My recent post on Meta was timely, given that they’ve just launched their new Twitter competitor, Threads. Thanks to Elon’s best efforts to run twitter into the ground, Mark Zuckerberg obviously see this an opportunity to spread his data grabbing tendrils even further.
I think it can only be seen as bad news for kinky people and sex workers who use social media. As I wrote before, Meta is famously anti-adult content. There’s zero chance that the kind of adult content I follow on Twitter is going to be allowed on Threads. Users and advertising dollars flowing to it, combined with Elon’s incompetent Twitter leadership, could end up driving the only adult ‘friendly’ social media site out of business. The idea of Elon Musk losing a ton of money because of that is highly entertaining, but not so entertaining I think it’s worth losing Twitter over.
If you are thinking of signing up for Threads, be aware of the degree of data mining that Meta do. They’ll look at anything they can find – contacts, cell location, wifi networks, account data – to try and build their graph of the world. While you might want to keep kinky and vanilla accounts separate, their goal is to connect everything they can about you, which can lead to very bad outcomes.
To finish a gloomy post, let’s use a happier picture, featuring a very different kind of rope threads. This is from another social media site that fell on hard days – Tumblr. More specifically it’s from the Dudes in Distress tumblr, which is still around but hasn’t been updated in 6+ years.
To add to this: “If you are thinking of signing up for Threads, be aware of the degree of data mining that Meta do”, they’re not even pretending to ‘do privacy’ anymore:
https://twitter.com/Ferns__/status/1677136064933400577
And Mistress Matisse shared this warning about the risks of Meta:
https://twitter.com/mistressmatisse/status/1676763121330028544
Ferns
Yes, they’re pretty much in ‘All of your data, all the time, all ours” mode. The value and power comes from linking it up, at our cost.
Thanks for the Matisse link, although it does tell me you didn’t click the links in the post :-). I linked to that one in the 3rd paragraph. Never hurts to reinforce the point however!
Thanks for stopping by. Hope you and Eskie are doing well!
-paltego
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I signed up for Threads using my scene identity to check it out. I use that same identity to access Instagram. I keep my scene identity totally separate from my vanilla one. Or so I thought. A few days after I signed up using my scene identity, a Domme I saw (who I only contacted with my scene identity) popped up on my vanilla Facebook page as a potential friend. But it was her real name and the images made it clear it was her!
Not good.
Very likely not a coincidence. They love linking different accounts together to figure out which ones are really the same person. Even if you keep them separate, their data mining algorithms are good at spotting things via identifiers like wifi and ip addresses. I’ve been surprised to see things I’ve searched for in my vanilla identity show up as ads when browsing as my kinky alter ego.
Very much not good!
-paltego
They’ve chosen a lovely name for the new service anyway. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jan/08/how-we-made-threads
Me, if I were going to launch a new social messaging service named after a dystopian future vision, I’d prefer it to be themed around The Worm that Turned. https://reprobatepress.com/2019/05/01/the-worm-that-turned-the-two-ronnies-vs-literal-feminazis/
But that’s just me, I suppose.
Obviously Zuck was never traumatized as a child by that particular BBC drama. Guaranteed nightmares for anyone that was.
I posted about the 2 Ronnies vision of the future a few years back – https://www.femdom-resource.com/2017/11/07/the-worm-that-turned/
Although I hadn’t seen those behind the scenes shots from the article before. Fun to see those!
As a name, I’m not sure ‘Worms’ would have made it past the Meta marketing department.
-paltego
Never had a Facebook account. One day a friend asks me ‘is this your brother?’ Only way they could have found out is Whatsapp. That was ten years ago.
As for using a seperate kink identity, I do that too. Most of the time I work on a desktop computer. My default browser is Firefox with tons of add-ons, which introduces the risk of canvas fingerprinter. There’s always a risk.
Yes. It’s amazing how many different ways they can link different online signals together. We all leave a much bigger trail than we think. As you say, there’s always a risk, no matter how separate you try and keep things.
-paltego