I never bought this privacy invasion thing. It just seems like a nice cause to rally behind, but from what I see most people don't care. But yeah, sure, it's nice to focus all emotional power and reduce a complex issue to one stock ticker, so it can be hated or publicly disagreed with in an economical way.
But the law should be the law and our regulations should reflect some sane ground rules of our societies.
You don't have to use it, but calling it a perfect opportunity just seems a bit lazy I guess.
I'm in an "elite coastal city" or whatever but people are conversationally very aware & very disgusted by the state of affairs. It gets brought up socially a good bit, and far outside the tech circles.
But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can.
Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet.
As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting.
Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.
Meta's platforms can require you to use your real name, give your phone number, and upload "verification selfies"/ID documents.
With federated protocols like ActivityPub (suits Twitter-like software) and Matrix (suits Discord-like software), even if one instance required the above for account sign-ups you'd have the choice to use another - or host your own and be sure that no sneaky tracking is going on.
It's true that ActivityPub doesn't really support private chats like Matrix does, and sites can be misleading about actions being visible to others (e.g: upvotes on Lemmy), but I think a protocol being designed for public-visibility content isn't inherently the same thing as it being bad for privacy.
Different instances can have different security policies too. Some will likely defederate. Many have anti-scraping measures.
One of the most pernicious things about surveillance is how widespread the tracking networks are. Different apps and different sites will embed adware that can often be connected to your account. If your social media account is associated directly with an identity like Meta or Google, it seems almost certain my posting & social media activity will be fed into the centralized adserving systems & potentially be something other adbuyers or infobrokers might acquire.
I was on Twitter to be a public person, with public words given. I still want that capabilitiy. But as @ukv says, having it decoupled & separated from the day-to-day identity I actually use, my private identity, is a critical firewall.
But the law should be the law and our regulations should reflect some sane ground rules of our societies.
You don't have to use it, but calling it a perfect opportunity just seems a bit lazy I guess.