Text for readability:
So far, Americans using RedNote have said they don’t care if China has access to their data. Viral videos on TikTok in recent days have shown Americans jokingly saying they will miss their personal “Chinese spy,” while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.
“This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren’t controlled by the same few oligarchs,” Quintin said. “People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks.”
Lemmy doesn’t have the censorship and speech-control from those platforms, but it pretty much distributes your data widely to anybody that asks for it.
Hear me out: if you post stuff publicly, it is out there. The issue is data that shouldn’t be public getting public
This is it. A strong public domain benefits everyone. It is why open source software works.
AFAIU Lemmy sends your username, a user ID, and URI along with your message. That’s pretty innocuous.
It’s way less innocuous than you think.
But yeah, it’s only the stuff that you’d expect it to send. And only the stuff it needs to send. But the thing is, the valuable data those social networks gather is almost exactly that. They will invade your privacy and get everything they can, but the real value is on that and what you read. (What you read isn’t shared here.)
Content sure, but not where you are when you posted it and other meta data
On that note, I’d be shocked if one or more of the alphabet agencies haven’t developed a half-duplex version of the fediverse platforms purely for surveillance purposes. The openness of the ecosystem is really nice, but the default promiscuity of the protocols in question does have some specific and notable drawbacks.
It’s never really been about data collection. It’s about what service feeds users. The algorithm can be tweaked to provide slant towards particular ideals. It can sway elections. Some would rightly say that’s already done hard by western social apps. Yeah, and that’s wrong too. So they blame other countries for a smoke screen.
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