Apple joins Threads; platform passes 100 million users

2023-07-10 14:51:27

Love it or hate it, the Threads it is already a success. With just five days to live, the “Instagram Twitter” hit today, according to data from Quiver Quantitativethe impressive brand of 100 million userswhich includes famous pages, media vehicles, (many) celebrities and a variety of important companies — among them, the Apple.

As noted by 9to5Macthe Cupertino giant took its first steps on Threads yesterday by importing some of its Instagram accounts to the platform, such as those from Apple Newsdo Apple Booksdo Apple Musicdo Shazam it’s yes Beats. The company’s main account (@apple), however, has not yet had its profile activated.

Of all these profiles, the only one that published anything was Beats, which even joined the platform shortly following its launch. The Maçã subsidiary took advantage of the new space to publicize, for example, the new Beats Fit Pro signed by fragment design.

Post by @beatsbydre

View on Threads

This growth of Threads is especially impressive if we consider that the application is not yet available in the European Union, which has been quite the thorn in Meta’s side — and which has certainly cost the platform a good few million users. As we commented, this unavailability has to do with the block’s privacy laws, since the app collects a somewhat worrying amount of data from its users.

And speaking of data collection…

Focusing on privacy, a WIRED published last Thursday (6/7) a survey of all the information that the new Instagram platform stores regarding its users, which includes their uses. The vehicle also took the opportunity to compare them to data collected from other alternatives to Twitter, such as Mastodon and the Bluesky.

Depending on the vehicle, the data collected is used to target ads (both from the company and from third parties), analytics, product customization, app functionality and more. Here is the complete list:

Purchases (purchase history) Financial information (other information) Location (precise and approximate location) Contact information (physical and email addresses, name, phone number and more) Contacts User Content (photos or videos, gameplay content and more) Search history Browsing history Identifiers (user and device) Usage information (product interaction, ad data, and more) Diagnostics (data from crashesperformance and more) Other information

For comparison, below is all the information collected by Bluesky:

Contact information (email addresses) User content (photos or videos, customer support and more) Identifiers (user only) Diagnostics (user data) crashesperformance and more)

According to the WIREDthey are only used to improve the functionality of the app or to allow the user to publish photos and videos on the platform.

Of all the apps analyzed by the vehicle, Mastodon is the only one that does not collect any user data on iOS. On Android, the app only collects the user’s name and email address to share with other companies — that is, nothing so dramatic.

If you use an alternate client to access Mastodon, however, it’s always a good idea to take a look at that app’s “nutrition information” on the App Store to make sure it doesn’t also store all of your information.

1689055873
#Apple #joins #Threads #platform #passes #million #users