Bluesky or X?
Here I rave about Terms of Service again. Why? I gave an hour and a half and then another hour or two of my precious life to reviewing the Bluesky ToS. Something is wrong with me. I’m a raving lunatic.
There was reported a migration among people on the blue side of the U.S. political spectrum away from X to another social platform called Bluesky. The report attributed this mainly to the association of X owner Elon Musk with President and President Elect Donald Trump. A friend asked me about Bluesky. “Is it safe?,” he asked? He doesn’t use X, either.
TL/DR. Bluesky is to Twitter (or X) as Telegram is to Wpp. Same compromises, different heads. It is not as Signal is to Telegram, Wpp, etcetera. Not even close. It is equally evil as most. There is nothing better about it. It is possibly worse because of the open AT protocol. It is yet another exposure.
Terms of Service
Wikimedia commons image of Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in 2024 at a press conference at Camp Navarro, Mendocino County, California. That is a beautiful redwood tree behind her. She’s standing at a podium that says, “Boy Scouts of America”.
There was an article on BBC about how Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, did not know the minimum age for using the platform. This information is in the first paragraphs of the Terms of Service (ToS). That she did not know the answer indicates that, not only do you not read the ToS. The CEO of the company doesn’t read them, either.
I’m always interested in the asymmetries within ToS. Generally, the provider takes a lot and gives little.
- Account termination
2E: if you delete your account, they will delete what they can of the content you have posted, best effort, no promises
4B: if they terminate your account, they will keep the user content that you have posted
Indemnity
12: In the case of a claim against Bluesky that Bluesky decides you are responsible for, you pay and they play. They have total control. You pay all of the costs. This is common to many ToS these days. You might consider it a non-starter if, not being a home owner, you have no kind of umbrella insurance policy that would maybe protect you. You are basically granting them your life savings.
If you think, “I don’t do anything wrong.” Remember that they decide that. Not you. If you think, “That never happens.” Ask, why is it there? Perhaps in the United States we are simply accustomed to this. A medical condition will break many people with the bills.
13: on the other hand, they have no liability to you whatsoever; or, in any case, not more than $100.
Arbitration
Cow ready for milking by Keith Weller/USDA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
14: It’s little you against big them. You can’t join with others to form a class. You won’t go to court. The arbitration committee will decide. Who are they? Are they like the Motion Picture Association? I rate this an R.
I get it. Class action suits are expensive. Congress made this happen at the behest of corporations. Power to the people? No. You are consumer cows. Say, “mooooo.” Give milk.
Privacy policy
This is a misleading term applied universally. These are disclosures of information gathering and sharing. What they say is that your interaction is not private. A more accurate title would be, “Data Sharing Disclosure.” Would that get your attention? Probably not.
Direct messages are unencrypted and accessible to moderators. That is anyone who can phish a moderator for their credentials. Also anyone who can coerce Bluesky into revealing them, such as U.S. law enforcement, or whomever. It’s just like messages at GMail. (Oh so sexy; and free!) You don’t know who reads them.
What you post is (obviously) available to anyone. In addition, they track your use of the site– what you click, what you look at and how long, whom you follow, how often you visit what feeds, etc.
They use this data for marketing and share it with business partners. You don’t know whom, when, how often nor for how much.
They retain the data as long as they want to.
Copyright policy
If you think someone has posted your copyrighted material you can contact them and they will do something about it, or not, as they decide.
Community guidelines
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Don’t do illegal stuff.
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Don’t harass or threaten others.
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Email support if you want to turn someone in.
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They have this thing (an AT thing) called labels. It is basically hash tags. Don’t label inappropriately.
Authenticated Transfer Protocol
Ah cool! They use this open source thing, AT Protocol. That makes things authentic. No more fake news. Is that true? What is it, really?
AT Protocol is cross-app data sharing as an open standard versus, for example, Meta corp’s cross-app data sharing as proprietary to their app’s. It provides a common identity across app’s that is useful for data aggregation.
That is to say, data that Bluesky gathers about your behavior on the app is accessible by an open source protocol to third-party developers in order to combine it with the data that other app’s using the AT Protocol have gathered about your behavior on those. Isn’t that great!
It is distributed, rather than centralized. Distributed simply means that multiple data stores can share without need for a centralized store. The criticism in the Wikipedia article regarding Bluesky is that they keep a centralized store anyway.
This link in the first paragraph of the Privacy Policy, for Bluesky AT Protocol Network Services Privacy Notice is broken as of this writing. It returns 404.