In Brief

Meta’s Twitter rival trolled for trawling customer data

Twitter’s newly formed rival app, Threads shook the internet by surpassing 10 million sign ups in less than 7 hours after its launch, then users started trolling the platform for the data Facebook owner Meta wants to collect.

Users shared screenshots of Thread terms and conditions that indicated data collected including location, personal information, health and fitness, web history, photos, files and folders.

Meta, the social media giant which owns Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, launched the text based app to rival Elon Musk’s Twitter. The platform will run with no ads at first which will come later on.

Threads is a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, thereby sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch. The new platform offers the option to link with Instagram too.

Threads went live on both Apple and Android stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday. However the European region’s launch was delayed amid concerns of data privacy.

This move comes coincidentally when Twitter users were dealt with a huge blow which placed restrictions on the tweets they can see in a day. It is widely thought that the Meta CEO is taking advantage of Twitter’s current hurdles.

The Facebook CEO took to the new app to write: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion plus people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will,” Zuckerberg said.

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