Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

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[–] 27 points 3 years ago (9 children)

What should happen? That's all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    But it's probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they've tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Meta isn't really in the data SELLING business. It'd be counterproductive to let their competitors have access to all the data they do - it's what keeps their advertising network competitive. Same goes for Google. They don't want third parties to have access to your data, they want to be THE company that sells targeted advertisements.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Sell it in bulk to governments for large sums of money for which advertising isn't their interest.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    Oh what makes you think governments need to pay for that? Is free if you're a big enough market.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm surprised that they pay for it. They could just demand it through all kinds of national security laws.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Oh they definitely do that stuIf but when they do they have to disclose that to the senate or whomever oversees such things. This way they can quietly buy up a shit ton of data with whatever dark budgets they have access to.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    If it's public information why would it be illegal? If I understand correctly the only thing stopping anyone else from doing it as effectively is Meta's ability to aggregate the data and find the buyers, and perhaps morals.

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