I’ve had some quite passionate (euphemism) discussions in the past couple of days with people who accused me of “throwing minorities under the bus” or “allowing Meta to scoop up everybody’s posts” just because I’ve temporarily decided not to defederate #Threads from my personal Akkoma instance.

What’s interesting is that some of those accusations came from people who, in some cases, had their profiles fully public and searchable, on instances with webfinger enabled and without authenticated API constraints.

Their posts are already available on any search engine, searchable on Mastodon, their profiles can already be enumerated via API, and, even if their instance blocks another one, users on the blocked instance may still be able to see their content (especially if reshared/quoted) through unauthenticated API calls. But yeah, they think that the problem is with my tiny personal instance not defederating what they don’t like.

I’ve got the impression that there’s a lot of confusion on the #Fediverse on how to customize the #visibility and #privacy of your content, and how to make sure that only those you wish will ever be able to see it.

In order to prevent pointless retaliatory blocks/defederations towards instances whose only fault is not to block what others want them to block, and in order to prevent the Fediverse from splintering into small islands along totally arbitrary fracture lines on the basis of unfounded beliefs about how it works, I’ve put together a sequence of steps to check if your profile and your content are really private and sealed from unauthorized access (if that’s what you wish) - thanks to @gruff for the suggestion, and thanks to @evan for validating some of my assumptions.

@Gargron you’re welcome to validate my hypothesis about how AUTHORIZED_FETCH and DISALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS work on Mastodon - I knew about AUTHORIZED_FETCH before, but I see that its functionality is now split on two environment variables, and I’m not sure if both instance A and instance B need to have it enabled to prevent content leak towards blocked instances from reshares/quotes.

cc @fediverse @privacy

Firefox ti traccia con la funzione di “tutela della privacy”

Oggi, @noyb.eu ha presentato un reclamo contro #Mozilla per aver abilitato silenziosamente una presunta "funzione privacy" (chiamata #Privacy Preserving Attribution) nel suo browser Firefox. Contrariamente al suo nome rassicurante, questa tecnologia consente a Firefox di tracciare il comportamento degli utenti sui siti web. In sostanza, ora è il browser a controllare il tracciamento, anziché i singoli siti web.

Sebbene questo possa essere un miglioramento rispetto al tracciamento dei cookie ancora più invasivo, l'azienda non ha mai chiesto ai suoi utenti se volessero abilitarlo. Invece, Mozilla ha deciso di attivarlo di default una volta che le persone hanno installato un recente aggiornamento software. Ciò è particolarmente preoccupante perché Mozilla ha generalmente la reputazione di essere un'alternativa rispettosa della privacy quando la maggior parte degli altri browser si basa su Chromium di Google.

@Privacy Pride

https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-feature