Meta is blocking EU-based users from accessing Threads via VPN | Hacker News Reader

Meta is blocking EU-based users from accessing Threads via VPN

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70 pointsimpish920896 comments

I can't understand why people are letting this happen. Not Threads blocking the EU, but Threads at all. Everyone--everyone--knows how bad Meta is for privacy, advertising, and election tampering. So many people, especially those in the target demographic of Threads, have left Facebook because either they've witnessed the site get worse and worse overtime, to the point where it lost all utility for them.

Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it.

Depends on what you want. If it's views/likes/etc., you have to go where the people are. And a lot of people are on FB/Insta.

> Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it.

Have you considered that your values are different from most peoples'?

I don't think many people are so concerned about the privacy features on their social network. Social networks to some degree are inherently about making private things public. A lot of the backlash Facebook gets from the average person is about their political moderation.

At some point the public has been informed that Facebook uses their data to advertise, and apparently that cost is worth it to them for the products they give. So far no one has really found a good paid model for social networks, and ads that use data are way more profitable, so here we are. Companies aren't a charity, they gotta make money somehow.

I never bought this privacy invasion thing. It just seems like a nice cause to rally behind, but from what I see most people don't care. But yeah, sure, it's nice to focus all emotional power and reduce a complex issue to one stock ticker, so it can be hated or publicly disagreed with in an economical way.

But the law should be the law and our regulations should reflect some sane ground rules of our societies.

You don't have to use it, but calling it a perfect opportunity just seems a bit lazy I guess.

I'm in an "elite coastal city" or whatever but people are conversationally very aware & very disgusted by the state of affairs. It gets brought up socially a good bit, and far outside the tech circles.

But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can.

Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet.

As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting.

Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.

> I'm all for ActivityPub

Now I'm confused. I thought your concern was around privacy. ActivityPub is absolutely terrible as far as privacy is concerned.

Meta's platforms can require you to use your real name, give your phone number, and upload "verification selfies"/ID documents.

With federated protocols like ActivityPub (suits Twitter-like software) and Matrix (suits Discord-like software), even if one instance required the above for account sign-ups you'd have the choice to use another - or host your own and be sure that no sneaky tracking is going on.

It's true that ActivityPub doesn't really support private chats like Matrix does, and sites can be misleading about actions being visible to others (e.g: upvotes on Lemmy), but I think a protocol being designed for public-visibility content isn't inherently the same thing as it being bad for privacy.

Different instances can have different security policies too. Some will likely defederate. Many have anti-scraping measures.

One of the most pernicious things about surveillance is how widespread the tracking networks are. Different apps and different sites will embed adware that can often be connected to your account. If your social media account is associated directly with an identity like Meta or Google, it seems almost certain my posting & social media activity will be fed into the centralized adserving systems & potentially be something other adbuyers or infobrokers might acquire.

I was on Twitter to be a public person, with public words given. I still want that capabilitiy. But as @ukv says, having it decoupled & separated from the day-to-day identity I actually use, my private identity, is a critical firewall.

Almost nobody cares about privacy. Do you think those instagram users, who post their face + location, onto the public internet are particularly concerned about meta collecting their data?

I like Threads, and think anything driving the normalization of ActivityPub is good.

Twitter has collapsed in usability for me. I don’t see community notes, when I search something there’s nothing but crypto scams at the top.

Because the alternative is Twitter.

The alternative is mastodon/pleroma/misskey/calkey, etc.

I've tried making do on Mastodon. It's just not as well-made. The federation thing gets in the way, the discoverability of content is hard, one prolific tooter can too easily flood your feed - it's a decade behind Twitter and Threads in terms of usability. Even the basic information density of the web layout is poor.

I'm willing to look past these flaws and stick with the fediverse, but if nobody I want to follow is doing that, there's no point.

I hope Gargron et al can make it happen and beat both Threads and Twitter, but so far they've just been too stubborn (like the search and quote-tweet things) and haven't iterated fast-enough to really compete.

Sure, and the alternative to mac/windows is linux. Which I guess is actually unfair to linux. mastodon/etc are terrible, they will never be used by more than an unimportant minority of people.

Mastodon don't even have a proper search.

Wouldn't the other big tech firms be able to build a Twitter clone? Why am I not hearing about a Google version, or a Microsoft version? You'd think someone inside one of the Trillion dollar firms would have had the idea.

