Bobby Burack
Videos by OutKick
The biggest story in media this week is Threads, a newly-released Meta rival to Twitter.
Meta says Threads recorded more than 30 million sign-ups within about 18 hours of its launch. But perhaps unbeknownst to those users is the data they have since signed over to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Such data includes financial and health information.
“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,” tweeted reporter Michael Shellenberger.
“If you are looking to have your speech censored and your data pillaged, then Mark Zuckerberg has an app for you,” said, Stephen Miller, a Senior Advisor to former President Donald Trump.
Fox News Digital provided the following breakdown of the information to which Threads has access:
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
Your credit score, huh?
Now, each tech platform mines personal data. Including Twitter. However, not quite to the extent of Threads.
As I discussed on SiriusXM Thursday with Stacy Washington, Twitter does not access users’ financial or health information — the most eerie of Threads’ features.
In fact, Threads’ data access is so aggressive it could cost the service a release in Europe.
“It is unlikely, even if Meta did pursue a wider release, that the application would pass legal muster,” reports Fox News.
Moreover, it simply won’t be to remove Threads from invading your privacy. Get this: the only way to delete a Threads account is to also deactivate your Instagram account.
Most users won’t leave IG and thus are stuck forking over data to Mark Zuckerberg.
