July 25, 2023
Futurity recently published an article featuring Garrett Johnson, Assistant Professor of Marketing, discussing online privacy concerns, behavioral targeting, the safety of Meta’s Threads platform, and how countries are addressing privacy issues.
Meta’s brand-new Threads app blew up since its debut caused from recent Twitter restrictions as well as the ease of the platform for existing Meta users. Consumers already on Facebook or Instagram can hop over to Threads with their same existing account information and begin using the platform. While this seems beneficial to users, it has caused concern of how simple it was for Threads to already have users’ information.
“I don’t think that there’s going to be a massive increase in data collection, because a lot of people already belong to Facebook or Instagram. Facebook already knows who our friends are. I guess Meta may gain a better sense of who our professional contacts are, but I don’t see a massive increase in data collection here.”
Johnson’s insight provides a new angle that Threads has not obtained any new information but just carried over existing data. In addition, he claims that the EU has restricted Threads because Facebook shares data with the United States, which recently resulted in the GDPT fining Facebook $1.3 billion.