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Elon Musk’s tenure as head of Twitter has, generously, been a bit of a disaster for the social media giant. Since Musk took over the company, Twitter’s traffic has dropped 11% year over year, advertisers have fled in droves, and alternative social networks are gaining ground.
Enter, predictably: Threads, Meta’s Twitter alternative. The company rolled out the text-based app, tied to Instagram, on July 5—and saw over 100 million downloads in its first week.
But the app’s surge in popularity has come with criticism from security and privacy experts who warn that Meta’s long-standing negative reputation when it comes to data persists. Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
Cybersecurity company InfoStream’s CEO Alan Crowetz told Florida’s WPTV that he sees the amount of information Threads is collecting as a “yellow alert” for security due to the possible “weaknesses” in the new platform that hackers could take advantage of.
“Any new source, treasure trove of data, is just yet another area of vulnerability, another thing hackers are going after,” Crowetz told the outlet.
Ups and downs. Twitter’s decline in rules enforcement and management of obscene and offensive content hasn’t earned it much in the way of user goodwill. Musk’s new verification scheme, where people who pay can have their content boosted to the top of the feed, has come in for criticism over the spread of misinformation and conspiracies, notably about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Yet Threads has its own problems. Among the biggest red flags on Threads is that the app is currently not usable in Europe due to privacy concerns. The exclusion, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri told The Verge, is due to “the complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year.”
Concerns over the new app include the fact that in order to delete Threads, you have to delete your Instagram account. Crypto scammers are impersonating big profiles in the space, using recognizable names to phish and steal.
And then there’s the data that Threads can mine from your profile. The App Store warns that Threads can collect information related to your health, finances, browsing history and data usage, location, contacts, and more. That’s a treasure trove of information for a company that has seldom been shy about mining that data to profile users.