this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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What public info could they gather? My IP?
I'm copying pasta from my previous reply on other post
Once they can interact with your account, they can pull your data into their server and analyzing it to deliver ads campaign.
Just look at this
They can connect the point of interest based on their users interactions with other users on other instances. It doesn't matter even if you don't use their apps, they just need to connect the points.
Whenever an account from Threads upvote/ downvote or reply to your comments/posts or vice versa, Meta will analyze that and they can sell ads based on your political leanings, gender, geo-location, hobbies, marital status etc.
That's the options from what I saw on fb ads dashboard years ago. If you're from US, that options are broader and more detailed.
I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding how data is handled in federated systems. When an account from Threads interacts with your post or you interact with a Threads post, information is exchanged exclusively through Actions sent between the servers- never to or from your or their client and another server. It looks like this:
Client <=API=> Instance <=Action=> Instance <=API=> Client
They don’t get any information that isn’t already available publicly to any random user on your instance- no IP address or anything otherwise. Threads’ mobile app data collection has no bearing on their ability to collect information on you.
Edit: To be clear- there is theoretically a set of protocols in the ActivityPub spec that allows for direct client to server communication (unimaginatively called ActivityPub Client-to-Server), but it hasn’t been adopted by any current Fediverse software implementation that I’m aware of.