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.
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 post 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.
19/f/Cali was the only acceptable response
I think we cybered
As I put on my robe and wizard hat…
Depends, could I have talked some vanilla WoW gold out of you?
puts on wizard’s hat
666/D/Hell
Yall remember those “your stripper name is the street you grew up on and your pet’s name” challenges? Literally phishing for password recovery keys.
Even back then we were told never to reveal that sort of stuff online. How many of us do you think were telling the truth?
You think someone would do that?
Just go on the internet and tell lies?
Lol yeah but we were 12 back then and we still understood the internet better than anyone else 🙃
I got a virus.
Flagrant System Error
Computer Over.
Virus = Very Yes
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.
DUDE MY GIRLFRIEND FUCKING DID THAT AND I JUST LOOKED AT HER AND ASKED HER IF SHE THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA. In hindsight no, thankfully she’s gonna be moving soonish. This was from before we were together, otherwise I would have warned her not to do that. It was the same discord she got a cyberstalker from, thankfully the stalker wasn’t a friend of the owner because otherwise he totally could have gotten her address and irl info.
Wasn’t there a twitter account that retweeted people posting photos of their credit cards?
so would my grandpa
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!?
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.
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.
Of course. They dont get any info to associate your IP with your lemmy account. You could even not have a lemmy account at all.
Of course. They dont get any info to associate your IP with your lemmy account. You could even not have a lemmy account at all.
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.
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
What about post views? Are those also stored?
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or: pgp :)
This person internets. 👏
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.
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!
With all due respect, figuring out who you are based off what you say in a public setting is already what people do irl
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.
Lmao the internet finally realizing what companies and the govt have been doing for decades on the internet
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.
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.
I get what you’re saying. I’m not sure if it’s something that is fixable giving that we participate in a public forum. Maybe the federation isn’t a great idea after all, or maybe we overthink it. I don’t know.
I’m almost willing to bet that big tech companies are already doing this. They got the motive and the means. No doubt Meta or Google have dedicated some of their servers to mining our Lemmy data in this way.
With only around 100k users and most people using anonymous usernames that cannot be connected to their identity it would hardly be worth the effort, time or money.
You’re looking at this from the wrong point of view. The fediverse is not just lemmy: Threads, Tumblr, even BlueSky (albeit with their own protocol, but anyone could just modify their fediverse enabled app to convert their data to be applicable to BlueSky’s protocol) are quickly setting the stage for a new norm. The more websites integrate the fediverse into their stack, the more data outside the immediate sphere of influence of these major corporations can be harvested. To what ends they’ll use it, I don’t know – but I don’t trust them with it.
And just think how much data you can gather by sending out puppet accounts on various instances, accounts that will serve only to publicly state an opinion, such as “I support this candidate”, so the data on the people who upvote it can be harvested and categorized more easily. There is so much data harvesting potential here with a little imagination, and with a little more, a lot of ways to use that data to influence the way average users engage with the fediverse.
That site would also be a great advertisement for Lemmy. Come here to our decentralized platform, where you can vote…but you better not, lest you end up on the site. What social network wouldn’t grow when users are peer pressured into not using one of it’s basic underlying mechanics that makes the whole thing work?
Lemmy is not a decentralized platform. It’s a federated one. Lemmy is very much centralized.
We need a decentralized system. Lemmy isn’t it.
Red*it can do that too (if not doing it already) but they also have your personal details linked especially when paying for premium :)
That was pretty interesting. I want to see graphs.
Can your instance secretly run a fork that doesn’t respect deletes?
Jesus Fucking Christ !
Honestly, why not? The data is already being recorded. At least this way it’s public and the rest of us get to interact with it. It might even scare a few people into paying attention to the information that they disclose about themselves and increase their digital hygiene.
If I’m reading it correctly, and please help me out if not: recorded data by the nature of being stored somewhere, should be made public?
That doesn’t make all that much sense. Data retention and access levels should always be tied to a use case that require it. And, there is no “if anything is stored, it should all be public”
recorded data by the nature of being stored somewhere, should be made public?
The difference is that this data can already be surfaced by anyone, all they need to do is spin up a federated instance, so someone could do all the stuff outlined in the parent comment, but keep the results for themselves, or monetise it, build advertising profiles, doxx people, etc.
The data already exists, and it can already be extracted and made public (or used privately). I’m not saying throw open every database to the world, I am saying the world can already access this database, so pretending that it’s not available doesn’t stop bad actors from using it. Might as well make a public tool (that actually sounds kinda cool?) and bring awareness to it.
Ah, gotcha. I don’t think anyone was saying that the solution was to try to make the problem less visible.
