Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given these apps’ use of encryption, Facebook needed to develop special technology to get around it.
Facebook’s engineers solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013. In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access all of their web activity.
After Zuckerberg’s email, the Onavo team took on the project and a month later proposed a solution: so-called kits that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific subdomains, “allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” read an email from July 2016. “This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach.”
A man-in-the-middle attack — nowadays also called adversary-in-the-middle — is an attack where hackers intercept internet traffic flowing from one device to another over a network. When the network traffic is unencrypted, this type of attack allows the hackers to read the data inside, such as usernames, passwords, and other in-app activity.
Do you know how the Fediverse works? Instance maintainers who are less than thrilled with Meta can choose to defederate from Threads.
Exactly my point. It’d be on an instance by instance basis, there is no “singular group” that can block them from the entire fediverse.
The whole point of federation is that you aren’t locked in the sinking ship. If everyone is defederating from your instance you can move to a better one.
Yes, but to realistically keep Threads from federating and utilizing people’s posts, every single instance owner would have to defederate. 1) that’s not likely, and 2) that’s a unilateral decision by the instance owner. I’m looking at things from a realistic standpoint, not an idealistic one.
The only places Threads can federate with are instances that are so poorly managed that they don’t even block Threads.
Which is probably a lot more than would be expected.
So long as my instance continues to block instances that don’t block threads, I’m happy.
I don’t need a public-facing microblogging service, I like having my own little dark corner on the internet. https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn
Good for you, but that won’t help majority of the people who don’t know or can’t run their own instance. Also the moment you make a post out to one of those instances that hasn’t defeated, Threads will just hoover your post right up. You’ll isolate yourself, sure, but not your posts or interactions. Welcome to ActivityPub.
I do suppose it’s better to only be implicitly training language models and making public posts which anyone is free to screenshot or repurpose compared to explicitly propagating all posts to Meta.
Why would I want to see posts from people on social networks who care so little about social networking that they’ve joined a corporate app?
It’s not ideal, for sure, but at least I won’t have to see any posts from threads.
I wouldn’t call lemmy.world poorly managed.
Or are paid not to block.