It’s owned by Microsoft now. Not like M$ is any better than Reddit. Software devs unionized? Nope. Didn’t think so.

Also remember this is useless without complementary security measures:

1. Encrypt the storage on any device where these are installed (including your desktop/laptop drives if you install e.g. the desktop version of Signal).
2. Lock your devices with pin or password, and store that pin/password only in your head (there’s no such thing as telepathy at this point in time so they can’t physically force it out of you, unlike biometric data like your fingerprints).

If you are relying on “Legally they’re not allowed to,” instead of, “They simply can’t, despite all they might try,” then you’re not doing it right.

Google does not really offer a space where people can come together to create communities or discussion threads. However, with the introduction of Perspectives, it may do so later.

So—despite the dumbass title (article’s fault, not OP’s)—explicitly not an alternative to Reddit, where literally the whole point is to create communities and discussion threads.

All right. Well, let me rephrase: it’s not a meaningful excuse which we should buy as justification for gross undermining of our privacy and our trust in organizations which allegedly exist to help us when we are in crisis.

Based on my experience in many privacy roles covering US, EU, UK and other countries, the sale of a company will likely be covered in Google’s privacy notice and is not considered a sale of personal data considering customer’s personal data will immediately be covered by the purchasing company’s privacy notice.

Funny, because if I decided to go into business with Google by renting a service from them, that honestly shouldn’t mean that I automatically decided to go into business with some other corporation at Google’s whim.

But hey, capitalism really cares about personal autonomy. It’s not like it just exploits our labor and treats us like commodities or anything. /s

I appreciate that the only JS scripts Beehaw seems to load are from beehaw.org. Usually NoScript shows like two full pages of domains, and (at least—you know, the obvious ones like xyzads4you.com) half of them are for ads and “analytics”.

Out of 33 of these crisis center websites they looked at:

In follow-up tests, four organizations appeared to have completely removed the code. The majority of the centers we contacted did not respond to requests for comment.

Ignorance may have been an excuse prior to this investigation, but it’s not an excuse now.

'Member when the Zuck assured everyone that Facebook cared deeply about their privacy, and then immediately turned around and quietly implemented features where people had to opt-out of sharing all their shit (when opting out was even an option at all), and those users didn’t even know it? And we’re not even getting into how it sells your data behind the scenes to advertisers, government entities, and anyone else with a little cash to offer.

Ah, the good ol’ days. And I don’t even resent it due to being personally affected. I’ve never had a FB account, and I just watched from the sidelines as it affected people I know and love and the broader online community as a whole.

It’s hilarious for Meta to invite some person who happens to run a server to an “off the record” conversation with “confidential details that should not be shared with others” anyway. LOL.

The only “confidential” information that’s likely to be involved in such an exchange would be some kind of bribe for the person to shut down or assimilate their infrastructure with Meta’s. It’s not like they’re going to reveal Meta’s trade secrets to someone they believe to essentially be a competitor or anything.

Irrelevant. See above.

I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.

Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.

Agreed. I think it’s more that we have been fooled on a superficial level into thinking that online interactions have filled the void (we’re on “social media” after all). So we still recognize that there’s something profound missing from our lives, but what that thing actually is has become kind of obfuscated. The dilemma then becomes whether to 1. blame technology, or 2. blame ourselves individually (“there must just be something wrong with me”). And either way it leads away from the radical solution of rebuilding those local, deep connections with our communities.

I think it’s both that and not having real community ties. We don’t form close associations with each other like back when we had town events, neighborhood gatherings, people belonged to more clubs, recreational groups, labor unions, etc.

I wonder if there was an attempt to ask people about television, too.

Hmm. Hate to be a downer, but that sounds like there needs to be a way for the service itself to block (ban) users and material, not for users to be able to block other users. So I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Apple’s response…