Lol. kids these days would post their bank info online if the banks didn’t prevent them from doing so.

I whole heartedly agree with this perspective.

Additionally, and this is an unpopular opinion, but trying to maintain a Nick or online identity over many years is folly. You end up with a huge repository of personal information, increasing the risk that it can be connected to you personally.

No, an alias will only give you pseudo-anonymity. Even trivial analysis like counting which words occur together frequently in your writings can reveal with very good accuracy any other alt of you, so the available information of you is basically everything you have shared online with enough accompanying self-written text.

Your home instance will act as a proxy and only they have access to your email and IP address.

Your home image typically doesn’t proxy image loading, those are hotlinked to the Lemmy server that the image was uploaded to. So your IP address and browser string are going to other Lemmy servers.

That is why I am as my username states: intentionally anonymous

The thing is, there is really no way to know is trustworthy as a home instance…?

What about post views? Are those also stored?

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or: pgp :)

This person internets. 👏

You know, I came in here with the mindset that the topic of discussion here isn’t a bad thing; I’m largely pro information-should-be-open-and-available. But you’ve argued a very solid point, and I’ve changed my mind on the issue. I appreciate you sharing this perspective!

Lmao the internet finally realizing what companies and the govt have been doing for decades on the internet

I think your comment clearly illustrates what might go wrong with it. If they need this data for sorting or something else absolutely, then I would be happy if they just hashed the usernames/instances or used some other form of UID.

Red*it can do that too (if not doing it already) but they also have your personal details linked especially when paying for premium :)

And just think how much data you can gather by sending out puppet accounts on various instances, accounts that will serve only to publicly state an opinion, such as “I support this candidate”, so the data on the people who upvote it can be harvested and categorized more easily. There is so much data harvesting potential here with a little imagination, and with a little more, a lot of ways to use that data to influence the way average users engage with the fediverse.

That site would also be a great advertisement for Lemmy. Come here to our decentralized platform, where you can vote…but you better not, lest you end up on the site. What social network wouldn’t grow when users are peer pressured into not using one of it’s basic underlying mechanics that makes the whole thing work?

I’m almost willing to bet that big tech companies are already doing this. They got the motive and the means. No doubt Meta or Google have dedicated some of their servers to mining our Lemmy data in this way.

They will know the user but not the person in real life. Even if you know that my user is more conservative on some points or more liberal on others, how can you use that for nefarious action ? Unless you know where I live and who I am, the data is useless.

People need to be aware that sharing your personal information on the internet is never a good idea.

Jesus Fucking Christ !

Can your instance secretly run a fork that doesn’t respect deletes?

That was pretty interesting. I want to see graphs.

Honestly, why not? The data is already being recorded. At least this way it’s public and the rest of us get to interact with it. It might even scare a few people into paying attention to the information that they disclose about themselves and increase their digital hygiene.

I’m going to start throwing “edit: thanks for the gold kind stranger!” on the end of my comments just to induce some nostalgic cringe.

Redditisms are cringe and always have been. Yes I agree we should leave them behind.

This.

EDIT: Thanks for the awards kind stranger!

EDIT 2: Rip my inbox

This is all examples of reddit shit that is really dumb. We don’t need to bring it over here

Besides that. A “disable inbox notification” option is not available yet, is it?

Agreed, I am incredibly confused by what seems to be the majority reaction to this.

I’ve never been particularly involved with the FOSS community, though I do use a few FOSS apps and generally appreciate their view on what FOSS means. I also strongly appreciate data privacy, and it was my observation that the FOSS community was (generally) relatively the same way. So to see this reaction is very surprising. It’s quite literally the same terrible argument of “Why fear it if you have nothing to hide” used against multiple data privacy concerns throughout the years.

I think the worst are the bad faith “But Reddit…!” arguments. For one, we’re not on Reddit anymore, this is about Lemmy’s issues that can be corrected. And for two, whilst Reddit potentially outsourcing that data to the highest bidder is far from ideal, at the very least the data wasn’t outright PUBLIC to anyone who wishes to set up a simple server.

