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Do you think companies are tracking you in the fediverse and tying it to your larger ad profile? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm sure it's happening but if the fediverse gets big you can bet your car that they will deanonymize you in the fedi.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 years ago (3 children)

I think the advantage that federation provides is that there is no central trove of data you can easily access. With commercial platforms like Twitter or Reddit, all the data happens to be in one place under a single jurisdiction. However, the nature of the Fediverse is such that it's a bunch of different servers scattered across the globe. Collecting data effectively means having to make deals with each server operator on case by case basis, and governments can only coerce servers that happen to be in their jurisdiction.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

You can collect a lot of information by crawling the activitypub endpoints. Its all nicely formatted as json, so you can parse it easily. However, the lack of advertising or other commercial aspects means that companies wont waste any thought on it. And for governments its likely still too small to care.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

Yeah, and a lot of the information is public by its very nature. I think this would mostly apply to stuff like private messages or locked accounts as opposed to public feeds.

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