this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Privacy

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Meta gave Netflix and Spotify access to users private messages (arstechnica.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
50 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Surprise level: 0

I'm not sure how anyone expects any form of privacy from any company Under The Meta umbrella. I would be more surprised to be told that they weren't selling your data to every company that offered to buy it.

I would say this should be ruled out / illegalized but personally I've hit that point where I really don't think we're ever going to have any right to privacy in this country(US), and the government itself benefits far too much from the same privacy Outreach. It will just end up being a slap on the wrist or another pop up saying "Hey by using the site you agree to XYZ" or "by making this account you accept to give away your first born child". But considering the alternative is probably them making the service a subscription based, I'm expecting the majority of their users would prefer it this way.

That being said, Facebook's biggest push right now is all your chats are now end-to-end encrypted, so what this tells me is that either Facebook knew this PR was going to get out there and they wanted to do damage control early, or that Facebook is not doing true end-to-end encryption and that it's still server client encryption between both clients with Facebook holding the shared key.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Zuckerbot sell user data? No one could have suspected this 🙄

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Meta is a dog shit in the middle of a dumpster. Episode 36384927339

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

Meta didn't "give" anybody shit. They sold that access. Do you see the difference?

As always, users are the commodity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I want to point out how similar this is to the FYES arrangement which allows close allies to spy on each other's citizens to skirt the legal blocks of a country spying on its own citizens. This allowed Facebook to honestly say (from a legal standpoint) they didn't read/use private messages for ads. Because they didn't say they didn't sell private messages to other companies for tons of $$$, and let them do the reading and advertising.

Let's not forget how similar Facebook is to a CIA program that ended from public scrutiny only a few years prior, and how much involvement Facebook now has with US Government entities.

If the CIA (or just Facebook) wanted to

  • Kill budding decentralization concepts and

  • Cause overload to the system while Facebook retains ultimate control once everyone gives up or only a few small instances are left

Threads is how it would be done. Interesting naming coincidence too, as pulling a thread causes the entire garment to become structurally compromised.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Remember this next time someone is arguing with you about how we should really not be so quick to defederate from Threads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platforms

Edit:

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/26/meta-gaza-censorship-warren-sanders/

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

What private info does Meta get through federation with other instances?

I suppose any DMs sent to Threads users?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

My point here is not overtly about Privacy. It's about recognizing that Meta has been a terrible corporate citizen for their entire existence. We shouldn't be pretending they are some friendly geeky company that just wants to participate like the rest of us. Even if they were, that's not possible when you are going to pour hundreds of millions of users into these fediverse spaces all at once.

They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's an excellent point that I don't see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.

The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.

If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that's still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Let's not forget how similar Facebook is to a CIA program that ended from public scrutiny only a few years prior, and how much involvement Facebook now has with US Government entities.

If the CIA wanted to kill

1.) Budding decentralization concepts and

2.) Cause overload to the system while Facebook retains ultimate control once everyone gives up or only a few small instances are left

This is how it would be done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yes, although I think DMs are still visible to the instance administrator. I'm not sure if there's a plan or what the timeline is for actually encrypting that information.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Ugh and now it's happening yet again with discord. Everybody seems to want me to be on discord. Just after I managed to get off everything. At least they seem kinda OK for now but we all know it's just a matter of time until dr evil gets his hands on it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Yea I would stay away from discord as well. I truly wish I could switch away from it. I tried revolt but the whole "developing behind a closed repo" thing threw me off. The added difficulty is that my whole social circle uses discord, I do not want to be that guy who tries to make everyone move because of privacy concerns that they do not share.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Same struggle. Are you referencing a specific instance and if so can you link an article or something?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Nah I'm just talking

[–] [email protected] 71 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Not your keys, not your security.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago

And even if it is your key, if you can’t see how they made the lock then you can’t prove other keys won’t unlock it.
OSS FTW

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If you want private messaging - use Signal.
If you use any kind of messaging on commercial platforms, expect immediate loss of privacy. They call them "direct" messages for a reason.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Anyone using these services in current year is asking for this. If someone is not computer literate and "has" to use these unnecessary services because they can't selfhost or whatever they need to recognize that total exploitation of their data is the cost and it will never, ever change unless you own your data on your own hardware.

I can't reiterate enough how much the government will never ever solve this problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Then how do you suggest we keep in touch with those older people in our lives who think other social media are scary?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Call or visit them in person.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Does going this far with targeted ads actually increase people's likelihood to buy something? Like, the value of data you can get on someone has to plateau at some point, right?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Its also about monitoring what people are saying privately about your shows

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I think its about decreasing the costs of Netflix by having the right selection of movies available for a given geography at the right time.

Anyway this limited library thing is another reason I prefer streaming from torrents

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My thinking is that on a case by case basis you are absolutely correct but that statistically the gains much average out in the large scale so that it makes it worth it. Otherwise, surely advertising wouldn't be nearly as big as it is right?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

I don't know. I feel like you need to be predisposed to a product category in order for an advertisement to have any impact on you. I don't give a shit about most of the products I see advertised. They're gathering all this data on me but still end up using it in stupid ways. So much so that even the stuff I am interested in gets presented to me in a worse fashion than it probably would with random ads.

For example, I built a new pc about a year ago and to this day I get tons of targeted ads trying to sell me GPUs and other PC parts. Like, cool, you figured out something I was interested in buying at one point but that interest evaporated the moment I made that purchase. Every ad I've seen since then has been a waste of everyone's time and yet they keep showing them to me.

[–] [email protected] 123 points 7 months ago

This is why they are called direct messages instead of private messages.