws deep into the network stack if it was reading packet buffers before they were encrypted. Not good; I’m sure that users were not made aware of this but in light of this possibility, your point stands.

I like your analogy but from my perspective it isn't fitting.

It would be more like the postal service opening your letters.

Even if they paid them there are a lot of things being done here that could be illegal, hence why they immediately shut down the VPN after someone found out what they are doing.

Not to mention how highly unethical this all is. If you read the articles, there were multiple people FROM Facebook that questioned the approach.

There are obviously ways that this kind of research could be done ethically or legally, and your right that people should be empowered over their data. That does not mean a large company abusing it's knowledge and power should be legal.

Why? It's not illegal, people don't care, they've decimated privacy to the point no one cares, so they're doing nothing wrong as Lon as they can justify all his horrendous shit to themselves.