A tool lets you see who blocked you on Bluesky… and view their profile

When you go to the ClearSky web application, developed by a third party, you only have to enter an identifier into a search engine to see a wealth of information displayed on the account in question.

In one click, you can access the accounts blocked by the profile, but also those who have blocked it. The tool also displays which lists he is on, and shows his history on the platform, including publications. This information is visible regardless of whether the person has blocked you or not.

In mid-October, more than 1.2 million people joined Bluesky following an update to blocking features on X (new window)now allowing blocked people to view the profile of blocking accounts.

One of X’s official accounts argued that the blocking feature, in its previous form, could be used for malicious purposes, for example to spread or hide private or harmful information about blocked people.

Several specialists disagreed, pointing out that it would be the update that would encourage negative behavior from malicious people. The British think tank OpenDemocracy had affirmed on X that this decision was a real victory for harassers and a setback for victims of domestic violence.

Limits to the open model

Is this a first sign of the limits of the open model of the Bluesky platform?

Initially, open a platform like Bluesky does makes people work for free to develop ideas that can eventually be integrated into the platformsays Camille Alloing, professor in the Department of Social and Public Communication at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM).

If we open up to encourage innovations and promote transparency […]it also allows the monitoring of accounts and the collection of data which can be used for purposes which may not have been envisaged by the platform itself.

On Tuesday, the specialized site Media 404 revealed that a bookseller Hugging Facea start-up in the field of artificial intelligence, had published a set of data, collected from a million publications on Bluesky, for machine learning purposes. He recanted and apologized that evening, acknowledging that his approach violated the principles of transparency and consent in data collection.

Later in the evening, the Bluesky team published a series of messages on its site, reminding us that its social network is open and public.

Websites can specify whether they consent to outside companies mining their data using a Robots.txt file, and we’re exploring a similar practice here.

The team cites as an example a setting that would allow Internet users to consent or not on their Bluesky account to external developers using their content in training data sets.artificial intelligenceIA.

Bluesky will not be able to enforce this consent outside of its systems. It will be up to external developers to respect these parameterssaid the company, promising to keep Internet users informed.

Camille Alloing believes this is a solution cosmetic.

The principle of robot.txt will not prevent anything at all in absolute terms. It will limit mass automation, a bit like a search engine, but it will not limit the targeted aspiration of content, what is in messages, images, emojis, etc.he specifies.

Twitter took the same approach in its early days, which attracts researchershe notes.

But sucking up data in 2013 compared to today no longer means the same thing, insists the researcher: It’s not just for ad targeting, it’s to feed machine learning. This raises questions of copyright and privacy in general.

Can you protect your account?

Are there account settings to limit this type of usage? To this question, Camille Alloing answers in the negative.

Everything is open for now. Technically, there is no way to protect yourself from this, other than not publishing on the platform and deleting your account.

He still bases a lot of hope on the fact that Bluesky is a relatively new platform, with a relatively small pool of followers (23 million registrations) and management leaders who are still accessible. This is the time to tell them that this is the security we want, and that if nothing is put in place, people will look elsewhere.says Camille Alloing.

ClearSky and Bluesky did not respond to -’s requests.