MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘data privacy’

Meta Launches Data-Harvesting Twitter Clone, Immediately Starts Censoring

Posted by M. C. on July 7, 2023

As journalist Michael Shellenberger notes,

Within a few hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal.

That crazy guy Zuck, at it again!

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/metas-twitter-clone-reaches-10-million-users-hours-aoc-says-app-bricked-her

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Meta claims that over 10 million people had signed up for its Twitter competitor, Threads, in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed as a “friendly” alternative to the little blue bird.

“Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads,” wrote Zuckerberg in his first post on the app, which is a “text-based conversation app” where users can publish posts up to 500 characters long, and allows people to post links, photos and videos.

Threads is directly linked to Meta-owned Instagram, which has over 2 billion users. The Twitter competitor is being rolled out in over 100 countries for iOS and Android.

“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” wrote Zuckerberg in a Wednesday post, casting the service as a more wholesome substitute to Twitter. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”

Meanwhile, data privacy and censorship concerns have emerged, with former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey highlighting the vast amount of data collected by Threads.

As journalist Michael Shellenberger notes,

Within a few hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal.

Meta is already too powerful. One company controls what much of the public is allowed to see. And if Threads succeeds, it will have 80% of the global market outside of Russia and China, according to one industry insider. As such, it’s reasonable to expect that Meta will censor precisely the same way the large news media corporations, including the New York Times, and corporate advertisers want it to. More censorship is what the mainstream news media, big corporations, and their celebrity pitch people have been demanding.

…additionally, Unlike Twitter, Threads collects data about “Health & Fitness,” “Financial Info,” “Sensitive Info,” and “Other Data.”

What’s ‘other data’?

Shellenberger further noted that within hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

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WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum is leaving Facebook after clashing over data privacy

Posted by M. C. on May 1, 2018

I don’t know anything about Jan Koum but obviously he isn’t dumb. He couldn’t see what Facebook is all about? He didn’t see the CIA/In-Q-Tel connection? Did Zuck con him with a pack of fake promises?

Koum’s concern with privacy appears genuine, that is the non sequitur. The real story would be interesting.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17304792/whatsapp-jan-koum-facebook-data-privacy-encryption

Nick Statt

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum is leaving the company amid arguments with parent company Facebook over data privacy and the messaging app’s business model, according to a report from The Washington Post. Koum, together with his fellow co-founder Brian Acton, sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for an eye-popping sum of $19 billion, $3 billion of which consisted of Facebook stock granted to both Koum and Acton, who left the company back in September. Koum confirmed his departure in a personal Facebook posttoday… Read the rest of this entry »

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