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.
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?
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).
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.
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.