Fear or death, I choose fear. The uproar that has raised the launch of the Threads social network by Meta as a platform linked to Instagram has not made some of the implications of Mark Zuckerberg’s new project sufficiently visible. In five days, more than a hundred million people have rushed to open an account in this new public conversation space and hit the accept button as many times as they have been shown on the login screen. This, when we talk about the founder of Facebook, is a risky sport.
It is difficult to summarize the list of data that is given to Meta when using its applications. It would be more practical to say that absolutely everything is given to him, but I make a superficial list: health and fitness, credit cards, physical and internet address, browsing history, how apps are used, purchases , location, contacts, searches, sensitive data (such as political and sexual orientations) and other data (anything you’re missing).
Citizens of the European Union are not counted among the hundred million incautious. Not because we are not as reckless as the rest of the world, but because Meta has not dared to launch Threads in the community area, fearing that laws such as digital markets (DMA), which enter into full application at the beginning of 2024, or the general data protection regulation (RGPD), which is already in force.
Europe protects us, even if it sometimes does it badly and late, but it is a safeguard against the abuses of someone who, like Zuckerberg, deeply despises our privacy. This is not an opinion. It is a fact after his repeated mistakes.
The last fine imposed on Meta by the Irish data protection authority was in May for an amount of 1.2 billion euros. Zuckerberg already knows who he’s playing with, so Threads won’t be coming to Europe. It may be that the absence is temporary, but it cannot be ruled out that it is permanent, because one of the things that the EU penalizes is that data is crossed from one platform to another and Threads is linked to Instagram. So much so that if the account of the first is cancelled, the account of the second is also cancelled. Like J.R.R.’s Ring of Power Tolkien, a good system to tie them all together.
Elon Musk is no champion of good practice either. It has demoted Twitter in just eight months. Now he is fighting with Zuckerberg over the networks and both are threatening a physical fight in a place in Las Vegas. The latest from the South African is that he called his rival “slut” and proposed a regrettable contest to measure his genitals. Neither of them deserve any trust, but if the choice is between Twitter and Threads, the choice is clear to me.
