Re: Meta implementing ActivityPub as intended? Not so fast IMHO.

Well at the time I was answering last night I was mainly thinking about
Cambridge analytica. But to be honest with you in recent years I've heard
increasingly a lot of criticism and lawsuits being filed especially in
Europe but even in the United States over manipulation of users and data
privacy. I mean I think just the other day Montana made tik tok illegal.
And I literally heard a piece on the radio about a week ago talking about
how I think this was based in Europe the lawsuit over this, that Instagram
and a lot of these platforms are just basically and obviously profit
motivated. And their main intention is to keep people's attention
regardless. And the piece I was listening to on the radio was saying that
some two out of every three young girls consider suicide that spend a lot
of time on social media. That is of a great concern to a lot of people and
increasingly so.
Dan

On Tue, May 23, 2023, 2:57 AM Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> wrote:

> Quoting Daniel Smith (2023-05-23 09:02:41)
> > Well my main question would be about this topic, and I'm just following
> > this list, would be what about the actions of organizations like the old
> > Cambridge analytica, and the ability of meta to interact with the
> fediverse
> > and capture and amass users identities or profiles or general information
> > about them for use in political operations or whatever?
>
> Seems to me that you are essentially asking if it is techically possible
> to act as an unfair player in the Fediverse - specifically if it is
> possible to benefit from openly shared data without "giving back".
>
> Sure it is.  At multiple levels.
>
> My criticism here is that, as I understand it, unfair actions are
> *aided* by core design choices of the Meta protocols, and consequently
> b) there is a real danger in embracing those protocols - regards if
> possible to not abuse those core powers of the protocols.
>
> With RDF and SPARQL you can optionally track as a custom addon.
>
> With OpenGraph and GraphQL you can optionally not track.
>
> Personally I think it is counterproductive to try construct technical
> tools that cannot be abused.  I do think, however, that it is important
> for developers to be aware of the potential for abuse and not embrace
> tracking-by-default tools when not-tracking-by-default tools exist.
>
> Because essentially, a well-behaving community is a *social* challenge,
> not a technical challenge - where the technical *support* for that
> challenge is to make use versus abuse easy recognizable for the
> community to deal with socially.  Big players will actively try to
> distort the language of conversation, e.g. by calling a tracking-enabled
> competitor "Open" when that is fundamentally not the core feature of
> that new thing.
>
>
>  - Jonas
>
> --
>  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
>  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
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>
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