wow 10 months flew by since this was posted and since then the United States had a surprise privacy bill that is bipartisan that sort of addresses the issues you and I mentioned. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/07/congress-privacy-deal-cantwell-rodgers/

This bill was proposed around the same time the TikTok ban was announced. I speculate that law makers had a difficult time framing the arguments against TikTok when “the data of citizens have no protections so there was no easy legal grounds to forbit the likes of TikTok to harvest it”

From what I’ve heard, this bill is pretty good. I need to educate myself more on it, however.

A step in the right direction but until there are more robust privacy laws in place, this will not go away.

If their gov is restricted on buying from data brokers, are other governments, foreign entities?

The inherit issue is the American’s data can be harvested and sold. Setting up legal restrictions toward certain entities will just cause those entities to “legally self identify” as another entity. Or do business with an entity that is allowed access to American’s data.

to preface what might sound like slander, I really would love to get my hands on apple hardware. It is engineered rather well and the geek in me can appreciate that. However, getting access to your own hardware is an issue.

While I have some concerns about their objective features, to my shame, the greatest problem is with the brand and their practices.

I think the root cause of all my issues stems from their morals and aggressive/elitist business practice - specifically their quest to squeeze money out of users and hide behind the lie of “we are doing this for the user’s benefit”.

I have no issue paying money for features I want or entities I’d like to support. In fact, I’m more inclined to financially support those who I believe in.

And apple loves to gatekeep features and keep them exclusive to apple. They effectively benefit from hard work of others who contribute to open standards and services, but at the same time do not share their own. Greedy.

agreed!

And with Meta’s resources and reach, they could stand up a Lemmy.world equivalent easily. Play nice, break their arms jerking each off the Fediverse. And once enough of the instances are reliant on the Meta instance, cut off everyone who won’t pay to federate.

I agree with the second part of your comment, and have concerns with the first part of your comment.

I’m all for allowing others to subscribe to Lemmy or Mastadon content, which is why simply defederating isn’t as attractive as ToS. I want others to see that their communities/intrests/heros/what have you/ exist outside of Meta. I want the average person to contribute even if they don’t know how to set up an instance. What I don’t want is Meta hosting content then paywalling it, cutting off others.

For the first part about limiting to one instance… Well FB is technically one instance from a “domain” perspective. They have load balancers and tons of servers hosting their “instance”.

like I said before, I’m not a policy guy, I don’t know how to solve this. But it would be nice for those who are to spear head this and rally up volunteers so we can get in front of it. If there are no solutions, defederating would be the easiest.

Not yet. The rumors are confirmed by Meta reaching out to a Mastadon admin, Kev, from fosstadon.org. He kindly made public the email.

Mail from Meta to Kev, from fosstadon.org, and reply