Over the course of my 7 years here on the fediverse, I’ve seen a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings about privacy, consent, and the onslaught of innovative new search and analytics tools. There’s a new one making the rounds and I wrote something up in response to a discussion on the topic.
Let me first say that yes, I think people should have the ability to consent to how their data is used. The reality is that doesn’t comport with, well, reality. We in the fediverse live behind a thin veneer of privacy, often relying on people doing unscrupulous things with fedi-data to be shamed into shutting down their service. But the reality is that doesn’t really protect our data. Not really. The fedivsere is an open ecosystem. It provides tools and abilities to better protect your information, tools and abilities that don’t make sense for other social media platforms to have because it hinders their ability to make money. But while those tools are available, they are not the default here.
This is something I just wrote for those that are concerned about their information being indexed, or analyzed, or otherwise used by one of the new analytics services. It’s Mastodon-centric and a few of the features are only available in the glitch-soc fork:
Enable “require follow requests”
Enable “hide your social graph”
Enable “opt out of search engine indexing”
Enable “hide your followers count”
Block and then unblock anyone that follows you whom you do not trust to not use a service like this so that they are no longer following you
Remove anything from your profile that you aren’t comfortable being collected and analyzed. For things you would like followers to see, create a followers only post with that info any pin it to the top of your timeline.
Going forward, ensure post visibility is set to “followers only” any time you post something that you don’t want to be analyzed
@jerry
It's critical to keep hammering home the concept that social media like this is not, by its very nature, "private." Any post with any level of visibility should be considered possibly visible to unscrupulous parties.
In particular, that the fediverse has no point-to-point communication system whatsoever. (As noted in a reply here, Signal is more suited to this.)
The suggestions here help, but the bottom line is that the fediverse should not be considered Private Communication™ at all.
I'd extend that to the internet in general. Unless you've personally audited the source code of your apps - if you want to keep it private, don't put it on the internet. That's erring on the paranoid side - but not nearly as far as most people think. Even fully-encrypted comes leave metadata tracks, and you don't control the security posture of the other side of the conversation; they may be compromised. As a rule of thumb, I don't put anything on the internet I'd hesitate to put on the bulletin board at the local grocery store.
