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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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 :)

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 safe, I upboated the beans

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