It's exactly the reason the EU shut the door on them.

ah yes, reporting spyware to the company famous for having spyware on literally everything they make

Off topic, but I keep hearing your comments in Max Headroom's voice. This one was especially suitable for that!

I remember when it was something of a privacy scandal that RealPlayer would phone home to check for updates.

Still, end of the day, if people aren't willing to pay for services with money, directly, then they're going to pay with their data.

It is necessary... for Meta.
Their business depends on the data that is harvested from it's users.

The fact that they can't launch in EU because of how much data they are hoovering up, is a tell tale sign as to how the business is operating.

Seriously... I don't understand how people can look at that list and be like. This seems fine.

It isn't unnecessary at all, if you're Meta.

Which is the fundamental issue with a system like that.

The priority is in the wrong damn place.

Depression, lower self esteem, active participation in the destruction of society, and sometimes a path to bigoted hateful extremist terrorism.

Not a bad deal if you have rocks for brains.

A friend of mine simply tried using Threads just to see how shitty it would be. She thought that it would be as simple as a quick download followed by a swift delete.

Turns out, you can't delete your Threads account without nuking your Instagram account either. She's stuck with the Threads account now.

Genuinely, are you asking why people like social media in general?

For one reason or another, they find the platform to be some combination of useful or entertaining and a good way to connect with people they care about. If you don't otherwise have significant personal issues about advertising, it's not an unreasonable position to think that the pros outweigh the cons, even if you have different priorities.

Oh, I expected absolutely nothing else.

Yeah I don't want it to be popular, I want it to be good and sustainable. Everything else comes after.

Practice makes permanent. Do it right, then get faster.

I mean, Meta can extract from the fediverse already. Having a federated instance doesn't really change that. It doesn't provide them deeper access than before. Theyre either federating due to EU policies on interoperability or trying to position themselves as the best instance in regards to the fediverse. There's a lot of clamour as to how great the fediverse is for users, now they can say "choose us, we're fediverse." Other instances need to show them the benefit of other instances and point out that they can have all the "benefits of Threads" (really just benefits of fediverse) without all the disadvantages.

That's why I deleted my actual Facebook account, it really did give me the impression that the company was Cyberstalking me. They knew stuff I did not tell them or put down anywhere in any of the data forms they gave me to fill out. I didn't upload any pictures, I barely did much of anything, yet somehow they seemed to know everything about me anyway.

I eventually made a new "account" a few years later and left it completely blank and filled out nothing but my name... and yet they still guessed quite a few things correctly, including who I knew in real life. So damn creepy. I only use that new account for log in synchronization for games and apps that don't have any other means of access. I wish I could get rid of it too, but it's a necessary evil for certain edge cases.

Why would you, when Meta will do it for free?

I know that it's just me being cynical, but in my head, there's no way that the "other" category isn't by far the largest one out of them all.

I wouldn't say it's force-feeding for a news site to report on the highly successful launch of a new social network by one of the largest tech companies in the world that's also directly aiming to compete with a platform owned by a very controversial and frankly entertaining megalomaniac.

If anything, I'd say they're a poor news organization if they didn't cover it.

Because hating on Threads is cool right now. The spotlight should be on Meta as a whole.

Are you really so thick to think that your workaround solves the problem?

These are app permissions for the Threads app; so the app itself will collected all of the personal information from your phone that it possibly can and send it to Facebook regardless of how you limit the amount of data you choose to share with Instagram. The only way to get around this and still use the app would be to use a clean phone and never use it for anything that may generate or collect personal data.

Yeah, that doesn't actually work that way at all.

Probably not tbh, but it's another thing to actually see it there in a permissions list.

I'm pretty sure that none of this is really "news" to anyone. I posted it because it's a slightly more "in your face" view of what we already know.