The Old Computer Challenge 2023 is coming up in little over a week and I’ve planned this weekend to get things set up for it. However, spaces that advertise themselves as places for activists to gather and work are essentially creating large databases of leftists that can be easily scooped up by the feds if that data isn’t secured. To be clear, this is no worse than corporate social media, which is often more than willing to hand over your unencrypted DMs to any government agency that asks for them. However, the failure to adequately handle potentially sensitive user data and to quickly communicate this breach shows me that kolektiva is falling prey to the lack of meaningful concern for its users that plagues most leftist spaces. It should be noted that direct messages on Mastodon require a copy to be stored on both your instance’s server and the target server, so the availability of these types of data is not unique. The main content affected as part of this is all user account information and all posts, regardless of the post’s privacy level. Today, the administrators of kolektiva.social, a Mastodon instance that bills itself as a “free, non-corporate platform for anarchists and anti-colonial content producers looking to circumvent Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists,” announced that an unencrypted copy of their database circa May 2023 was seized by the FBI as part of an unrelated raid².
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |