Koos 🆗 is a user on octodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
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So did somebody already identify what instances are run just to collect user data? The open seems perfect for that. I'd be surprised if secret services aren't doing that yet.
@koos I haven't heard anything about this yet.
The way mastodon is set up it wouldn't be very easy to get a lot of useful data from running a server, the largest ones are only about 40k users which isn't a large enough scale for there to be much money in it.
I am not sure how we would go about determining if a server exists just to farm data.
@inmysocks alright it may be too early for marketers, but for intelligence agencies it would actually be easy and cheap, compared to what the NSA is doing anyway.
@koos that is true, and it would probably catch a lot of what they don't get from Facebook and google.
I will try to not be too paranoid for a bit longer, but that is hard.