Meta’s new Twitter rival wants to suck Instagram users’ data, including health, location, search history and sensitive information, into the new Threads service. Under EU data privacy rules, it faces higher hurdles than in the US or UK, where it is launching on Thursday.
Meta will not launch its new Twitter rival, Threads, in Ireland or the EU for the foreseeable future.
In its US format, the platform tells users that it will collect a wide variety of data from users, including health, financial information, browsing histories, location, purchases, contacts, search history and sensitive information.
Here’s an image that has been going around that covers what data the Instragram Threads app collects:
Seems like in this case privacy regulations like the GDPR can actually block privacy invasive products from being launched in a certain region. I wonder when the US will get consumer privacy laws crickets
That’s a bit disappointing. I was sort of hoping this would immediately kill off Twitter, but without the EU that’s not gonna happen. Hopefully they open federation pretty soon after launch so then at least EU can participate from Mastodon.
I don’t get why this is blocked though, given Instagram is available in the EU. I guess the development timeline hasn’t allowed enough time to ensure it complies with the specificities of each region and their respective users.
After receiving user feedback over this policy decision, Instagram head Adam Mosseri clarified how account deletion would work. He says that users can deactivate their Threads account to hide their profile and content, can set their profile to private, or can delete all their individual threads posts without deleting their Instagram account. But, right now, Threads and Instagram are all one account, so deleting one would delete the other. Mosseri adds that the company is “looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately.”
I’m (reaction)laughing but in reality it’s depressing. From all sides. People are still falling for the “new and shiny” and (some) companies are still getting away with exploitation and “profit above all” approach
Threads had 30M signups and 95M posts the first day, source.
Meta has an estimated 2B active users and Twitter has around 350M, there is a very big difference in size between the two companies, and Twitter isn’t a successful business to start with. This could end up killing Twitter, even if they didn’t launch the platform in the EU, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
