A large chunk of the Fediverse was scraped; your posts are being “released”
Matteo Zignani, Christian Quadri, Alessia Galdeman, Sabrina Gaito andGian Paolo Rossi from the University of #Milan scraped all english speaking instances (363) listed on instances.social, wrote a paper about it and are distributing the dataset.
“In this context, we release a dataset gathered from Mastodon, […]“
https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/download/3262/3130/
“These data have been collected by implementing an ad-hoc tool for downloading the public timelines of the servers, namely instances, that form the Mastodon platform, along with the meta-data associated to them.“
“The spider exploits the instance list obtained from the previous step and makes a pool of requests to the instance endpoint 4 which returns the latest toots of the local timeline. Since the time-lines implement a pagination mechanism, the spider extracts the URL for the next request and repeat this procedure till it reaches the end of the timeline.”
“In the terms of service and privacy policy the gathering and the usage of public available data is never explicitly mentioned, consequently our data collec-tion seems to be complaint with the policy of the instance.“
Wrong.
#FediAdmin #MastoAdmin #MastoDev #Privacy