Google bringing back Buzz (the Twitter-alike that was briefly in gmail) would perhaps be the funniest possible outcome of all of this.

Google building a social media product. That will definitely go well this time around.

5th time's a charm.

You can also just not use either.

Hacker News is a fine alternative

HN is in no way an alternative, and that's okay. For the masses that use Twitter, HN is completely uninteresting and completely fails to replace Twitter. HN is too niche, too obscure, too old, and too strict to be a Twitter, and that's what makes it great.

At least Twitter fixed the election tampering problem, and now allows the free flow of information, even if TPBT object to it. Threads will still be as bad as FB in those regards.

Twitter did no such thing, Twitter now personally silences loud dissenters and engages openly in anticompetitive behavior meanwhile doing less moderation than they ever have. Plugging your ears and ignoring it is not "fixing" the election tampering problem.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Free flow of information, huh?

What do you think Twitter did that Facebook didn’t do?

People (like me) are looking for a Twitter alternative. The alternative need to have a minimum viable product.

Mastodon is 7 years old and still don't have a search or quote feature.

BlueSky is newer, but the app it's totally awful (takes 30 seconds to open here on Android), you can't post videos.

Ironically Meta owns React Native, but Threads is built with native tech, meanwhile BlueSky it's React Native....

Of course - people need to be there too. I use Twitter mainly for news, politics and tech. Most of this is on Threads. Meanwhile on Bluesky and Mastodon, almost none of this is there for me.

On Mastodon you have a bunch of accounts replicating twitter accounts exactly because it lacks greatly these accounts.

As others have pointed out, people don't care about these things. Either at all, or simply not enough for forgo the value they get from social media.

Perhaps the question you're really trying to ask is why people don't place a greater value on these things?

Many people follow celebrities/public figures/politicians who market Threads as the new "Digital Town Square," or themselves like a "curated" space that conforms to their beliefs, and the ability to silence people who deviate too far from their beliefs. Those same aristocrats are not informing their followers of the privacy dangers, because they also benefit from a commoner's privacy loss. Most common people aren't thinking about the potential consequences on the individual or societal level, because the dangers are not marketed at a similar scale and it's not something the average person thinks about without strong external influence.

Turns out many people just don't care that much, or get value out of using a social networking app/site.

People who want to be influencers see this as "the next big thing" and want to gain a following before it is saturated. They missed out on Tiktok/Twitter/Instagram/etc. so this is their path to making it big.

I used to think so too. However, I think the view that “everyone” knows is a distortion. The HN audience knows, but quite a few people in my life (friends, family, coworkers) don’t have a clue.

Most likely they are just blocking all users who have an EU home country associated with their Instagram account. Meta determines an account home country based on a lot of different signals, and it takes weeks to months to update after actually moving. Just using a VPN is not enough to get it to update in a short amount of time.

Even as a Meta employee I remember it taking multiple months after moving from Europe to the US before I could use US-gated products (late 2020/early 2021).

Can confirm empirically that using a VPN from a European country is not sufficient to be blocked.

So better create a new account?

Oh wait you'll get asked for id verification. lmao

No, you do not get asked for ID verification.

Withholding Threads is most likely a negotiation tactic in the broader context of how EU’s new Digital Markets Act “gatekeeper” rules are applied to Meta.

Threads is basically a new view into your Instagram account. That’s a common model in mobile apps (e.g. Meta’s existing FB and Messenger apps, or Microsoft’s Office and OneDrive apps suite, or thousands of others). There’s no inherent reason why “log in from a different app id” would suddenly be problematic under DMA.

By not releasing Threads, Meta signals that they want an agreement to be in place with the regulators about the details of EU DMA oversight before they’ll bring new products to the market. It’s a way to get consumer demand to apply pressure.

> Withholding Threads is most likely a negotiation tactic in the broader context of how EU’s new Digital Markets Act “gatekeeper” rules are applied to Meta.

Perhaps. This has the potential to massively backfire though: "Threads is not available in EU and we found that it doesn't really matter and we're fine without it".

Or someone else with enough budget and online presence will launch an alternative worldwide and become dominant.

If there was any doubt EU privacy laws were of any use, here is some proof.

I doubt it's related to privacy at all, it's not different than the Instagram app which is available everywhere.