I don’t think you’re been harsh lol, the right to secrete ballot is literally in the universal declaration of human rights.

Open ballot is a well known method for intimidating and blackmailing participants, it’s absolutely crazy that Fedivese operates this way. But even worse, seeing so many people here supports it.

I don’t think it’s possible to encrypt the data.

Say we have a rogue user that sends to the server multiple upvote requests for the same comment, how can the server reject the subsequent requests? After all, we can’t let a user upvote a post or comment multiple times.

If that data is encrypted, the server cannot tell whether the user has upvoted a comment before.

What information is stored/publicly accessible for our accounts?

I don’t see it being a problem that your votes are public so long as there’s no way to tie the account to you irl. Like, so long as the instance (? I’m very new here I don’t really understand the data structure) doesn’t store your IP address or anything does it matter?

Like yeah you can see that u/randomdickhead (again, not familiar with naming conventions) upvote some weird shit but so long as that’s where the bill ends that user could just make another account aaaaaaaaaaand… No issue?

If I have the wrong idea please let me know I’m genuinely confused about this

I agree as in “we need to assure anonymity” although I find complete transperency better than corporate overlords deciding what happens with your data

now atleast you know that everyone that does want to know the information is going to get it [so you can behave yourself ;) ]

You call us insane but you don’t want to be harsh? I wonder what would you call people that are not panicking at even a possibility that anything personal becomes public if you were trying to be harsh.

On a more serious note, I am happy that people like you exist that care about privacy as it benefits everyone overall I guess. But you have to remember that some people, like me, don’t have issues with having their opinions and even some personal data public as long as we are aware that this is the case (which is how I treat all the social media).

For instance, durning my Reddit 7-year tenure I always wrote my comments in a way that if suddenly my employers or friend brought it up, I would not be ashamed of what I wrote.

I am not saying it’s not good to think and discuss about things like that but I would appreciate if you didn’t call people insane that have a very different attitude to you if it comes to internet privacy.

Some people freak out about internet privacy, GMO, sweeteners causing cancer, etc. There are others that don’t.

This completely goes against the entire philosophy of the Fediverse

Care to elaborate on that? As far as I know this is built in to all the ActivityPub applications.

alternatively, if votes were private, you could spin up a bot network to mass upvote your comment; making it far more influential as most people are more inclined to believe statements they think others also feel. thankfully, votes are open, so you can’t

as long as there is a system, people will try to game the system; and when there is a new system, people will come up with new games

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I agree with you about harassment issues, and the importance of controlling the transfer of admin-level data between instances, but for your last scenario, doesn’t blocking only apply to users who are logged in? Assuming your hypothetical tankies and Nazis were actually posting as well as blocking, it would be easy to find them just by logging out, and there are a lot of ways to get them banned or otherwise counteract their activities that don’t require someone to interact directly with them while logged in. The case you’re describing is not the kind of situation where the most important action is to argue with them. Arguing with extremists usually just validates their delusions, and encourages them to keep doing what they’re doing.

While I agree this shouldn’t be so publicly accessible, I’m curious about the possible benefits of limited sharing between instances to give spam/bot detection tool’s more power.

Users on A vote on a post on B. The admins from A and B can see the fine details of who did what, but the admins of C (and all of the general users regardless of instance) just see totals of up/down votes.

The problem that Reddit realized early on is that user voting is the engine behind the content aggregation. That aggregation is one of the main selling points of Reddit. The more users vote on what they see, the more information Reddit has for how to aggregate that content. That’s what keeps the front page fresh, that’s what keeps content moving up and down on the site. In a very real sense, the voting is the heart pumping blood through the site.

So it behooves the site to not give any reason for users not to vote how they feel. Keeping votes private was part of that. It is one of the most basic tenets of democracy: the only way to give people the freedom to vote honestly and frequently is to give them the privacy to do it.

The potential for retaliation against users, in any number of conceivable ways, far outweighs any benefits that come from making votes public.

