1y ago

YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private

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.

Comradeship // Freechat @lemmygrad.ml

YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private

71 28

The Andromedus Galacticus Collection @lemm.ee

Cross-Post lemmy.world

YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private -

46 12

1.2K comments

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.
- Lol. kids these days would psot their bank info online if the banks didn't prevent them from doing so.
  
  You say that like A/S/L wasn't a thing back in the day.
  
  I don't want to shame anyone, but I've had people sign up give me their full DoB and offering to show me their ID. I know of people who disclose their id to get access to nsfw discord communities.
  
  Wasn't there a twitter account that retweeted people posting photos of their credit cards?
  
  so would my grandpa
  
  19/f/Cali is the only acceptable response
  
  So would a significant portion of the population of all ages
- 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.
  
  The posts just contain a URL which doesn't include the uploader's ip address or their browser string.
- 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.
  
  This has come up as part of those requests to migrate accounts between instances. "I want a persona that stays with me for years"... Is that actually a good idea though!?
- What about post views? Are those also stored?
  
  No, Lemmy currently doesn't do authorized fetch and thus there's no way for users to request access to a certain post, which would sort of require to disclose a user wanting to get access to something. So no, they are not stored as part of activitypub.
  They could be logged on your instance's server and/or the server where are an image is hosted as part of typical logs for web requests. These would contain your ip address and other browser metadata such as the user Agent, but these are typical logs that happen every time you load anything on the internet on any website that exists.
- 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.
  
  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.
- Me, using an mail alias + VPN, should be safe privacy wise. :)
- The thing is, there is really no way to know is trustworthy as a home instance...?
- That is why I am as my username states: intentionally anonymous
- This person internets. 👏
- or: pgp :)

Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.
Can we leave this kinda stuff behind? It is NOT obligatory.

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.

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.

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.

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.
- Knowing they're visible on kbin made me realize that most Lemmy users probably weren't aware, as it's non-obvious.
  
  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.
  
  Yea, good call. I wonder if kbin makes them viewable because the activity pub protocol does not allow them to be easily hidden.
- 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.
  
  Yeah, and guess what? They can do that to you.
  Effectively, every single person can use a bot that will automate the blocking of any user that ever downvotes them ever.
  Like if I made a post that says I like Nazis, and then waited for the downvotes to pour in. Add every single one of those names to a block list, share that block list with all of my alts and all of my friends, and suddenly you have a whole army of Nazi sympathizers that are invisible to the users that would downvote them.
  These hand waving excuses about votes being public are really lacking imagination. This is extremely abusable information, and cursory tools can will be put together to make abusing them simple.
  
  Depends on where it's posted in. Also this example is pretty low effort. I would downvote it too

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 about both are bad.
  
  That is the entire (and only) point I was making. x)
  
  It is what it is, mí hijo
- 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.
  
  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.
- It makes sense to me that people are more worried about potentially any corporation / bad actor accessing their data rather than one
  
  here, have my upvote. but please don't tell anyone.
  
  Why? The masses have no issue forking data over to big tech. What difference does it make if it's one or a million corporations using that data when it's being sold willy-nilly to anybody with a checkbook?
  The point is not how many actors have access to your data. The point is that in both scenarios (public data vs. single-corporation-controlled data), your data is pragmatically public from data sales, data leaks, and so on. However, in only one of them, your data is ostensibly "protected" by a corporation - the lie at hand. In the other scenario, you are under no spell that your data is protected or private - the truth.
  My comment was simply pointing out how they're effectively the same thing. Giving your data to a big tech firm is effectively the same thing as making it public. Hence, the outrage over one not matching the outrage over the other is amusing to me because it implies how effective the corpo framing of this issue is.
- 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.
- And the one in the open can be abused by everyone. Not just one bad actor.
- i dont think a humongous corporation can afford to screw me with this data as much as the random people running instances, what're they gonna do? give me midget porn ads?

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?

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.

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

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).
- Probably safer to assume your password is public to
  
  Nah because if you type in your password it will show as stars.
  ******* see?
  
