Harvard gutted team examining Facebook Files following $500M Zuckerberg donation | Hacker News

Otter@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 789 points –
news.ycombinator.com

I linked the discussion because I didn't know enough about the content

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Stop using facebook/meta, Instagram, Whatsapp. You're giving them power by using their services. Use alternatives like Friendica, PixelFed, or Signal.

That's all well and good, but if you think that Facebook isn't mirroring all data from the Fediverse, and any other network it can touch, and then correlating what it can back to whatever individual/digital/personal profiles it can, you'd be mistaken.

The only solution here is a political one with significant judicial punishment as the enforcement mechanism. FYI I'm also including the guillotine in the list of nonviable solutions, as the problem is too large and geographically vast to behead our way out of it, even if it would be cathartic.

Can we have a little beheading as a treat?

I'm not opposed to the idea, and it it's purely for catharsis I'd prefer a good gibbeting at the National Mall, repurposing the NYPD's horses to aid with drawing and quartering them in Times Square, or... Well, basically anything that isn't as clean and quick as a guillotine.

while I agree they are probably doing this and we should have better data privacy/ownership, the scope of the data they can pull from the fediverse is substantially less than what they get from their platform.

when you're on Facebook, they control and track everything. which posts you see, which you don't, and in what order, how long you looked at a given post, whether or not you scrolled through comments, every movement of your mouse, everything you typed and deleted in that text box, where on the screen you touched while you dragged to scroll, what text you highlighted, absolutely everything.

the only data they can probably pull from the fediverse is posts, comments, and like/dislike. maybe which posts you clicked into if that's public and I'm pretty sure they can't get which posts were shown to you without owning the instance you're on.

Nearly everyone has a shadow account if you know someone that uses it.