• LWD@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    No, because your email client does not publish all the emails you send and receive, and it does not provide an API for ad networks to freely scrape.

    • Not_Alec_Baldwin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lemmy only has the information that I give it.

      And it demands fairly little information.

      I’ll take that in exchange for nobody privately owning as much of my shit as they can get their filthy hands on.

      • LWD@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        By fairly little information, is it more or less than Reddit?

        And by nobody, are you aware of the servers that have your data, and what are their privacy policies?

    • cerevant@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Tell me what my email address is (the only private-ish info that Lemmy has about me). If you can do that, then I’ll think about worrying.

      Big data already has enough info about me from social networks to guess my underwear size. The only way to be really safe is to not play.

      • LWD@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Big data already has enough info about me from social networks to guess my underwear size.

        Is the implication that you shouldn’t try to be private regardless?

        The only way to be really safe is to not play.

        Is the implication that anyone who uses this service should not question it?

        • cerevant@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          The implication is that social media is inherently not private, and it is extremely difficult to have social media benefit you without revealing personal details that can be aggregated to identify you uniquely, if not specifically.

          Definitely question the services - that’s why I’m here. I have much more control over my data here than on a commercial, ad driven platform. There is nothing available through the API that isn’t available to logged in user, and remote instances don’t have access to any of my private profile data (the entirety of which is my email address).

          It is fine if you don’t like Lemmy, but I challenge you to identify a social media platform that isn’t worse without being so closed that it loses the whole “social” part. If your goal is to have a blog with 4 followers, then you don’t want social media, you want a private Wordpress or wiki instance.

          • LWD@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            We can compare Lemmy to Reddit. Lemmy has an API fully available to data scrapers, and requires an email address; right now, Reddit has neither.

            We constantly think about how public facing data is treated; after all, Facebook is not the same as Lemmy either.

            • cerevant@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Data scrapers don’t need an API, but you are still wrong - there is a Data API for Reddit that anyone can use. If you want to use it at a commercial scale, you just have to pay for it.

              How exactly do you think ChatGPT was trained?

              • LWD@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                In other words, for mass data scraping, Lemmy makes it easier for large corporations. Which was my point.