  ...so you see, it wasn't me who upvoted all those Justin Bieber posts, my password was hacked!
  
  Its not, all passwords are salted and hashed
  
  Its not, all passwords are salted and hashed
- I respect your right to be wrong about the bean meme.

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.
- I concur with this.
  Don't use your real name or anything tied back to your identity online if you don't want to compromise your identity.
  I say this as someone who is pro privacy and takes many steps to avoid leaking data. The way lemmy does this, like others said, and the Fediverse does in general, is good as it helps prevent astroturf and makes the project(s) as a whole more trustworthy as you can see, in real time, what “campaigns” are being made.
  
  I don't know what you're talking about. I, Margot Elise Robbie, am using my real name here on Lemmy.world to promote "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
  
  I wish my parents hadn't called me trouser_mouse
- There are a number of things you can do, depending on how serious you want to get about it (think about who and what you want to protect against - harassment from other users? Admins?).
  Create an account using an email alias or an email account not linked with something you can trace back to your real identity.
  If you're concerned about retaliation/harassment from downvoting something, you could create 2 accounts - one for normal use and the other you only use for downvoting, or one for participating in discussions on controversial topics.
  You could retire an account and start using a new one after a period of time, so your entire history isn't linked to a single account.
  The above might be able to shield you from other users but not from admins.
  If you want to stay anonymous from admins:
  An admin would be able to see the IP address the account uses to connect to the service. If 2 accounts connect with the same IP address and the IP is consistently the same, they'd be able to conclude it's likely the same person (or someone else in their household) is connecting to the service with both accounts.
  If you use a VPN or Tor when connecting to the site, that won't be as easy to see because many people would connect to the service from the same IP address and the account would likely frequently connect using different IP addresses.
  Be aware that if you access the site on a mobile device app with a VPN, it's possible that the app could contact the server when the VPN is down (for example, if the VPN connection is closed when the device is locked). To avoid that, you could try using using something like OpenVPN with its "Kill Switch" enabled).
  Note that the admin of the VPN service would be able to see your connections to Lemmy's servers (but not specially what you're doing on Lemmy), so you aren't fully anonymous. Lemmy's admins would see part of the picture, the VPN's admins would see another part, and you're counting on the 2 not talking to each other (and a good VPN service shouldn't, unless they're legally required to).
  I use a VPN in general for all connections to the Internet but don't always care to keep my IP address hidden from some services (banking, primary email addresses, etc - services that will have my personal info anyway). It can be very challenging to keep your IP address hidden over the long haul with a frequently used service - you could end up connecting with the VPN down due to a technical reason or carelessness.
  With some services I might have multiple accounts - on one I might not really care if my real IP is revealed, but another on the same service that I'm very careful with to keep hidden.
  You could use a browser with protections against fingerprinting like Tor or Mullvad Browser.
- It’s simple. Just don’t comment or upvote on anything that interests you.

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.
- 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.
  
  At least you know the instance host isn’t selling your data right? The advertisers already have it 🤪
  
  I mean I didn't upvote or downvote porn on Reddit either. It's all personal information.
  On Reddit there were plenty of people with access and the data was sold to advertisers.
  Here it's public, not great but not terrible either. Also makes it easier to battle vote brigading?
  
  That's my only concern. I don't mind my comments to be public. That's what a public place is, unlike other social media platforms who claim to be but they're not. It's, like you mentioned, the upvote/downvote system that I'm worried about and will refrain from using. Because it is public, too, it feels like it lets people read your thoughts. So, I'll refrain from using it until it's fixed.
- Still unexpected. And that's the problem.
  Comments are obviously public because I can read them. But there is no "upvoted by xx people (and downvoted by xx)" link I can click to see the list of people who interacted this way with the post. It's only with API calls or similar that I can access the information.
  
  kbin has the ability to see activity including upvotes, boosts, and downvotes from the UI for entries, comments, and microblogs
- Don't think people should be expected to be developers to consider their right to privacy on websites where contents meant to be private. Like online banking, instant messaging. Let's not strip devs of these services of their responsibility.
- I am looking forward to new apps having the option to show this kind of information.
- Still unexpected. And that's the problem.
  Comments are obviously public because I can read them. But there is no "upvoted by xx people (and downvoted by xx)" link I can click to see the list of people who interacted this way with the post. It's only with API calls or similar that I can access the information.
  
