this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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It only takes looking at your data to figure out your trends, save the trend, and serve you ads.
Think about it: public posts are public. It's the same as you putting a note in the town square. Anyone can look at it and see the username of who wrote it.
Defederation doesn't stop that, it just inconveniences people who want to use/see both sides from one login.
This is not how it works technically.
For Meta to analyze your data they need to either scrape it (legally questionable and scraper bots are commonly blocked on server level) or work with a local copy. By federating with them you are allowing them to legally make a local copy of all the posts of the instance.
Newspaper articled are often also public, yet google got sued (and lost) because they were scraping and analyzing them to put previews in their search results.
Just because something is public doesn't mean you can just take it. Copyright still aplies.
Defederation does stop legal use, and Meta is already in enough legal trouble, especially in the EU, that they are unlikely to blatantly pirate user contributed content from sites that defederated from them.