@BraveSirZaphod Hey, I'm the guy that wrote this. While I absolutely hold negative bias towards Meta, the point of the article was not to produce a piece of propaganda, but instead illustrate that their policies have updated to acknowledge that they will have third-party accounts on other servers, that they will be collecting data, and that this is likely a sign that federation may be happening sooner than expected.
Not everybody is happy about that, and some developers are working on hardening their applications to protect against unauthorized access for edge cases related to this.
Anyone who owns a server can access all the data stored on it, unless the data is end-to-end encrypted. Whether it's mastodon, Lemmy, Facebook, twitter, Gmail, vBulletin, whatever.
If you need to say something that you can't risk anyone else seeing, use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, or implement encryption yourself using e.g. PGP.
Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse ( wedistribute.org )
Threads, Meta's new microblogging platform, is updating its terms to focus on data collection from "Third Party Users".
We tried to run a social media site and it was awful ( www.ft.com )
Extinction looms for FTAV’s Mastodon presence