  In case of pitchforks: I downvoted this comment because it's a duplicate, not because it's bad.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Nothing private in fediverse except when you are selfhosting yourself.
- and not interacting with anyone else.
  
  🤣🤣
- If post views are public that’s a fairly poor implementation on the developers part. I’m sure it will change over time.
  E.g. someone using your account to view illegal content in a community you are not a member of, and you being held accountable.
  
  I think the in the current implementation, your post views is not public. But any data you have is still accessible to your instance admin.
  
  These are upvotes and downvotes. I doubt views are logged anywhere, apart from the webserver.
  
  It's not possible to make votes private is your care about no manipulation happening. Otherwise any self hosted instance could just communicate any made up amount of votes.
  
  E.g. someone using your account to view illegal content in a community you are not a member of, and you being held accountable
  Can you explain what you mean here? How would someone else be using your account without your knowledge?

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.

Good. If I downvote something its for a reason, and I don't care who knows.
- In fact, I'm tempted to say I WANT people to know I'm not the one downvoting them when I disagree.
  
  SAME its happened on Reddit where I would have a back and forth w someone where we disagreed but it was respectful, and then in the middle of it I'd notice the other person's comments being -1 even new ones. Meaning someone who isnt in the convo would start downvoting the other person, and I'd be like 'what if they think I did it? What if that damages a mutual understanding they were close to reaching? What if that turns them off from considering a different point of view bc they assume I'm doing it and that I'm hostile?' Then sometimes I'd be like "sorry someone is downvoting you its not me"
- People might ask you to provide context for your down vote.
  Recently somebody got butthurt about being called out on it.
  I think the feature is nice because you can spot shill ops, as those accounts travel in packs.
  New articles for politicians are pretty obvious about it but so are generic karma farmers. Although I am not sure why farm karma on here.
  
  People can certainly ask about reasons for voting, but that doesn't mean anyone has to provide the answer. Nobody is entitled to know a person's reason for voting on posts except for that person themselves.
  
  They can ask, and I can tell them to fuck right off. Simple.
  
  People might also ask you to provide further justification of your comment. In both cases you can either engage in a civil manner, tell them to eat a bag of dicks or just ingore.
- That's cool but I think the votes are more trustworthy (in any voting system) if all people feel comfortable voting without some sort of retaliation. Maybe there could be a toggle and you can see who voted that doesn't mind the vote being public.

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.

I'mma be honest, this might be the worst part of lemmy. NSFW, gray area topics, sports discussion, all that becomes completely radioactive.
- I think its a massive improvement. Reddit did next to nothing about astro-turfing and vote manipulation. Lemmy gives people the tools needed to detect inorganic content.
- People might have to stand behind their opinions if they choose to voice them. The horror!
  (Although the user/account is still basically anonymous 🤷‍♂️)
  
  There's a reason nobody has to publicly announce who their voting for in democratic countries, and that there's no mechanism to check that. People can be grouped, ostracized, persecuted, canceled, or worse.
  
  This is an issue of privacy, though. There is a reason why people dislike google or their neighbour having access to their information, however mundane.
  
  Yeah, that's terrifying for a lot of people
- Err, up/down voting is just a quick way to agree or disagree. If one is voting because they feel they can't stand behind their opinion if they expanded it in text... I don't know what to tell ya.
  
  One of the reasons I really disliked Reddit and stopped using it years ago was this way of using the voting system. If I make a post, and it gets voted something like +4-10, and a reply that is some rewording of "that's a dumb statement", what am I to think? I'm certainly not going to change my mind, no one gave me a good reason to.
  If one is voting because they feel they can’t stand behind their opinion if they expanded it in text… I don’t know what to tell ya.
  I'm inclined to believe a lot of people do this. This is not to say they are terrible for doing this, it's that it's human nature. Replying to someone with a well thought out post takes effort and, from my experience, makes the me realize i don't know shit about the subject. Point is, this way of using the voting system breeds half-thought opinions which is a host of a lot of other problems.
- What about IP addresses? I see those are logged. Are they available to query?
  I would imagine so, right?
  If so, ummmmmmmm. That is not ok.
  
