And I’d worry more about them dumping and analyzing comments from here directly through scraping, without ever having to seize the hardware, and trying to identify users through cross matches with other sources
US users should be particularly careful with OPSEC these days
And while hexbear is pretty low profile, it’s not that crazy: there was already a contractor scrapping comments massively from hexbear in the past to “analyze trends in extremist discourse” or some such. I remember they even complained in their report because admins had temporarily limited the history length you could consult, resulting in a limited dataset for the contractor in question.
Also we’re federated; even if hexbear had perfect security and so on, other instances have most of the content. Again, back to OPSEC. Can’t scrap / exploit data that doesn’t exist.
She means it’s hosted in France
And I’d worry more about them dumping and analyzing comments from here directly through scraping, without ever having to seize the hardware, and trying to identify users through cross matches with other sources
US users should be particularly careful with OPSEC these days
And while hexbear is pretty low profile, it’s not that crazy: there was already a contractor scrapping comments massively from hexbear in the past to “analyze trends in extremist discourse” or some such. I remember they even complained in their report because admins had temporarily limited the history length you could consult, resulting in a limited dataset for the contractor in question.
Also we’re federated; even if hexbear had perfect security and so on, other instances have most of the content. Again, back to OPSEC. Can’t scrap / exploit data that doesn’t exist.
There was also that one user who submitted a FOIA request on the FBI’s hexbear files