You Should Know

To anyone surprised at this: welcome to the fediverse, please treat everyhing you do or say as public.

The way to achieve privacy around here is by following the long forgotten arts of the old internet before Facebook was a thing: use a Nick name and don't tell strangers on the internet your real identity.

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

So, as long as you trust your home instance to not leak or disclose your connection or sign up data (which would be illegal in EU countries), just sign up with an alias.

A very positive aspects of this is that it should allow us to detect voting manipulation by correlating the activity of certain potentially malicious actors. If Lemmy instances take vote manipulation seriously and do their best to block bots this has the chance to make Lemmy / Kbin much more transparent and credible than Reddit ever was.

To illustrate op's point I'm going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.

Then I'm going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.

Additionally, I'll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user's political affiliations and display the results.

Worst of all, I'm not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I'm spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.

I'll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.

Just kidding I'm not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.

Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.

Can we leave this kinda stuff behind? It is NOT obligatory.

Reading these comments, seeing so many excuses, sarcastic responses, and handwaving, makes me realize a great deal of users really need to develop some imagination.

This is not about privacy. It's about data that can easily be used for targeting and profiling users, and how that creates countless avenues for targeted harassment and wide scale retaliation. It's about all of the innumerable ways public vote information can and will be abused to manipulate scoring across the site with targeted/automated shadow banning and shared blocklists. Raise your hand if you trust every single admin to never abuse such a tool to curate the outward appearance of an instance to fit a narrative.

For a different example: I could say something about how great Nazis are right now, and have a bot programmed to read every single person that downvoted me, add those names to a shared blocklist, and viola, I've made myself and all my alts invisible to the people that would challenge me on a massive scale.

I promise you this is going to be a big issue as tools for this site get more sophisticated over time.

Oh no, so my upvotes on c/spacedicks aren't private?

/s

Not to sound harsh or anything, but those of you saying that it's okay that all this data is public are insane. This completely goes against the entire philosophy of the Fediverse and FOSS in general. The reason we all are fleeing from Big Tech is because they collect so much data on us. At least, they keep it hidden from public view. This is a major issue in my opinion, and needs to be addressed ASAP before we can claim to have superior platforms on the Fediverse. Why can't this data at least be encrypted?

Activities are public and easily viewable on kbin. It's been interesting. Seems mostly positive other than people harassing those who down-vote them demanding explanations.

Just commenting so this stays one of the most commented posts. Feel free to keep scrolling

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

Our data has never been 'invisible'... We've just trusted that places like Reddit and their staff will do the right thing. That's literally how it already works.

If you sign up for Reddit, Reddit staff can see your posts and votes if they want to.

If you sign up for a private forum the admin there can also see database contents.

One way encryption is not possible without stopping functionality... If data about you was encrypted then posts you make couldn't be displayed. If you include a means to decrypt then there was no point encrypting anyway.

This is how it's always been, and Lemmy doesn't change this status quo much.

A faceless corporation that has had access to your data is just replaced by a variety of admins distributed across instances.

This isn't a good or bad thing, the potential for abuse does exist, but when we have literally made agreements with places like Reddit that they can use and sell our data... then what difference does it make it an admin takes a peek?

It wouldn't be great... but nothing is perfect.

It's still worth working on however, to see if a better solution can be found, but at this time I'd say just be aware that it is possible that your data can be seen and understand the only safeguard against that if you need to communicate something private would be to use direct messaging with end to end encryption.

I’ll just use my short username then

There's something amusing about people feeling violated by their activity being made public, but not necessarily by corporations hoarding and capitalizing on that activity & data. I mean, one of them is out in the open. The other is pure abuse.

How often are we going to see this postage? I think this is the third time I've seen it at least

I downvoted the beans and I don't care who knows about it. I'd do it again.

This is useful to know though, thanks. I guess assume everything is public short of your password (unless your admin is particularly nefarious and has altered the code to store passwords in plaintext for some reason).

Well, yeah, it's put on the database.

It's the only way to avoid double voting from the same account or to remove the reverse vote if one changes one's mind and votes the other way.

Did you think that it was any different on Reddit and that no random employee with access to their database could run a similar SQL query with a couple of joins and end up with nicknames, e-mails and IP addresses?!

Do you know who are the Reddit employees with access to their database or a copy of it? Have you had a chance to vet them? I don't think so.

At least here it's a bit more transparent.

The only shocking thing in this is that anybody is shocked by it.

Suppose there is someone who wants to maintain their anonymity and privacy on Lemmy so that it couldn't be tied to their real identity, what do you think is the best way to do that?

Hmm, I, famous Hollywood actress Margot Robbie and star of "Barbie", sure am stumped.

Nothing private in fediverse except when you are selfhosting yourself.

Back in my day everyone knew that once you put something on the internet it's there forever to be seen by all. Has everyone already forgotten this? This is nothing new and in fact the way it's always been! Now get off my lawn!