Boz (he/him)

I love the Gangnam Style reference, lol.

Aren’t pictures the point of Instagram, though? I don’t use Instagram, but I would not expect people to like something that is basically a picture sharing service without the pictures.

And in my opinion, the ChatGPT summary is a pretty good condensation of those 500 words. There are some things that are said more than once, and some details that are interesting, but not crucial for having a discussion about the topic, particularly with a focus on privacy.

Sure, 500 words isn’t a big ask, but I think when 500 words really conveys 300 words worth of content, and easily boils down to more like 100, it is reasonable to choose to read 100. I enjoyed reading 500, but that doesn’t mean everyone should.

[/I took a lot more words than necessary, lol, it’s because I am a degenerate]

I don’t know, I think Musk might actually have an inferiority complex. He’s obsessed with himself, but he puts an awful lot of effort into trying to prove that he’s cool. But yeah, they’re both terrible, it doesn’t really matter who’s worse.

Probably the shirtless pic was a carefully calculated move to short-circuit theories about his lack of humanity, by showing that he has a navel. [/s]

…for real, though, at least the man utilizes his paid PR staff.

I personally wouldn’t trust the website, either. It might be possible to block all the direct trackers, but they can learn a lot about you by what you do on the service, from who you follow to how long you spend on the site. If you have an account, you’re paying for it in data.

…if you’re okay with paying in data, that’s your business, not mine, but don’t assume blocking trackers is full protection.

No, they’ll start raising rates for people with weight loss apps on their phone, or refusing coverage for people who made too many phone calls to an oncologist, or got a lot of texts from their pharmacy saying “X prescription is ready.” Companies collecting medical data is very, very scary for a lot of people.

If you have a smart light bulb or thermostat you control through your phone, they probably know when you went to bed last night, and approximately what your electric bill was last month–unless you get electric bills by email, in which case they might know exactly what your electric bill was last month.

Confirmed, unless they have done it in the past few days, not yet. TechCrunch quoted the head of Instagram as saying that they haven’t implemented ActivityPub yet. There was no specific reason why not, and no timeline for adding that functionality. I think we have at least a few months, since there are a lot of other missing features that should be higher on the to-do list.

Wait, are there people who aren’t advertisers who do prefer Threads over Mastodon or Lemmy? Most of the reviews I have seen are bad, and the good ones seem to be from people who haven’t tried the fediverse, though I couldn’t swear to that.

Possibly. Apparently there are some possible issues with interconnection between instance admins that would give Threads information your local instance has about you. I understand that there are ways to change the code so that doesn’t happen, but as of right now, there’s more risk of data transfer than just posts/comments.

…Wayyyyy less than if you actually install their app, of course. But there’s room for improvement.

You’re right that “technical difficulties” are not a good defense when they break the law, and neither is “we didn’t do it on purpose.” I don’t think it would be a case where they’d have to pay for the use of the content, though, it would be a case under privacy law. And that would be a lose-lose situation, since if they won the privacy case, they would open a different, potentially nastier area of liability. I’m not a lawyer, but from what I’ve read, this is dangerous territory. Their safest move here would be to quietly re-delete everything, and try to convince users that the rollbacks never happened. (Aka “gaslighting.”)