The third feature, which deserves further study, is Meta's brazen ongoing violation of users' privacy through its new application, and its collection of massive amounts of sensitive personal data (in about 25 categories).
It went so far as to ask users for personal information related to their health, fitness, finances, contact, search and purchase history, their physical address, among other things.
Ultimately, these applications live on advertising revenues, in hundreds of millions of dollars, and don't hesitate to exploit their users' data to fill their companies' accounts and make huge profits at the expense of their privacy.
Although Threads is still ad-free in its early stages, the more you penetrate your customer's life, the greater the return.
For example, would Meta take it even further by asking for racial or ethnic data, information on social orientation, family situations, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, political attitudes, genetic information, or biometric data?
Because of this feature, the new application, which has been launched in 100 countries, including the United Kingdom, could see its entry blocked into the European Union, where strict regulations and rules are imposed by the new Digital Markets Act on major internet companies' use of sensitive data for advertising without user approval. This was highlighted by the Data Protection Commission of Ireland.
The Meta record has set several precedents for violating the requirements of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as violating EU user data in a flagrant way, by transferring it to the United States. In May, they were fined a whopping $1.3bn.
Although this incident was related to Facebook, in principle, the same requirements can be applied to other Meta platforms, including Threads, which ranks higher in terms of data exploitation.
Meta was also fined in January more than $410mn in the European Union for the same reasons, this time in relation to Instagram.
This is apart from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Meta was found to have allowed the British political consulting company to access the personal data of Facebook users in the period before the latter was renamed Meta.
The question remains, however, will users be able to look past Meta's disregard for privacy in exchange for greater freedom of expression that is lacking on Twitter?
Threads leverages Twitter's weakness
This is what you don't find on Twitter, which collects information from users only while using the platform and when they authorise it, or when it receives data from third parties, in accordance with the application's privacy policy.
On the other hand, Threads, through its reliance on the protocol ActivityPub, takes into account that users may someday leave the platform someday. So as not to lose followers, ActivtyPub can seamlessly transfer users to alternative platforms.
This is the kind of flexibility that Twitter does not offer. Instead, it seems that Twitter has been increasingly imposing restrictions on its users.
The latest of these restrictions is Musk's imposition of "temporary limits," as he put it, on the number of posts that users can see in a single day – 10,000 posts by verified accounts, i.e. accounts that pay fees; and 1,000 posts by unverified accounts.
The move, which is turning off users, was justified by the need to end extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation by third parties, especially those that rely on artificial intelligence.
It's clear that Threads doesn't offer anything new except that it opened the door to receive "refugee" users from Twitter, who are fleeing the draconian, and sometimes irrational, restrictions on the application since Musk's takeover.
