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Why just blocking Meta's Threads won't be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse
(privacy.thenexus.today)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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To be fair I do not expect any privacy protections from lemmy/mastodon in general, or from blocking/defederation in particular.
Lemmy/Mastodon protocols are not really private, as soon you place your data in one instance your data is accessible by others in the same instance. If that instance is federated this extends to other instances too. In other words the system can be seen as mostly public data since most instances are public.
The purpose of blocking or defederation (which is blocking at instance level) is to fight spam content, not to provide privacy.
I do sort of expect the Lemmy instance to protect my IP address, email associated with my account and whatever fingerprinting can be done in the browser as well as protect any Javascript they use from injections of third party Javascript, but only when accessing the instance, not when following external links or otherwise loading external content (e.g. images hosted elsewhere).
Fair point (IP, email, browser session data). Those should not be exposed via the federation in any way. And the existence of the federated network means we could switch instances if we are concerned our instance is a bad actor about this.
I did not mean to suggest the ecosystem is not valuable for privacy. I just really don't want people to associate federation with privacy protections about data that is basically public (posts, profile data, etc). Wrong expectations about privacy are harmful.