  Umm, anything you access on the Internet has to know your IP address, that's how the Internet works. Whether or not they choose to keep the logs is a different matter.
  
  I haven't looked into it at all but I expect IPs are visible to instance admins. That's pretty typical of any online platform.
  
  IP Adresse does not really matter. It changes every day or whenever I restart the router.
  
  every website logs ip. The question is whether the admin maintains those logs. However a web server needs your IP so they can route traffic back to you. That IP gets logged so that if something is not working the admin can review the logs and figure out what is going on. Many websites that are privacy focused either turn the logging off or dump the logs fairly quickly. Doing something like that means the admin needs to take steps to create other avenues for troubleshooting that don't factor user data into the scenario. With smaller projects like instances hosted on lemmy that might not always be feasible for volunteer admins. This doesn't necessarily mean they are doing anything wrong. Lots of websites maintain logs that include IP addresses.
- Radioactive? Honestly, some people are never satisfied and really like to constantly complain, don't they?

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 :)
- Done. Thanks for setting me straight and the very polite manner of reminding me to RTFM.

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
- 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.
  
  secure machines than Reddit servers
  Not that I don't agree but there is a pretty big citation needed there.
  We don't really know how secure Reddit Servers are and their attack surface is likely to be far larger.
  
  What account data are you referencing?
- Because they're stupid
- Being able to doxx someone for their upvotes without even commenting strongly disincentivises engagement with communities that oppose authoritarian governments and such.
  When it’s just between the user and admins of their home instance that’s a feasible level of trust. When it’s available to literally anyone that’s a huge jump.
- Because they've not ever done a data request from Reddit, I imagine. Reddit stores a COLOSSAL amount of information on you. The bits that they are willing to provide are concerning enough; I do wonder what they have that they don't reveal. For example. your ENTIRE history of IP connections seem to be stored (because there's a use for a 3 year old IP record, you know,) all of your chat messages (no way to delete those either,) associated accounts (I am guessing this is "accounts we think are you too, but I don't know...) ...so I'm not sure why Lemmy / Kbin / etc get the hate here.
  I think Kbin and Lemmy could be better about disclosure, but there's nothing inherently shady about the way they're set up. Downvotes being revealed, I am torn on. I tend to lean toward private, but I see arguments either way.

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

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."
- 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.
  
  That's my biggest concern, too. People are fuckin' weird and you never know what will set them off. Some people just can't stand any sort of disagreement or pushback and might want to retaliate. I really think the source should remain invisible to other users.
  
  Huh, now I'm actually thinking that maybe it's not that bad that my instance hides downvotes. No temptation
- This^
- I don't see why this is an issue. I used Boost for Reddit, which let me see all my upvotes on my account by checking my profile. I always assumed this could be seen by anyone. Also, to respond to a comment lower down, this is not a democratic process, this is internet opinions. Voting in an election is NOT equal to agreeing with a publicly posted opinion. I know you voted, if you showed up to the voting booth on election day. But you don't get to hide your identity either.

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).

I would hope this would be obvious to anyone. If your client can highlight which posts you have upvoted in the web and app UI then the fact that your user specifically upvoted that post must be recoverable from the instance server and thus must be recoverable by the instance admins. I would not expect anything different.

So everyone knows I upvote my own posts? This is an outrage.
- I upvote my own posts too, I do try to avoid boosting my own posts. We're from kbin though, I think on Lemmy self-upvotes are automatic.
  
  Yea, I automatically upvote my own posts and comments. I felt very self-conscious about it at first, but then I figured all other users do the same.
  So now I just mentally subtract one vote from every score :)
  
  Never thought of boosting them too, see you at the top.
- I always upvote myself. But I have to think extremely highly about my contribution to even think about boosting it.

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.