People think it's mostly related to Digital Markets Act https://www.theverge.com/23789754/threads-meta-twitter-eu-dm...

--- start quote ---

Mosseri attributed the postponement to a variety of issues. But he specifically noted rules preventing Meta from mixing the data it collects from users across products like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

...

The DMA prevents companies as big as Meta from reusing a user’s personal data — including their name and location — across its products for targeted advertising without user consent.

--- end quote ---

What I read between those lines

Meta: There's this small inconvenience for us, that if we decide to ignore the European market instead of fixing it goes away.

They clearly are extorting the EU with their -now I won't work here- techniques.

Good riddance if you ask me

I don't understand your point. Do you think that Meta should be obligated to provide their services everywhere?

If I'm running a company, and the laws in Italy would require more work to comply with than the value I would receive from being in Italy, how could you somehow possibly fault me for deciding that the best thing for my company is to just not be available in Italy?

No. The point it: if you run your business in a country, you comply with the laws.

Meta has been doing everything in their power to avoid doing that. See the most recent example: "CJEU declares Meta/Facebook's GDPR approach largely illegal" https://noyb.eu/en/cjeu-declares-metafacebooks-gdpr-approach...

they knew this going in, so my guess is that they took a shortcut with pushing instragram users into threads in order to make it successful quickly. and now they are quietly working on cleaning up in order to enter the EU market later.

The fact that it transfers data from Instagram is already a gigantic headache for Meta. The sharing of data between Whatsapp and other Meta properties, for example, has been blocked multiple times due to EU privacy laws. Instagram being in the clear in Europe doesn’t automatically means that Threads is, and they clearly don’t wanna take any risk by enrolling EU Instagram users semi-automatically. Moreover, the connection between the Threads account and the Instagram account (i.e. you can’t eliminate a Threads account without eliminating your Instagram account) sounds like the main culprit here. And it’s good that it is. It’s basically a forced user retention pattern that is in place only to favor Meta. In other words, Threads is a can of privacy worms by EU standards. The US is still a privacy wild west and Meta actively lobbies for it to stay that way. Threads is great example of why that is.

But they are not accomplishing their goal. The intention is to force these companies not to collect data on EU citizens, not to stop companies from operating in the EU.

The first will follow from the second.

If you have a choice of two social networks to use, one which has your European friends/family on it and one that doesn't then you will be more likely to use the one that has them. This will then exert pressure on the company to do what is necessary to get those people onto its systems.

Well if they're not operating in the EU then they're not collecting EU user data ;-)

On a more serious note, if this spurs other companies into developing products and services that align with EU privacy standards, then all the better.

It's not like Meta/FB is a huge contributor to employment or the economy in the EU.

EU laws could actually require a company to identify EU-based users that are using VPN if they actually want to be compliant. Using VPN doesn't somehow make EU laws no longer apply to that user. Most companies just don't care to follow the law. We should be praising Meta for their commitment to the EU ideals here.

Or, Meta doesn't want to run afoul EU censorship laws that coming into force soon and EU folks are blocked until European Threads is even more spied and censored on.

This has little, if any, recognizable connection to facts in reality.

Why does anyone take this marketing spin seriously? No one in Europe is waiting for another data collector from the world's biggest internet criminal.

>No one in Europe is waiting for another data collector from the world's biggest internet criminal.

Surely nobody in Europe would use an app designed to share photos of themselves on the public web and from said company.

Apparently many are, giving that they're whining about not being able to access threads even with a VPN.

Lucky you. You haven't met any actual internet criminals, it seems.

Are you arguing that Meta isn't breaking any laws? Including the GDPR?

Probably more along the lines of "Meta doesn't commit identity theft, ruin my credit score, or drain my bank account." The harms are far more abstract and theoretically, thus calling them criminals can come across as a little histrionic even if technically correct.

Eh, this site almost certainly violates GDPR. If you're going to go around calling jaywalkers criminals, then fine, but then you'll quickly stop getting the emotional reaction you are begging for when you use the word.

Their whole promo is scam 'faster growing than ChatGPT' you wish Zuckerberg, you just migrated existing users nothing more.

Is it possible they're just blocking VPN users entirely? Nothing in the article mentioned non-EU VPNs

I'm guessing they are blocking users from Europe regardless of where they are connecting from. It'll be interesting if people will change their location because of that.

