Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threadslocked
blog.joinmastodon.org
Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
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What should happen? That's all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.
But it's probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they've tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.
Meta isn't really in the data SELLING business. It'd be counterproductive to let their competitors have access to all the data they do - it's what keeps their advertising network competitive. Same goes for Google. They don't want third parties to have access to your data, they want to be THE company that sells targeted advertisements.
Sell it in bulk to governments for large sums of money for which advertising isn't their interest.
Oh what makes you think governments need to pay for that? Is free if you're a big enough market.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-us-government-purchases-your-user-data-heres-what-it-does-with-it/
I'm surprised that they pay for it. They could just demand it through all kinds of national security laws.
If the fine it's less than the profit they will do it anyways.
If it's public information why would it be illegal? If I understand correctly the only thing stopping anyone else from doing it as effectively is Meta's ability to aggregate the data and find the buyers, and perhaps morals.