The voting information also makes it insanely easy to automate mass blocking of any opinion under the sun. Nobody in this thread seems to grasp all the things you can do with that data to manipulate user interactions on this site. If you think troll armies are bad, wait till those troll armies have a shared automated block list of every single person that has ever downvoted them.

Agreed, especially because I believe we’re headed for a repressive regime here in the US in about 2 years.

Places like this will need to get very careful if they want to remain bastions of free speech and places where people can come to find the information that will no longer be available in mainstream channels.

Pretty easy to make an instance that would auto vote certain things with suspicious amounts of votes

As it stands now, they have to fake the origin of some of those votes. Not much of a barrier, the fediverse generally accepts any user an instance says exists, but still, it’s a barrier

And of course any instance thats blatantly manipulating votes is going to be defederated, but I’m more concerned with an instance that behaves normally until it encounters a keyword or user is been set to, and then gives their posts a -5 or whatever

That would allow to fake votes, as I can tweak my instance to spew any number I want.

I think those users who live under oppressive governments should be used to using tools like Tor and accounts with a proton email to interact on the internet.

Knowing they’re visible on kbin made me realize that most Lemmy users probably weren’t aware, as it’s non-obvious.

One thing I really like is that it makes it easy to identify users to block. If there’s a post stating that “Nazis are bad” and it has ten downvotes, it’s very easy to use that to block future content from trolls and people I’m not interested in hearing from.

I’ll contribute that my intent with this post is not evangelism. I like the voting system and would be disappointed to see it disappear.

A vote in Reddit was, from a practical perspective, anonymous. While it was recorded in the database and admins had access to this information there were mitigations in place to deter abuse and the end result was that the person you up or down voted was not going to know that YOU, personally, downvoted them. It was also of limited value to external data sifters in creating social graphs.

Since Lemmy votes are non-anonymously propagated across the Fediverse and, literally, anyone can be an admin there are people who may want to reconsider whether they upvote or downvote a particular post or comment. The actual reasons may vary; they don’t want to be outed as sympathetic to a political view or cause, they don’t want it used a social graph for targeted advertising or even spear-phishing. In many cases there will be people who don’t care at all.

Just trying to contribute to transparency. Not everyone can read code, sift data or visualize how a social network would work behind the scenes. There’s plenty of opportunities for others to use our data, good and evil. I believe that efforts to bring to light non-obvious consequences of actions is good citizenship.

The problem is that it’s actively worse than Reddit. While only Reddit employees can access your data and it’s being sold to the highest bidder, Lemmy sells your data for $0.00.

Anyone can become an instance admin through their own instance, so your voting data is pretty much unprotected. That is the opposite of privacy. I get that it’s a consequence of the fediverse, but then it just may not be the solution to social media.

How about both are bad.

Ah, the old Reddit Lemmy switcharoo.

You are probably seeing two very different vocal minorities, and conflating the two.

Also, there’s a very clear difference in expectations between posting/commenting and upvoting. I blame the UI. We naturally expect public actions to be easily visible. The lack of universal accessibilty to the public data makes people unaware that the data is public. Lemmy UIs, including apps, need to make this information (a list of upvoting users) universally publicly accessible before people will change their expectations.

It makes sense to me that people are more worried about potentially any corporation / bad actor accessing their data rather than one

Well it’s just as bad but in a different way.

Big cooperations may not respect me as an individual, but they have a self-preserving interest, a brand image to loose, and are checked by privacy watchdogs.

A Lemmy I stance can be run on any PC in some anonymous guys basement; there really no way of telling.

If that is a solution you’d need to change the ActivityPub specification. You are more than welcome to submit your idea.

Also, there’s way too much trust in instances. Like, one person could easily make a post on lemmy.world, go on their personal instance, and just give themselves, say, 2000 upvotes.

I’d first have to create 2000 users, then I’d have to send 2000 upvotes. And then I’d get blocked by all instances.

Instances should have their own settings on what instances are allowed to keep a local copy.

This is also not compatible with the ActivityPub spec but even if it were you’d win nothing because as soon as you fetch the post it is still on the server.