No, it works fine without a VPN from the EU. It only matters if you have the app or not and you can just get it with a US app store account.

Very possible. VPN detection technology like https://focsec.com/ is widely available nowadays.

VPN works fine on it in the US.

Thanks for testing - I wasn't able to.

Facebook deserves credit for its systematic and consistent complete disregard of user privacy; for deflecting responsibility and pointing fingers at governments and legislation that prevent it from doing whatever it wants; and for pitting users and governments against each other as if they were the culprit.

Facebook deserves credit for always doing the wrong thing.

At this point, if a product even remotely or indirectly touches the company, it's a no-go for me.

> To view this this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings.

What a joke is this site? Ever heard of screenshots? Why does text-based content have to be embedded anyway? Ok, it is hard to press couple buttons, paste a picture, edit, align it, etc.. Then just give me a link.

Screenshots aren't that good for accessibility, although a boring old blockquote would do the job too

Screenshot with alt text for accessibility

... where do you think the alt text gets stored?

Such a lame excuse, ever heard of alt text?

As someone in EU who uses a VPN, thank you Meta for preemptively improving my mental health. The addictive horrors of social media are well documented by now. Thanks for doing us all a BIG favour and giving us huge chunks of useful time back. I'm going outside to enjoy the real world now.

The interface and user experience of threads is pretty awful so it also does a good job of being boring and painful enough that you won't want to use it.

Why do they bother though? Both Meta to block the users and the users attempting to use Threads..

There are two reasons that I see which Meta might be doing this:

1. They know that Threads is doing things which are not acceptable by EU rules.

2. They want to fight the EU so that EU makes rules that allow Meta to disregard the privacy of their users.

Or it costs time and resources to meet EU regulations and they launched in other marketplaces first while they work on complying, and verifying their compliance with the laws?

This isn't uncommon for new products, and there doesn't need to be a conspiracy theory.

Or maybe they know that their plans to connect to the fediverse will leave them with tons of personal data they wouldn't be allowed to collect under GDPR. Although that doesn't matter since the EU is considering any company worldwide to be subject to GDPR when they collect data from EU residents.

Facebook: to pressure the EU to back down on their privacy laws

People: FOMO

So that GDPR doesn't apply to them.

Threads already have all the data they need on anyone because of the rest of the Meta dragnet so this is pretty confusing honestly. I wouldn't use it anyways but seems like a weird way to not make money. Or is threads still not monetized?

But you don't need a VPN to access it. As long as you can install the app, you can use it, no need for VPN. That's how I've been trying it out just to see what the fuss is all about.

Not anymore.

Tell that to my app I guess. Just opened it and checked some "threads", refreshed, got some likes. All seems to be business as usual. Located in Germany, no VPN, via iOS.

Good.

I would have thought that from a GDPR perspective, requiring a VPN is enough. What's next, Meta has to prevent europeans who are currently in the US from accessing threads?

> What's next, Meta has to prevent europeans who are currently in the US from accessing threads?

Here's what GDPR says it covers [1]:

1. In the case of processors or controllers established in the Union, all processing of personal data.

2. In the case of processors of controllers not established in the Union processing activities related to

2(A) the offering of goods or services to data subjects in the Union, or

2(B) monitoring to the behavior of data subjects as far as that behavior takes place in the Union.

If you are not in the Union and the entity processing your data is not established in the Union then GDPR does not apply.

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/

As someone from the EU, thank you. Enough Facebook (sorry, "Meta") misinformation here is only a good thing.

As someone else from the EU, I disagree, and I wish our citizens would think independently and critically about individual issues, instead of repeating the same anti-x (x here being Facebook apparently) sentiments ad infinitum.

how do you tell if someone is repeating anti facebook sentiments they heard elsewhere, or making these statements because they came to the same conclusion after critically and independently thinking about the issue of privacy themselves?

i would counter that, if the claims are true, then it does not matter if they repeat it or realized it on their own. it is obviously an issue they care about.

and if the claims are false, then i'd like to see the evidence that all the already known privacy violations are made up or at least overblown, and were not intended but honest mistakes.

facebook has not given me any indication that they should be trusted. compare that to apple, who has presented a privacy stance at least, even if they don't implement it everywhere, and i'd be much more likely to believe them than facebook.

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