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?
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.
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.
Damn
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
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While I agree this shouldn’t be so publicly accessible, I’m curious about the possible benefits of limited sharing between instances to give spam/bot detection tool’s more power.
Users on A vote on a post on B. The admins from A and B can see the fine details of who did what, but the admins of C (and all of the general users regardless of instance) just see totals of up/down votes.
Ideally, detecting bots should be up to the Admins. They should have access to the vote information, and they can share the tools with other admins to detect it. But the average user should not have unrestricted access to this data.
The average user can run their own instance as an admin.
Let me be a little more clear, the Admins of your account’s particular instance should be the only ones that have access to your votes.
Now the question remains about when your account posts/comments into a different instance, who should have access to those votes? Perhaps your instance has a way of obfuscating the votes of any user coming from your instance, or else only the admins of the community that you’re posting into will have access to your votes?
The problem really comes down to how we avoid the problem with duplicating votes. Currently this is easy as each vote is public so every instance can verify the correct vote count. But implementing either of the solutions above will need a way to verify the correct number of votes.
To top it off you would also need a way to detect if a malicious instance had come along and started lying about how many votes had been cast.
One thing we can look at under the hood would be how cryptocurrency works as they have solved both the problem of duplicate values as well as the ability to trust those values being sent. All of the code is free and open source so we can pick out the parts that we need and reuse it. (And no, I’m not telling people to go out and buy crypto).
Z Cash would be a particularly good one to look at as it ensures a “zero knowledge” (or “zero trust”) method of sending the values across “nodes” (or in our case “instances”). Using this, who is voting on what would be hidden, but we could ensure that the values are correct.
Additionally you could probably throw out the second hashing algorithm altogether and just keep the Blake2b hashing algorithm as this one is far more efficient and quick to compute (and that second algorithm was mostly thrown in to prevent people with specialized hardware from being able to come in and beat anyone else running on just a GPU/CPU). https://github.com/zcash/zcash
However, using this particular method would make it so that not even the instance admins would be able to view the details of anyone’s votes (which may be a good thing after all if we decide that any random instance admin is not to be trusted).
There’s no need to complicate things by bringing crypto buzzwords into it. It’s already been solved faster, better, and easier just like everything else cryptobros invent a problem for.
The crypto example was only a suggestion because they have simply solved the exact same problem we are looking at: duplicate votes (transactions) and verifying the results while being able to hide it.
I would love to hear any other suggestions that people may have that solve these problems. Copying open source code from crypto isn’t the only option. So let’s look for solutions instead of dismissals (unless you’re arguing for keeping votes public of course).
I agree with you about harassment issues, and the importance of controlling the transfer of admin-level data between instances, but for your last scenario, doesn’t blocking only apply to users who are logged in? Assuming your hypothetical tankies and Nazis were actually posting as well as blocking, it would be easy to find them just by logging out, and there are a lot of ways to get them banned or otherwise counteract their activities that don’t require someone to interact directly with them while logged in. The case you’re describing is not the kind of situation where the most important action is to argue with them. Arguing with extremists usually just validates their delusions, and encourages them to keep doing what they’re doing.
Removed by mod
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).
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.
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.
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.
Holy shit. HOLY SHIT.
I just realized what this actually MEANS.
It means that when you like or dislike something so much that you unvote and then vote a second time, people can tell. This will change karma forever.
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.
I started a discussion on feddit.de about good discussion practice citing Karl Poppers rules of discussion and the use of the down and upvote buttons.
I think discussion culture in the Fedivers is quite healthy at the moment.
It’s so weird when people do that!
Yea, good call. I wonder if kbin makes them viewable because the activity pub protocol does not allow them to be easily hidden.
Seems to be Ernest’s attitude about that sort of thing, he doesn’t like to hide things from the average user that someone more technically inclined would still be able to access
And I like it. It’s pretty earnest :)
Excuse my ignorance, still super new to Lemmy. What’s kbin?
Spot on:
https://kbin.social/m/youshouldknow@lemmy.world/t/82174/YSK-You-can-view-upvote-and-downvote-information-through-kbin#entry-comment-349825Excuse my ignorance, still super new to Lemmy. What’s kbin?
Kbin is another open source link aggregation program with a different developer that uses the same protocol as Lemmy (ActivityPub), so kbin and Lemmy instances can communicate with each other. If you see anyone with “@kbin.social” after their name then that’s where they’re from. You can check it out yourself here as well kbin.social
It’s apparently because it’s Twitter based and Twitter shows likes and such. Kbin doesn’t really have a like upvote downvotes thing. It’s like a favorite and a boost. It’s weird
Not true.
