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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by muddybulldog@mylemmy.win to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] Wander@yiffit.net 656 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.ee 197 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] T156@lemmy.world 165 points 1 year ago

You say that like A/S/L wasn't a thing back in the day.

[-] GBU_28@lemm.ee 118 points 1 year ago

19/f/Cali was the only acceptable response

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[-] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 285 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.

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

[-] NotMatt@lemm.ee 138 points 1 year 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.

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[-] gsa32@lemmy.world 68 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] booty_flexx@lemmy.world 270 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.world 59 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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!

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[-] RyanHx@vlemmy.net 189 points 1 year ago

People raise a good point that in countries where political dissent can actually be dangerous, this would very much dissuade people from voting on things they believe in, or even coming anywhere near Lemmy period.

A better approach I think would be to have the user's host instance save their votes (the database obviously needs to remember what you voted on), but when federating those votes with other instances just hand over a cumulative total, e.g., "here on vlemmy.net we have +18 votes for this comment", which the other instances can then add. There's no need to send user information with that data.

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[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 175 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

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[-] czech@no.faux.moe 162 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 131 points 1 year ago

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

[-] theinspectorst@kbin.social 60 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I had a good natured discussion with a Lemmy user on feddit.uk the other day where they were still inexplicably downvoting my responses each time, despite us both being polite and constructive.

It made me realise that a) they use the downvote button quite differently to how I use it and b) they probably didn't know that I, as a kbinaut, could literally see they were the one downvoting.

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[-] kennydidwhat@lemmy.world 155 points 1 year 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.

[-] DoctorTYVM@lemmy.world 64 points 1 year ago
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[-] ScaNtuRd@lemmy.world 136 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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?

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[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 136 points 1 year ago

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.

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Woah woah woah. Hold the phone. You’re telling me that things that I post… on the internet… are… PUBLIC???

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[-] Bill@lemm.ee 112 points 1 year 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).

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[-] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 96 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

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[-] FinalFallacy@kbin.social 85 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Isn't that kind of the point? You don't get very far hiding in a social setting. You're on a public website talking to other people. Your posts should be public, comments, etc. At least people should treat all websites or apps they didn't develop personally like they're public. I mean you don't really have a right to privacy in public.

And I'm not trying to say this with some malicious tone or anything but it's just my view on it.

[-] Album@lemmy.ca 78 points 1 year ago

Posts and comments is one thing... It's inherently public. But I think being able to see up and down vote publically is a tough pill. If you don't realize your votes can be seen you risk your vote being held against you. If you do know it disincentivizes you to use the vote system to protect yourself from something that should be rather benign.

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[-] MissingNo@lemmy.world 82 points 1 year ago

At first I agreed with the general "whatever" sentiment. It has some important implications, however.

It discourages people from voting if they're concerned about other people seeing their activity. This could result in a lower quality of scoring for posts.

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[-] Exosus@lemmy.world 82 points 1 year ago

I mean essentially any decentralised type of social Media cannot work any other way. An open backend is not shocking, it is expected.

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[-] daniskarma@lemmy.world 77 points 1 year ago

I've been in forums where upvotes were public. It's not something that I expect to be anonymous by design.

That being said. If something is public, it should be clear that is public (and available to everyone), if it's not it should be protected.

I think Lemmy should go one way or the other, or upvotes are public to everyone, or they are available only for you instance admins.

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[-] AncientMariner@lemmy.world 75 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So when Threads decides to federate, they can slurp all this information.

That would be massively concerning and that should be blocked. Ideally votes should remain only on the current instance. Anything shared with other instances should be anonymised. This would need to be re-architected imho.

People come here to get away from Reddit now that trust has gone. Trust and a feeling of safety is vitally important to continue to build this platform.

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[-] sebi@lemmy.world 74 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So any instance admin can analyze all users upvotes/downvotes and possibly derive political standpoints, likes/dislikes, opinions and location data from it

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[-] s4if@lemmy.my.id 65 points 1 year ago

Nothing private in fediverse except when you are selfhosting yourself.

[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 78 points 1 year ago

and not interacting with anyone else.

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[-] JshKlsn@lemmy.world 65 points 1 year ago

Redditors already scream at people when they get a downvote and blame it on the person that replies to them, even if that person didn't downvote them.

I can see this being dangerous and leading to a lot of bullying. I know k-bin already publicly shows this. I can see who downvotes my comments/posts when I open up the post in a k-bin instance, without even being a member.

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[-] Monkeyhog@lemmy.world 64 points 1 year ago

Good. If I downvote something its for a reason, and I don't care who knows.

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[-] masquenox@lemmy.world 60 points 1 year ago

I have no problem with admins seeing what I upvote or downvote. Hell, I have no problem with everybody seeing what I upvote or downvote.

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[-] brave_lemmywinks@lemmy.world 58 points 1 year ago

I'mma be honest, this might be the worst part of lemmy. NSFW, gray area topics, sports discussion, all that becomes completely radioactive.

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[-] dukk@programming.dev 54 points 1 year ago

Couldn’t we just use a hash for the usernames instead?

Nothing too over the top, but just a simple hash and match that instead?

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.

Instances should have their own settings on what instances are allowed to keep a local copy. (Default behavior should be to get the post itself from the instance “hosting” it).

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[-] _MoveSwiftly@lemmy.world 51 points 1 year ago

Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.

Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)

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[-] JesusTheCarpenter@feddit.uk 50 points 1 year ago

For me, it makes so much sense. Likes and dislikes, besides serving as a means of sorting posts and comments, also serve as a shortcut for leaving a comment saying, "This^" or "I disagree."

[-] FunkyDuck@lemmy.world 60 points 1 year ago

I think the issue is just that having votes publicly accessible can lead to harassment. Sometimes I want to downvote bigots or idiots and not want the possibility of them engaging with me.

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[-] VirtualAlias@reddthat.com 50 points 1 year ago

Good. DM me. I'll tell you why I downvoted your shitpost.

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[-] mookulator@lemmy.world 49 points 1 year ago

Can someone explain why r/privacy is so up in arms about this? Seems fairly obvious that my actions in the public domain are public, but they’re all “Lemmy doesn’t care about your privacy”. Why?

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/144clka/warning_lemmy_federated_reddit_clone_doesnt_care/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1

[-] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't say Lemmy doesn't care about your privacy, but probably they didn't have enough traffic before the death of Reddit to really prioritize it. I myself have security concerns, particularly with the storage of account data on servers that who knows where they are hosted or what the security is. But I would say Lemmy instances are much more likely to be targetted for attacks by malicious hackers than Reddit, because most instances are likely hosted on far less secure machines than Reddit servers.

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[-] BitOneZero@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago

the comment_like database table in Lemmy also has a timestamp on it, "published" field, that discloses what time you voted. This reveals patterns of your Lemmy usage to other federated servers.

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[-] Dav@kbin.social 46 points 1 year ago

So everyone knows I upvote my own posts? This is an outrage.

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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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