Meta’s Twitter rival "Threads" has already enraged social media after it was discovered that the new "sharing with text" platform asks users to hand over even more data than its competitor, including financial and health information.
Reporter Michael Shellenberger warned that the new creation from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has "near zero privacy" and said Congress must either break up Meta or mandate transparency as a condition of the company’s Section 230 protections.
"Mark Zuckerberg says he’s not thinking about monetization of users on his Twitter clone, Threads, but that’s a lie. His business model is selling our data to advertisers," he tweeted Thursday.
Weighing in on the controversy, Stephen Miller, a Senior Advisor to former President Donald Trump, tweeted, "If you are looking to have your speech censored and your data pillaged, then Mark Zuckerberg has an app for you."
ZUCKERBERG SAYS THREADS, INSTAGRAM'S NEW TWITTER-LIKE APP, HAS 30 MILLION USERS; ELON MUSK RESPONDS
"Zuckerberg’s Threads app looks interesting," The Babylon Bee Managing Editor Joel Berry tweeted. "They mine you for data and will probably censor you, but the upside is that you can read the political opinions of Instagram yoga pants influencers."
Greg Price, the Communications Director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, expressed concern that Zuckerberg launched Threads by using data from Instagram to compete with Twitter after it was found that the photo-sharing social media platform helped facilitate the spread and sale of child sexual abuse materials.
"Think seriously for one second about how @elonmusk bringing back banned accounts from old Twitter was a bigger and much longer discussed controversy in the media than Instagram actually serving as a network for pedophiles to find child porn," he wrote.
According to the "Data Linked to You" page found on Apple devices, the following information may be collected by Threads and linked to your identity:
TWITTER ACCUSES META OF STEALING TRADE SECRETS WITH NEW APP THREADS, THREATENS LEGAL ACTION
Location: Approximate location and precise location
Personal Info: Name, email, user IDs, address, phone number, political or religious beliefs, sexual orientation and other info
Financial: User payment info, purchase history, credit score and other financial info
Health and Fitness information
Messages: Emails, SMS or MMS, other in-app messages
Photos and Videos
Audio: Voice or sound recordings, music files and other audio files
Files and documents, calendar events, contacts, web browsing history and devices.
App activity: App interactions, in-app search history, installed apps, other user-generated content and other actions
App info and performance: Crash logs, diagnostics and other app performance data
Twitter, in comparison, does not ask users to fork over health and fitness data, financial information, sensitive information and "other data."
HOW FACEBOOK SECRETLY COLLECTS YOUR INFORMATION EVEN IF YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP
Threads was released on Wednesday evening on the Apple IOS App Store. Seven hours later, Zuckerberg announced the app had already exceeded 10 million sign-ups.
The app, described by some as a "Twitter killer," works by syncing with existing Instagram users’ login credentials. Once logged in, a user can follow those with shared interests and accounts they already follow on Instagram. Users can share posts up to 500 characters in length with the ability to share links, photos and videos.
Currently, Meta is not seeking to release the application in Europe, where privacy and data laws are much more stringent than in the U.S. It is unlikely, even if Meta did pursue a wider release, that the application would pass legal muster.
Under EU law, health data requires an extremely high standard of explicit consent to be processed to comply with the General Data Protect Regulation (GDPR). Additionally, the app’s ability to import personal data from Instagram creates an additional legal headache, described by some tech journalists as a "privacy nightmare."
Earlier this year, Meta was fined nearly €377 million for failing to provide a valid legal reason under GDPR to run behavioral advertisements on the company’s array of apps.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
