Meta keeps a profile on you even if you’re not a user. They mine data from your friends, family, and colleagues to learn who you are. If anyone you know has you in their phone contacts, and if they’ve given apps like Messenger or Whatsapp access to their contacts, then you already have a secret Meta account.
Why does Meta want to gather data on non users? Because this information is valuable for data on social engineering. Social engineering includes advertising, influencing people to make purchases in both direct and in subtle ways. But it also includes political campaigning, and the efforts of industry giants to influence people in certain directions.
Maybe car companies want you driving bigger and more expensive cars. Maybe fossil fuel companies want you to form positive associations with the idea of gas stoves. Maybe Israel wants you exposed to pro-IDF memes on your social media. Maybe the US government wants you to respect the law and ignore covid.
This data is a tool that tells organisations how to make subtle changes that influence populations. If you have access to enough information, you can run scientific experiments to see what random changes influence people’s behaviour. Then you figure out how to make those changes less random, and more controlled. Meta has already gotten in trouble for running exactly these experiments.
In a companion piece, The Times reported that people at Cambridge Analytica and its British affiliate, the SCL Group, were in contact with executives from Lukoil, the Kremlin-linked oil giant, as Cambridge built its Facebook-derived profiles. Lukoil was interested in the ways data was used to target American voters, according to two former company insiders. SCL and Lukoil denied that the talks were political in nature and said the oil giant never became a client.
Democrats looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election — already interested in Cambridge’s role in providing analytics to the Trump campaign — said they would seek an investigation into the leak. They were echoed by lawmakers in Britain investigating Cambridge Analytica’s role in disinformation and the country’s referendum to leave the European Union.
Meta has been using the internet to influence the government and control the laws you live under, no matter what part of the world you’re from.
ha, yeah i dont use those apps either. i also dont use youtube or any streaming platforms. i can appreciate i am not the masses though.
that said, the fediverse is by its nature, public. anything put out here is being put out into public, for public consumption. its already fairly possible for a configured LLM to pull any text a specific person has typed simply by the linguistic signature give the data and a sample. meta can already scrape all of our data and make inferences.
i think our problems go back to why people use these platforms as a form of information proxy in the first place; lack of critical thinking… purposeful destruction of the education system
It’s not just the data collection, it’s also the data presentation. Meta controls how information is presented on their platforms. Remember how I was talking about making seemingly random changes to influence society? Social platforms are how Meta makes those changes. They can control what gets upvotes on Facebook and Threads. If Threads is federated with Moist Catsweat, then they influence what content is visible from the Hot and Active pages of Moist Catsweat. That means they don’t just control the political opinions of everyone you talk to, they can influence you. Show you memes and news articles that make you more likely to vote for Trump or Brexit or whatever it is in your country.
I feel like you’re arguing in bad faith. Meta/Facebook has shown for years what kind of company they are and a lot of folks don’t want that. That’s why they’re here and not on Facebook.
I feel that you need to be the one to supply arguments to convince us of how they’re not going to do what they have done in the past here and how they’ve changed as a company rather than the other way around.
im not here for blocking meta/facebook on ‘being assholes’ reasons. i need actual, technical , server-level reasons.
for example, nestle and facebook are both terrible actors. do i block their SMTP servers? nope. im not going out of my way to block companies at the protocol level unless i have a reason to do so. its extra work, and honestly, mostly necessary outside resource issues.
meta doesnt control the protocol anymore than they control SMTP.
i feel like you just have no technical understanding of the communication platforms
meta isnt in a position to kill the fediverse with their single server and inability to modify ActivityPub.
im still hearing a lot of ‘but my feels’ and no ‘this will break your server/communication because…’
if you dont use their products, how can they ruin the internet?
just curious, i havent touched any of their shit in decades and i kinda havent really noticed the internet being any worse because of them
Meta keeps a profile on you even if you’re not a user. They mine data from your friends, family, and colleagues to learn who you are. If anyone you know has you in their phone contacts, and if they’ve given apps like Messenger or Whatsapp access to their contacts, then you already have a secret Meta account.
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg
Why does Meta want to gather data on non users? Because this information is valuable for data on social engineering. Social engineering includes advertising, influencing people to make purchases in both direct and in subtle ways. But it also includes political campaigning, and the efforts of industry giants to influence people in certain directions.
Maybe car companies want you driving bigger and more expensive cars. Maybe fossil fuel companies want you to form positive associations with the idea of gas stoves. Maybe Israel wants you exposed to pro-IDF memes on your social media. Maybe the US government wants you to respect the law and ignore covid.
This data is a tool that tells organisations how to make subtle changes that influence populations. If you have access to enough information, you can run scientific experiments to see what random changes influence people’s behaviour. Then you figure out how to make those changes less random, and more controlled. Meta has already gotten in trouble for running exactly these experiments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html
Meta has been using the internet to influence the government and control the laws you live under, no matter what part of the world you’re from.
ha, yeah i dont use those apps either. i also dont use youtube or any streaming platforms. i can appreciate i am not the masses though.
that said, the fediverse is by its nature, public. anything put out here is being put out into public, for public consumption. its already fairly possible for a configured LLM to pull any text a specific person has typed simply by the linguistic signature give the data and a sample. meta can already scrape all of our data and make inferences.
i think our problems go back to why people use these platforms as a form of information proxy in the first place; lack of critical thinking… purposeful destruction of the education system
It’s not just the data collection, it’s also the data presentation. Meta controls how information is presented on their platforms. Remember how I was talking about making seemingly random changes to influence society? Social platforms are how Meta makes those changes. They can control what gets upvotes on Facebook and Threads. If Threads is federated with Moist Catsweat, then they influence what content is visible from the Hot and Active pages of Moist Catsweat. That means they don’t just control the political opinions of everyone you talk to, they can influence you. Show you memes and news articles that make you more likely to vote for Trump or Brexit or whatever it is in your country.
https://youtu.be/qyN5tNYhfSg?si=pb8hpz9f8iQZykl6
I don’t use either if those platforms, and the meta upvotes are tied to user accounts.
Again, I still don’t see a problem here for me. Meta upvotes/downvotes are not going to be undiscernable from my local content.
If I think they are having an influence, I can actually check.
And you send me a YouTube link?? Ha
What you will notice is the law changing.
thats a long way to go for ‘why we should not accept aunt betty’s upvote on this cat picture’… but hey, you do you man.
I feel like you’re arguing in bad faith. Meta/Facebook has shown for years what kind of company they are and a lot of folks don’t want that. That’s why they’re here and not on Facebook.
I feel that you need to be the one to supply arguments to convince us of how they’re not going to do what they have done in the past here and how they’ve changed as a company rather than the other way around.
im not here for blocking meta/facebook on ‘being assholes’ reasons. i need actual, technical , server-level reasons.
for example, nestle and facebook are both terrible actors. do i block their SMTP servers? nope. im not going out of my way to block companies at the protocol level unless i have a reason to do so. its extra work, and honestly, mostly necessary outside resource issues.
meta doesnt control the protocol anymore than they control SMTP.
i feel like you just have no technical understanding of the communication platforms
meta isnt in a position to kill the fediverse with their single server and inability to modify ActivityPub.
im still hearing a lot of ‘but my feels’ and no ‘this will break your server/communication because…’