Maybe now people will stop using social media. Ah, wait, no. Everything in the name of convenience.
If anything the solution is to boycott the US. This is ludicrous.
Insurance companies, banks etc. can use social media connections. Friends with risky hobbies and insurance premiums go up. Unemployed friends and it's harder to get mortgage loan.
What's wrong isn't social media enabling that (there are countless of other sources anyway), it is the act of actually doing it.
Given the complexity, people get lost in the numbers. That some people are intentionally blacklisted seems inevitable. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if there is any alternative or safety from it.
GDPR is a start.
Does this matter? Would it make any difference if the same message was spotted on a self-hosted out-of-us mastodon instance?
First of all, it is much easier and cost-effective to gain full knowledge of the graph data in a centralized system. Instead, by working on a distributed system, we could change the protocol to increase the effort needed to mine data.
Second of all, we gain the opportunity to know who or what has requested our data. We can decide to block these requests if they are used against us.
Lastly, we can distribute the available power of information over multiple nations. When policies change, data (and information) can flow to places where these policies have no effect.
At least right now, that's not true. It's harder to automatically scrape Facebook than a random decentralised system - mainly because decentralised systems need to have the data sharing built in to work. Sharing the data in a structured way is the central idea behind them.
> We can decide to block these requests if they are used against us.
You're not going to be able to block this access from gov only. If known networks become blocked, new gateways can be obtained for less money than is worth mentioning.
> When policies change, data (and information) can flow to places where these policies have no effect.
Again, if you're interested in anything resembling a social network, you'll need to share your data with a lot of people. Unless you want to keep it all private - you can do the same thing on FB currently, and border control will not have access to it.
I disagree. It is harder for Joe Average, but for state actors MUCH easier to scrape one system, instead of thousands. Also, it is possible to design decentralized systems in such a way that scraping becomes almost impossible.
> You're not going to be able to block this access from gov only. If known networks become blocked, new gateways can be obtained for less money than is worth mentioning.
You can block based on more than IP address. Decentralized systems can use networks of trust to curtail unwanted information gathering.
> Again, if you're interested in anything resembling a social network, you'll need to share your data with a lot of people. Unless you want to keep it all private - you can do the same thing on FB currently, and border control will not have access to it.
Of course border control has access to it, regardless of your privacy settings. Do you really believe FB has full control over your data?
They probably use some kind of translation service.
"the US is a goat"
Could reasonably be an insult or a compliment, an automated tool wouldn't be able to say which.
Or by translation service, do you mean a person.
Can you imagine being denied the right to travel or to temporarily relocate for school or work in a theoretically democratic country only to be denied entry because you or your friends expressed a personal, private, inconsequential and most likely fleeting opinion in the past?
Our normal tendency is to want to regulate, but this can only be done to a limited extend. Too much regulation can stifle innovation or place too much power in the hands of the regulators.
I'm not arguing against regulation. I am arguing that we should understand that our social media use (among others) comes at a very high cost to our freedoms. Proportional use, (proportional to our ability to regulate or our willingness to provide asymmetric information power) is warranted.