this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Lemmy
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The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn't so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it's so Meta can't easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don't give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.
Meta can always profile you from the content you post to the fediverse, and they don't need Threads to do it. In the fediverse, every upvote, every down vote, every comment, every ban, and everything else is a matter of public record that can be easily queried by anyone without logging in to anything.
In the EU companies can't scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it's already publicly available. IANAL, and there's probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it's not a free for all. It's unclear though how it works for federation. It's definitely not the same legally though.
Info that is publically broadcast, that technically must be publically broadcast, that isn't necessarily personally identifiable, and is only linked to a user-chosen pseudonym probably isn't going to be found to have much of a right to privacy.