There was an interesting pair of polls last summer about reactions to Threads and Tumblr. 66% of the respondents were either opposed to or alarmed by Threads federating, and only 10% were supportive. By contrast, only 15% were opposed to or alarmed by Tumblr, and 39% were supportive. It’s just one data point but still interesting!

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110663712542031369

Thanks, it’s a good point!

It depends if I’ve turned on “approve followers” – upvote if you agree!

No, followers-only posts are not public – upvote if you agree!

Yes, followers-only posts are public – upvote if you agree!

Yeah really. Think of the children!!!

It’s all true. WTF indeed. Here’s a letter from over 90 LGBTQ and human rights organizations with more detail. EFF’s article from in May, which is the one they linked to in the original article, has good info to.

Not exactly. These bills cut across party lines and there’s a lot of desire to be able to pass something – “think of the children!” So if anything the overall gridlock makes it more likely that these bills will pass. So the dynamics that led to stopping the bills last year was a combination of activists making enough noise, and privacy and digital rights groups pressing the case in meetings with legislators (as well as some grassroots groups with good relationships with their legislators). As a result, that Dem leadership decided not to move the bills to the floor, so the vote never happened.

It turns out that crossposting to Lemmy works better from Lemmy communities. So, a Lemmy community is useful. Since I had already crated the kbin magazine and there’s no way to delete magazines (!), looks like we’ll experiment to see whether or not having two of them makes sense. Here’s the Lemmy community I created, I’m using it for now to cross-post from other communities so that there’s a single place to go for everything. !bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org

I don’t trust them either, and they’re very likely to move ahead with federation anyhow. It still means something that they’re changing the story that they’re telling.

Agreed, other laws are needed as well as this – https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/1197545 goes into more detail.

Agreed, other laws are needed as well as this. The ADPPA consumer privacy bill is likely to get reintroduced later this session; last year’s version had some good features but also a lot of weaknesses, and big tech companies and data brokes are pushing to further weaken it. So it’ll be a battle to strengthen and pass it.

But ADPPA doesn’t apply to government agencies (and that’s not likely to change) so bills like Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale are important complements!

No, bipartisan legislative support. It’s got bipartisan co-sponsorship both in the House (Warren Davidson is an R, Sara Jacobs is a D) and Senate (Rand Paul is an R, Ron Wyden is a D). And House Judiciary Committee just voted 30-0 to advance it.

Of course as you say we don’t know what’s happening behind closed doors, and there are also legislators in both parties who aren’ supportive, but there really is bipartisan support for this.

It’s a plausible theory but at the House Judiciary Committee everybody in both parties voted “yes”! We’ll see what happens as things move forward. In the Senate, Rand Paul is a co-sponsor and Mike Lee’s a likely yes vote, so it’s not likely to be straight party-line.

Thanks! Those are links to the version of the bill from last session; this year, the bill number in the House is HR 4639 and the text is at https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/hr-4639-bill-text.pdf

That EFF action alert is also from last session, and has the old bill number; they don’t have a new one up yet as far as I know. So I linked to Free Press’ action page, which is more up-to-date.

We’ll see. Cynicism is certainly justified – it’s very hard to pass a good privacy bill, and last year even though everybody supported it, it died in committee. On the other hand, it really does have bipartisan support, and there Congress is deadlocked in so many areas that they have an incentive to pass something.

Also, people I’ve talked to at EFF, ACLU, and Free Press all think that grassroots activism can help make a difference, and that right now is a key time … so it’s worth a try.

Thank you very much, that’s a great point – I’ll update the post to include it!

That’s right, as the article says

And from the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.”

Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! has plenty of perspectives from both sides.

That just shows how little Eugen understands the privacy risks. Why just blocking Meta’s Threads won’t be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse has an example of how federating with Meta can expose private data. And, data can be public but hard to discover (a profile for somebody who only makes followers-only and local-only posts); federating with Threads adds exposure.