Both Lemmy and KBin map the same activitypub activities to the same upvote and downvote actions.
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.
I think there are some problems about voting being public. I don’t think this is one of them.
I don’t mind people blocking me, and if I don’t appreciate the type of content people provide I’ll block them liberally. It’s not necessarily anything personal, I’m just cirating my experience.
Furthermore, I strive to be on instances where nazi sympathisers would be banned, and where instances tolerating them would be defederated. The only issue is identifying and weeding out troll accounts.
You wouldn’t know that your instance is infested with tankies and fascists. You can’t see their posts because you’re on the block list.
Depends on where it’s posted in. Also this example is pretty low effort. I would downvote it too
It shouldn’t be like that. I hope it gets changed.
Transparency is the only way auditing and validation can be done. People should own their actions.
Everyone can be an admin then everyone sees everything
We’re posting on a public forum bro…
There is nothing new or concerning about people extrapolating potentially false or truthful things about you based off of what you’ve said in the past.
If you guys are seriously going to paranoid about upvote and downvote visibility, you should check out the Snowden documents and see all the surveillance that the govt already does and has been doing on you, your data, and your social contacts.
Everyone is being critical about the new internet site which is fine but it feels like paranoia
Same. I understand why it’s like that, all instances need to be able to see the information. But there must be a way to do this without the instances understanding exactly which users are doing what. Something like zkproofs or hashes or whatever (I’m not a programmer, clearly), there is surely some way to do it while maintaining some privacy.
It gives a lot of data on users to see exactly what they upvote and downvote. Especially with AI being able to go through that data very quickly. It wouldn’t be hard to find out a user’s political leanings, general IRL location, age, gender, so many personal details they don’t want to share that could be used against them through advertising or worse.
I think I personally give out more information in what I say than how I vote, and I think that’s going to be true for a lot of people here. I want to share, and that requires me to sacrifice some privacy.
No shade intended, but if you’re concerned about what your voting history will say about you, you might consider not interacting with posts at all, and if you’re really concerned, don’t curate a news feed, either. It’s totally fine to browse logged out if you really want to be safe. I think any level of concern about privacy is valid, but it’s useful to think about the whole picture when you evaluate your risk tolerance.
Unless you don’t vote on much, I think you underestimate how much information can be attained from the pure data of up/down votes.
There is also the fact that people traditionally vote on stuff they wouldn’t comment on because they see it as more private.
I agree that a lot of information can be inferred from vote history, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry if I came across as trying to minimize the risk there.
What I meant is that exponentially more information of the type you describe can be inferred from post history, particularly for those of us who use this space to connect with other members of marginalized groups we belong to. Voting history is a minor risk to me when just the fact that I have replied with “I have also had this experience” to a certain post or posted a meme in a certain group could cause serious trouble for me in my offline life. I don’t understand the use case where someone would become concerned about privacy because they found out their vote history could be accessed by unknown parties if they weren’t already concerned about privacy because their posts and comments are visible to anyone and everyone.
I guess the tl;dr is that I just don’t understand how the hyper focus on the risks associated with voting history is consistent with an assessment of personal risk in a broader sense. I am conscious of taking a huge risk by being on the fediverse, and I decided it was worth it. The stakes were high enough to begin with that I just assumed that the only source of privacy I had would come from anonymity, not the technology, which might be why I am confused by some of the responses I am seeing.
Shortly after joining I realized I was being a bit too honest on here lol. Can’t help it. Haven’t been on SM in a few days, in hiding from people, now back to my ditch to die. Love you!
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!
Well, that’s probably a wrong kind of ‘open’ to what FOSS means by ‘open’ yet I’m not convinced. With the whole 'anybody can make an instance and collect all the data they wan’t it’s kind of awkward and messy. How much of the said data you can obscure/encode without losing the openness between instances?
Because if one instance can’t verify actions of another then you have an issue dealing with bots and overall the platform becomes way more obscure and less reliable as a source of information.
And like if the buttons themselves had an ability to openly show who upvoted/downvoted a post - how much of a difference would’ve been here? I don’t feel like it’s such a concern.
The point about deletion/edits - it’s not about removing your info from the internet, it’s about correcting what’s wrong for the sake of providing correct. If it’s on the internet once it’s there forever. I don’t see people complaining about weyback archive doing their thing. Yet it’s doing exactly the same thing possibility of which upsets so many people here.
If you monkey brain posted you home address and where the keys are - it’s on you, not on the internet for storing the info.
The only real point I see here is corporations/governments scraping all this data for their use. Yet as long as they can federate there’s nothing much to do and if you try to restrict federation then it’s just a bunch of forums with extra features.
