Alert: New Threads App Secretly Collects All Your Highly Sensitive Data – Even Search History
Meta’s new Threads app is drawing warnings for its policies that allow vast collection of users’ data.
The website TechCrunch said the app “already looks like a privacy nightmare.”
“Information about your company, your role on your team, your job history, and your performance evaluations may be collected and sent to third parties,” the website Quartz noted in assessing factors that might keep the app from being deployed in Europe.
i want to get on threads but here are my reservations:
– it’s a THIRD app owned by meta, creating a monopoly on social media
– meta has huge privacy issues
– you can’t delete it unless you delete your IG
– it blurs the lines between IG contacts and twitter pic.twitter.com/kgWSJVca2Y— lilac bambi 2.0 (@altLilacBambi) July 6, 2023
The site also warned that Threads can collect information about “sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, biometric data, trade union membership, pregnancy status, politics, and religious beliefs.”
“This data may potentially be sent to ‘service providers’ and ‘analytics partners,’ which is often code for third-party advertising and marketing firms,” the site warned.
Fox News said the app will also prowl “Photos and Video” as well as “Voice or sound recordings, music files and other audio files.”
Threads Privacy Report knows more about me than me own mum! 👀 pic.twitter.com/fxQJDK1sTk
— Basic Apple Guy (@BasicAppleGuy) July 4, 2023
Tech Crunch added to the list by noting that Threads will collect “health and financial data, precise location, browsing history, contacts, search history and other sensitive information.”
The site said that because Meta “makes its money from tracking and profiling web users to sell their attention via its behavioral advertising microtargeting tools” the lack of privacy “is hardly surprising.”
Just found out apparently the reason threads is US only is because it collects so much user data that it violates privacy laws in other countries
— I’M CAPTAIN BASCH (@nyarlychan) July 7, 2023
“Similar to Meta’s other products like Facebook and Instagram, it appears that Threads will earn revenue via data harvesting and surveillance capitalism,” online privacy expert Mark Weinstein said, according to CBC.
Weinstein said by integrating Threads with Instagram, the app has a chance to surpass Twitter “albeit while collecting mass data troves on its users.”
Yahoo noted that trying to manage what Threads collect could impact the app’s performance.
The CBC report noted that the only way to delete a Threads account is to delete the Instagram count that it was created from.
Done deactivate Threads account & delete Threads app.
Reason ? Data privacy concerns.
I will not allow Mark Zuckerberg & @Meta to have access to my precious data. WTF you want to have access all these kind of information ? For data mining purposes so that you can sell our data… pic.twitter.com/nuOQ42aNin
— Saifuddin Amri, CISSP (@saifuddin_amri) July 7, 2023
TechCrunch suggested Meta might have a hard time getting the app launched in European Union nations due to privacy rules in its member nations.
The site noted that Meta has been fined almost $1.3 billion for sending data from EU users to the United States for processing.
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