Fediverse

I showed my friend all of the privacy problems with threads and his response was ‘I don’t care, they already have everything anyway’.

I told another friend and their response was ‘I don’t care if they have my data, it’s not much use to them and it doesn’t have any effect on me’

The world is hopeless.

Sigh, just tell me which team to join, so I don't have to make anxiety producing decisions and alienate anyone. Don't wanna rock the boat!

Bigger is better, right?

/S in case it isn't obvious.

So there's a lot of doom and gloom here, but what do we actually do about it? How do we do it? ~Strawberry

It's more that the average person doesn't have a clear understanding of what the cost is of not protecting your privacy.

The Internet is basically a privacy economy, where you sell your privacy in return for free services, and to most people this feels like a very one sided exchange. They're giving away something that to them has no percieved value.

What privacy advocates need to get better at is actually explaining to people what the value of their privacy is.

What do you mean when you say "privacy"? Threads isn't more or less private than using any other federated service-- they all share everything you do on them with everything else anyway. I guess federation doesn't share things like your email and IP address, so there is some privacy-related concerns, so maybe that's what you meant?

The big distinction between threads and, say, Mastodon is that Mastodon doesn't have an algorithm. The minor distinctions are more along the lines of it being open source and not controlled by a giant corporation. I am not surprised that most people don't care about (or maybe actively seek out) a service with an algorithm, let alone about the benefits of FOSS.

Most people just don't even realise despite everything that all of these huge corporations are tracking their every move and, of those that do, many do not see or simply refuse to acknowledge the dangerous implications of handing people like Mark and Elon what are, in many cases, essentially the keys to their personal lives.

You could tell that from the number of users having a meta account

Same here. I've tried so hard to get people to care about their privacy. But it's one of those things that human brains are designed to fear things they can see and feel. We aren't really good at fearing the stuff that creeps up. (aka heart disease, diabetes, privacy creep lol)

In the case of content creators they typically would not care as much about privacy from a social media platform. They are going to do anything that gives them a commercial/marketing edge, so why wouldn’t they try to be visible in the most popular place?

Yes, I think it is blatantly obvious how little many people care about their privacy and data. This is the result of an astonishing lack of knowledge and education on the consequences of giving away your data. They cannot imagine how many types of data are stored about them and analyzed to gain all sorts of insights into their life, thoughts, ideas, views and social life. Often people don't believe they have anything to hide which is always false because we are humans. The other is they underestimate or refuse to believe the the information which can be drawn from your data or the fact that ads and other forms of manipulation do in fact work on them.

Unfortunately it's just not that much of a priority for most people. They value convenience much more than privacy.

People have a lot going on in their lives.

how do you think we got here (gestures all around) in the first place

The problem isn't privacy. It's how they use the data they get from you to lie to you.