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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

Man I hate these alarmist hit pieces.

- "You cant delete Threads without deleting Instagram altogether": but you can deactivate it. What's the difference, and why do I care? Without including that info, you're useless.

- "Threads collects sensitive personal information about you": How? Inferred from the things I post? Well I'll just not post those things.

- "Threads collects data about your employment": Same.

- "Threads collects data about your body": Same. Alternatively, this could come from the Health API, which I have to provide explicit permission for. Such permission was not even asked for.

- "Threads collects data about your web activity": How? It reads referrer headers. So an issue with my User Agent, if it were configured to do that. Which it isn't.

- "Threads collects data about your location". It may reverse-geocode my IP. Okay. And? Literally any analytics service with a map does the same.

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This reply is a good example of someone whose perspective is utterly locked in to their own perceived personal threat model (which may or may not accurately understand their own actual threats). This technology, they think, is perfectly acceptable according to their own sense of threats, so why isn't it good enough for literally everyone?

Other people's threat models are so unimaginable, so inconceivable that the commenter "hates" the "hit pieces" that attempt to inform people of risks, people who may face different threats than the hater.

I hope most folks can step out of their own context occasionally and view our current zietgeist from the perspective of a sex worker, or a journalist, or basically anybody who may have perfectly good reasons for electing to maintain their privacy.

I don't think that's too much to ask.

Is it too much to ask how, exactly, other apps safeguard this info? Allegedly, according to the App Store privacy declaration, mastodon collects no user content. Now how does that work? How does one post on a network that doesn't collect user content?

Mastodon doesn’t actively poll the operating system for data about you. You can input data (via posts) and that may be scanned by some system but you actively control all data that you choose to or not to share.

Threads polls just about every bit of data the operating system stores. E.g., on iOS threads reports that they collect data from the health app (“health and fitness”). If you are using the health app to store information about your health and body, Threads wants to get it straight from that app.

It’s not that it’s collecting data, it’s that it is asking for permission to passively collect data from other apps in the background (without you explicitly allowing it each time).

There's a thread above stating that this is not correct. I'm not saying they are right, wish someone would chime in with the authoritative details.

For iOS the authoritative source is apple itself; you can read their post on this topic here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211970

The actual list of privacy descriptors and what they actually mean can be found here: https://apps.apple.com/story/id1539235847

For example, the description of “Health and fitness” is:

> Health and fitness

> Health

> Health and medical data, including but not limited to information from the Clinical Health Records API, HealthKit API, and Movement Disorder API, or from health-related human subject research or any other health or medical data that you provide.

> Fitness

> Fitness and exercise data.

Which indicates that the app can use HealthKit etc to gather information about your health and medical data and exercise data.

What makes you think these rhetorical sex workers have learned anything at all from this piece? A belief you know more than them about what's best for them?

> "Threads collects data about your body"

This could come from any number of sources. Running AI to determine race, height, weight, and age from a profile picture for example.

> "Threads collects data about your web activity": How? It reads referrer headers.

Or it fingerprints you and your local network so it can associate browsing outside the app with your threads’ profile to better target ads?

Honestly you seem 20 years behind the times with how invasive tracking and analysis can be.

I think you are underestimating Meta's modeling capabilities, and their reach outside the app.

You do not need to explicitly talk about employment info, personal information, or permit health api access on Threads for Meta to infer these things "well enough" for advertising.

Interesting to see the media side of the battle of the billionaires.

Honestly, I find it far more interesting than the physical fight that Musk and Zuckerberg were talking about.

> - "Threads collects data about your employment": Same.

There are passive ways of doing this. If you take your phone someplace monday-friday, from 8:30 to 5pm, and you have geo-location turned on, it's a pretty good guess they know where you work, and your working hours, minnimum.

" but you can deactivate it"

You actually can't deactivate your Instagram account. The deactivation feature doesn't do anything; they automatically reactivate your account immediately when you try to use it. It's fake.

This has been the case for several years and I can confirm this was still the case as of last week:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/k0vxzk/my_instag...

I'm sorry to be callous but you just don't understand how any of this works.

You can't just "not post those things". If we are on good terms I can literally just post "Saw you working the bakery this morning, did you skip your morning jog?" and the system already knows where you work and that you are physically active, no input from you required at all.

Facebook already did this with shadow profiles. Facebook has information about me and I have never posted there, I don't even have an account there.

There are so many more sophisticated, more accurate, and scarier ways to collect data about web activity, location and your body that you don't seem to be aware of.

If this is all true, then how does Facebook make so much money?

The first stock market bubble in 2000 partly burst because investors realized that large user numbers by themselves were worthless.

Then other monetization schemes were discovered ...

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