I think the thing that is going to drive me off Mastodon is the one-eyed fedi superfans.
I've always known twitter can read my DMs but I also know they have a privacy policy backed up by strict privacy regulation in the US, EU and Australia.
The chap who runs my local instance is lovely but there's no privacy policy and no regulatory oversight. I don't even have a contract with him. I'd have to sue him in a private capacity if anything happened.
@engagedpractx The effectiveness of those privacy policies and their enforcement is up for debate, but that is an interesting point. It should be possible to setup an instance with such policies and an enforceable contract or use another tool that has such contracts in place to interact with the Fediverse (for instance a paid blog on WordPress.com maybe? But I don't think that's a great interactive solution).
@allrite Privacy regulations were tested in the Cambridge Analytica case and Meta found itself on the hook for hundreds of millions in fines and direct settlement with users, so the incentive not to fuck up is considerable. And sure, someone could set up a privacy focused *instance* but that does nothing to solve the problem of privacy across the fediverse as a whole. The entire 'DM' function should be removed, it just misleads users.
@engagedpractx @allrite or people should just take reasonable precautions like they should on every single other web site and service they use?
@engagedpractx @allrite a "take some responsibility" approach. They're called DMs not PMs.
@engagedpractx @gr0k My understanding, which may be wrong, is that DMs are only shared between the respective users' servers. Which means the server admins can view them due to a lack of encryption.
I guess the correct way to view them is as a means of communicating directly with person without the conversation "polluting" the public timeline. Which can be useful. The issue is if they are seen as actually private.
@allrite @engagedpractx like I said, they're called DMs not PMs. Like you said earlier, they're not private on other services either. There may be greater repercussions when enterprise breaks user trust due to laws in certain territories, but they're still legally using your data to train AI, serve you ads, etc etc. The proposal that we remove DMs because they aren't totally secure is roughly equivalent to suggesting we should get rid of electronic payments for the same reason
@gr0k @allrite a 'blame the users' approach? in this economy?