Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • Wander@yiffit.netEnglish
    532·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • abbadon420@lemm.eeEnglish
      161·
      2 years ago

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

    • BitOneZero @ .world@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • azuth@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        The posts just contain a URL which doesn’t include the uploader’s ip address or their browser string.

        • BitOneZero @ .world@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          When the browser loads that URL, hotlinked image, that server has to have your IP address to return the results. Just browsing posts those images are being loaded.

    • Yaxoi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

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

    • kaba0@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        2 years ago

        Also, it’s not just about privacy, it’s about retaliation. It will be the easiest thing in the world for people to put together bots that will track the downvotes on every post they make and automate adding those people to block lists. Suddenly a whole fleet of alts is invisible to the people that would disagree with them.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • booty_flexx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • agoramachina@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      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!

      • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        With all due respect, figuring out who you are based off what you say in a public setting is already what people do irl

    • Reliant1087@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

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

    • Smk@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        It’s very difficult to both A) have meaningful conversations in a public space, and B) conceal your identity from a dedicated adversary. Once a person has a long post history, it’s likely that an observer could narrow down their identity to a very small group, if not a single person. Every post you make reveals something.

        Even if you don’t ever explicitly state it, your age range and gender can likely be guessed with high probability by your writing style and/or little tidbits of info you leak without thinking about it. Same for political leanings. You might casually mention the brand of car you drive, or your favorite foods, or just reference something you experienced as a child that is not universal. All of these things leak information, and while each one seems insignificant, in aggregate they can tell a detailed story. Just knowing that you’re a Canadian who speaks both French and English eliminates about 99.8% of the world’s population as possibilities.

        Back on Reddit I used to create fresh accounts all the time, but then I’d go and join the same subs, post with the same writing style, and generally express the same worldview. If anybody cared, had a good grasp of statistics, bothered to collect the data, and put in a stupid amount of time to it, they could likely match all of my accounts together. I was never too worried about this because…well I just didn’t care. But I did have a cyberstalker at one point and it made me think.

        I wouldn’t be shocked if someone could match me to one or more of my Reddit accounts just from this one comment, tbh. I’m leaking information here like a sieve! Not many people have the skills to do that, and the few who do are unlikely to give a rat’s ass about me. HOWEVER, as AI becomes more advanced, anyone with computer literacy will be able to do analysis in minutes that might currently take an expert days or weeks.

    • NotMatt@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • gsa32@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      2 years ago

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

      • JesusTheCarpenter@feddit.ukEnglish
        11·
        2 years ago

        Well, I disagree. Redditsms, or whatever you call them, among other things helped to make reddit as popular as it is (was) right now.

        I get you don’t like it personally, but your personal opinion about them being cringe, while respectable, is not a fact.

      • Chriszz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        2 years ago

        Yes all the bad Reddit jokes and unoriginal lame attempts at garnering upvotes eg making a stupid joke out of a typo (generally unfunny, rare exceptions), I also choose this guy’s wife, take my upvote you bastard, anything along the lines of wow I hate you for making a pun, I’m not crying you are, I feel personally attacked and god knows the list goes on and on

        Hopefully these things aren’t just replaced but one can hope

    • Cheems@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ‽@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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

  • ScaNtuRd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • OmniGlitcher@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • icedcoffee@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

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

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Bill@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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).

  • kennydidwhat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • kennydidwhat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        On the contrary, I’m not conflating two specifics. I’m speaking in general terms about the demonstrable public perception (read: billions of social media users who happily hand over their data vs. the palpable unease over data publication in all walks of tech discussion) and how it is innately hypocritical.

        It is perfectly normal and useful to discuss societal contradictions. For example: “We hate school shootings, but we do fuck-all to stop them from occurring.” That statement does not conflate two different vocal minorities, it purports to accurately describe the generalized societal contradiction at hand.

        The rest of your post is completely off-topic.

        • sauerkraus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Why does the person have no problem sharing their address with the DMV but gets upset when their address is leaked publicly? Curious. They claim to value transparency, but oppose doxxing?

  • trouser_mouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think this is to be expected - some instances have downvotes disabled but that doesn’t seem to be the rule of thumb.

    There are quite a few questions about data retention, usage, retrieval, compliance and how it is shared which will need to be addressed as the platform grows.

    Countdown for this to be monetised by someone.

  • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • fishos@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    That said, don’t just call people out who downvote you. No one owes you an explanation if they thought your post was bad. I’ve already seen it once and it was pretty childish.

  • mrmanager@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Well of course. The instance stores all data in a postgres database. How else will it be able to remember anything?

    Maybe this is not obvious to non-programmers but you never see everything in the user interface for any system. There are tons of records needed for the system to track everything that goes on.

    Since posts are federated, they will exist in the local db as well as on each instance.