Reddit always had this too though. In every app I used there was an "up voted" and "down voted" tab when I would look at someone's profile
Maybe it was an api thing?

Now we know who are the people stalling the liftoff of the bean's meme to the stratosphere.
- And who helped. Via the database on my instance I can tell I was about the 8th person in the federation to upvote the original beans post.
  Not particularly useful knowledge but I find it fascinating, nonetheless.

Good find, albeit a bit horrifying.
I wonder what the GDPR implications of this is. As far as I understand, even free, privately run services are required to abide by GDPR and offer data insight and deletion. They're also required to state clearly what happens to user data.
Edit: Apparently people have varying takes and feelings on what the GDPR does and does not say, so I urge you to please read the summary of GDPR data privacy here: https://gdpr.eu/data-privacy/ as well as the summary of what constitutes personal data here: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ It's easier to have a good and fruitful discussion if we talk about what the GDPR actually says.

People have burner Reddit and Twitter accounts for posts or votes they think could bite them in the ass, so why wouldn't they do the same on Lemmy?

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'm already questioning the whole system behind it, not just votes.
Say you have critical information that you want to delete but other instances can just ignore this deletion request, than I could technically write a plugin that uses an extra instance, to always display all deleted comments to me, despite me being a regular user.
For other sites you'd need a crawler, catching this information and all this in a rapid fashion to be usable, with a lot of programming extra work.
At this point we can as well remove the option to delete or edit a comment as everyone can host their own, which wouldn't be possible with proprietary tools.
If someone can simply see votes the same way, we can as well add a mouse hover function that will display the username of whoever upvoted.

Sounds like a "non-issue" to me, really. That's kind of the point with the fediverse. If I run an instance, I have access to its database and, thus, everything stored in it. That was the case with old PHPBB forums, admins could see everything.
The questions is what ends up stored from outside my own instance. I haven't looked at the source, but I would hazard a guess that it's mostly some json blobs and/or pointers to users/instances.

I'm fine with it.
I mean... you can get information accessing the database. Can anyone access the instance DBs? No. How would you know reddit doesn't log these in its database somewhere?
On it's own, it's not a problem IMO. Why would you want to show all information stored on the frontend? But, if you have to investigate something, it's not that bad you have stuff in your database that can help it.
Granted, if an admin is a shitface, they can look at these information. And then...? Make fun of downvoting people? Go to other instance and that's it.

Well time to write a bot that creates a new account for every vote and comment

Beyond upvote/downvote data is there anything else that is seen beyond whether someone had an arbitrary influence on a post?

For as much as I love Lemmy, its obvious that it is an early software. Mark my words, that’s not the last privacy threat it will experience.

"unlike reddit" mm I'm sure they have RIGOROUS controls over which creepy staff / disgruntled plutocrats / repressive regimes get access to their voting database..

I'm safe, I upboated the beans

It shouldn't be like that. I hope it gets changed.

Admins can see literally everything. If you can see it (from your end, like whether you've upvoted something), it has to be stored somewhere and of course the server owners can see it

It's not just upvotes and downvotes. Instance admin also knows your email and can store your password in plaintext if they want to. It's up to user to decide whether to trust the instance admin

I don't think that's necessarily bad. You upvote to indicate your approval of something. Usually people approve things to recommend it to others.

Is the poster's IP address, system, or other system identifier/location, tracked?
If I have users giantshortfacedbear and throwaway123. Then it could be inferred or impled that they are same person if there are from the same IP or phone.

The things I upvote and downvote are in line with my personal values and I am not ashamed of that. I have no issues with anyone knowing my reaction to a post. On Discord anyone can see who leaves reactions on a message. Same with Facebook. It will show you who added what reaction.

Out of curiosity, is there a particular set of circumstances where knowing how you voted on certain posts a bad thing? I would imagine that if you didn't want people to know you're voting/looking at specific posts, then you either don't vote/look at the posts, or you set yourself up an alt account on a different server. But let's be honest, if you'd be embarrassed by something you're looking at, maybe you shouldn't be looking at it. Just my 2¢.

1208 comments