Since the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk was officially confirmed, the social network founded by Jack Dorsey has not stopped making changes to its operation, changes, generally, for the worse and that are making users rethink the possibility of continuing to use it. Mastodon has always been on everyone’s lips as the main alternative, but its operation through decentralized servers is not the best option. The latest option to hit the market to replace Twitter is Meta Threads.
Threads is the new application from the Meta group, that is to say, from the same owner as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the Oculus virtual reality glasses, an application that is already listed in the mobile application stores and that we can download from the 7th of July, one day after its release in the United States.
Regardless of how it works, which from what users who have tried it say is very similar to Twitter, what is most striking about Threads is the large amount of data it collects from users, something that should not surprise us considering that it is a Mark Zuckerberg application, since all its platforms live off the data they collect and sell to third parties to focus advertising campaigns.
All web applications and services, to a greater or lesser extent, collect user data to offer a more personalized user experience, to display information that is relevant to your interests, being the price we must pay if we want to use it. However, others, as is the case with Threads and in general with all Meta applications, collect a large amount of data that really does not serve them to display personalized content, but rather to know the very insides of their users.
Apple requires all developers to indicate what type of data the applications available in the App Store collect. In the case of Threads, the list of data that it collects associated with our account, that is, personal data about us and the use we make of the application and our device is impressive.
Like other applications, Threads uses contact information, identifiers and other data to track our activity, as we can see in the Data used to track you section. Within the section Data linked to you, we can see all two that are collected and linked to us.
- Health and fitness
- Financial information
- Contact information
- user content
- browsing history
- Usage data
- Diagnostics
- Shopping
- Location
- Contacts
- Search history
- identifiers
- sensitive data
- Other data
All the data that the Threads app collects is the exact same data that both the Facebook and Instagram apps collect, so it shouldn’t really surprise us. Fortunately, all the applications that we install on our mobile must request permission from the users to be able to access certain information, so we can limit, as far as possible, the amount of data that it collects, thus protecting our privacy.
