Facebook's New Twitter Alternative Is A Harvester Of All Sorts Of Info - You Probably Don't Want Zuckerberg To Have All Of This ...

Do you really want Zuckerberg to have your private medical history? All of your contacts and the interactions you've had with them, including those you presume to be private?

I’m dumping social media in general, because it’s a privacy risk and the data put out in the “cloud” could be used for phishing and other nefarious purposes. This includes Meta apps like Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads, but also Gab and MeWe. I’m looking closely at Twitter, too… Social media is widely used for psyops and harassment, it’s probably a major cause of divisiveness and social hysteria, and has been used for many other toxic purposes:

The various social contagions seen over the past four or five years - the transgender hysteria, the COVID hysteria of fear and loathing, the “woke” hysteria - can be laid at the feet of social media - and this is apparently deliberate and well-characterized, in the case below by researchers at Facebook itself:

“Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.” https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

And social media only gives the perception of connection - there is no real connection at all, and the social media companies do everything they can to prevent real connection, like through phone calls and emails not mediated and spied on by those companies:

Part of what’s in the graphic below may be a joke - such as the last three lines - but comedy nowadays is a mirror of the real situation:

(source: https://vulnu.mattjay.com/p/security-vs-privacy)

“Meta’s planned Twitter killer, Threads, isn’t yet publicly available but it already looks like a privacy nightmare.

Information provided about the app’s privacy via mandatory disclosures required on iOS shows the app may collect highly sensitive information about users in order to profile their digital activity — including health and financial data, precise location, browsing history, contacts, search history and other sensitive information.

Given that Meta, the developer behind the app, the company formerly known as Facebook, makes its money from tracking and profiling web users to sell their attention via its behavioral advertising microtargeting tools this is hardly surprising.

…

Currently, the adtech giant does not even offer users a general, up-front choice to deny its tracking and profiling, let alone explicitly ask if it can share data on your health conditions so advertisers can try to sell you diet pills or whatever. And with even harder limits on surveillance ads coming down the pipe in the EU an app that proposes to track everything to maximize its appeal to advertisers will be a tough sell to regional regulators.

Plus — as if that wasn’t enough — Meta was recently hit with an order to stop sending EU users data to the US for processing and fined almost $1.3BN for breaching the GDPR’s requirements on data exports. That order is specific to Facebook but, in principle, the same requirement could be applied to other Meta services that don’t adequately protect Europeans’ data over the pond (such as by using zero knowledge architecture and end-to-end encryption). And, clearly, Threads isn’t going to offer users that kind of privacy.

Bringing Meta’s surveillance ads business into compliance with EU law is going to require a sea-change in how it operates — one which does not appear to be its plan with Threads, given it’s presenting more of the same data-grabbing attention farming that’s gained Mark Zuckerberg’s empire such a toxic rep it had to undergo an expensive corporate rebrand to Meta in recent years.

Whether the rebranding has worked to detoxify Meta’s corporate image looks debatable given it’s opting to attach Threads to Instagram’s brand, rather than explicitly calling it a Meta app (the developer listed on the App Store is “Instagram Inc” and the text description describes the app as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app”). Albeit that choice might be more to do with Meta seeing it as the best strategy for quickly building up a Threads user-base if it can push Instagram’s large and engaged community to insta-adopt what it’s framing as a sister “text” app so the latter can hit the ground running.” https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/threads-no-eu-launch/

“Sensitive Information - You might choose to provide information about your religious views, your sexual orientation, political views, health, racial or ethnic origin, philosophical beliefs or trade union membership.” https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy?subpage=1.subpage.1-YourActivityAndInformation

Apparently, Threads and Instagram are tied together, so if you want to get rid of Threads, Instagram goes away, too - but as I’ve said above, that might just be a really good idea if you want any kind of privacy for your life. And it might make you a lot less depressed and lonely - and help your blood pressure and general health, too.