this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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If you can create a Lemmy instance and federate, you can shovel data about every vote linked to an account (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 10 months ago by andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've created this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/8898162

And some admin showed they can see how the upvotes\downvotes go.

If you are concerned about privacy, you should know, that this data on Lemmy can be easily mined and tracked.

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[–] pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev 39 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Well, not only this data, all activity on lemmy is public since it needs to be federated (sent to all instances subscribed to the community will receive all activity).
Which means any person can track anyone if they subscribe to the same communities the user's instance has.

AFAIK the only activity not sent is saved content, and downvotes from content hosted in instances which disabled them.

EDIT: for more example, here's my upvote to this post

"actor":"https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/u/pe1uca","object":"https://sh.itjust.works/post/8931097","type":"Like","id":"https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/activities/like/f6b0cced-4e1c-41d7-bf11-349b680c4d84","audience":"https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides"

And here's the original comment

actor":"https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/u/pe1uca","to":["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],"object":{"type":"Note","id":"https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/comment/1434121","attributedTo":"https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/u/pe1uca","to":["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],"cc":["https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides","https://sh.itjust.works/u/andrew_bidlaw"],"content":"","mediaType":"text/markdown"},"published":"2023-11-11T04:07:31.962497+00:00","tag":[{"href":"https://sh.itjust.works/u/andrew_bidlaw","name":"@andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works","type":"Mention"}],"distinguished":false,"language":{"identifier":"en","name":"English"},"audience":"https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides"},"cc":["https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides","https://sh.itjust.works/u/andrew_bidlaw"],"tag":[{"href":"https://sh.itjust.works/u/andrew_bidlaw","name":"@andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works","type":"Mention"}],"type":"Create","id":"https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/activities/create/7a1c726e-0191-4a71-8980-a565727ac52d","audience":"https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides"

And all instances which are subscribed to this community need to receive this information to keep it updated.

[–] db2@sopuli.xyz 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Butt it's not private! /S

[–] lalo@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

All federated data (thus public) should be easily available to the end user. Otherwise we create a false sense of security.

[–] FutileRecipe@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago

Privacy is not the same as security....not to say Lemmy is either, but it's definitely not "private."

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

IP addresses of accounts are also private?

[–] capital@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I assumed as much seeing as it’s a public site ran by many different entities.

Similarly, I think Google can read my gmails.

[–] urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In order to read gmails, you have to work at google.

In order to read the upvotes on this post, all you have to do is spin up your own lemmy instance. Anyone with technical knowledge can do it. The problem is a bit different. I could do it, if I was motivated.

If lemmy gets popular enough, there will be 3rd party sites with search bars and nice UIs and graphs to help you see how someone votes.

Not sure what the solution is. Maybe if we can’t make votes private, they should be fully public.

[–] capital@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand the concern though. I always assumed my votes, comments, or even PMs here were readable by at least the admins of the instance I'm a member of. The fact that votes and comments are public doesn't seem to matter from a security or privacy standpoint.

[–] urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

There was an era of reddit where some nerds used addons to tag users for their own personal notes. Nothing wrong with making your own tags for people, imo.

But I do remember there were extensions for “mass tagging”. You could install browser extensions to label people based on their post history. Someone would run a script, aggregate data, put little tags on people based on how they post. Like, maybe you would install a tagger to label people who don’t agree with you politically, based on someone’s aggregated data.

I never personally liked the mass tagging stuff. It felt toxic to put people you don’t know in boxes. But, I never felt like it should be prevented. At the end of the day if you post something publicly, you shouldn’t be surprised when people respond to that.

But, some people here might not realize how public their vote history is. Not sure anyone wants weird graphs about how they vote. I upvote a lot of stuff, I’m sure a lot of people upvote stuff they don’t totally agree with. Maybe I’m imagining a problem where there isn’t one. I’ve just seen how weird people get when it’s easy to put people in boxes.

[–] capital@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Oh yeah I used both of those.

Reddit enhancement suite would do manual, single user tagging and the Masstagger browser add on would do… well, mass tagging.

I used it to show me when people I interacted with made more than 50 posts/comments in places like r/conservative or r/thedonald. It would also link you to the comments so you could see what they were saying there.

I found it helpful because there were times when I found people undermining concepts like cultural pluralism and participated in those subs. I knew where they were coming from and what they were trying to convince readers of (nothing good).

Several times it helped me effectively argue against white supremacists.

As long as comments are public, which I think is the point of sites like Reddit, lemmy, and kbin, those types of plugins and info will be available.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

deleted

[–] Fitik@fedia.io 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I can already see all upvotes and downvotes on mbin(kbin fork) so it's not really that private

There are all upvotes of your post for example - https://fedia.io/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one/t/395044/If-you-can-create-a-Lemmy-instance-and-federate-you/favourites

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months ago

Link lead me to main page, but after finding my post, yeah, I can see it.

[–] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 1 points 10 months ago

On lotide I click likes on a post and it lists who posted. If you make a post or comment with mastodon you get notified every time someone upvotes.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

From when I was asking about it, I think it's only the instance admins that can see the details. It would be nice to have this information clearly outlined somewhere, so people know and aren't surprised.

Maybe a table like

What can each person see

Lemmy

Other users Community Moderators Instance Admins
info A1 info B1 info C1 (all)
info A2 info B2 info C2 (home instance)
info A3 info B3 info C3 (community's instance)

Reddit

Other users Community Moderators Instance Admins
info A1 info B1 info C1 (all)
info A2 info B2 info C2 (all)
info A3 info B3 info C3 (all)
info A4 info B4 info C4 (all)
[–] e0qdk@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Anyone can see any upvote from federated users via kbin -- for example, the upvotes on the comment this is a reply to can be seen here: https://kbin.social/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one/t/616970/If-you-can-create-a-Lemmy-instance-and-federate-you/comment/3491191/favourites

That may not be complete or consistent though given the way federation works.

Downvotes from lemmy do not show up. (Not sure why not; haven't dug into it.) Only downvotes from kbin members are shown on kbin. Also unclear to me if downvotes between different kbin/mbin instances show up or if it's the local instance only. (I've only noticed local downvotes, but haven't really been looking.)

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh huh

Well that might discourage people from voting...

[–] e0qdk@kbin.social 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I had a mixed reaction to finding that out a while ago, but I'm kind of just rolling with it for now. Votes are just simply NOT private on here, for better or worse. My feeling right now is that it's sort of positive from a community feel perspective, but I'm also avoiding interacting with a lot of subjects I consider more controversial.

Probably we'll end up developing a culture of either lots of alts used simultaneously, short lived accounts with regular name changes, or both as people become more aware of this. Either that or people will just say "Fuck it. You really want to see all the weird porn I like and my political preferences and what not? Don't blame me if you regret looking!" :p

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Appreciate the thoughts, it gives me more to think about. I've also been avoiding controversial subject matter and I think I'll avoid it even more now.

I do think the Fediverse needs to improve privacy and ease of use for alts. I've seen a lot of stuff over the years on Reddit that an authoritarian government would love to get their hands on. I guess the fediverse, by design, can't be private? I worry that someone who doesn't know better will get hurt because they don't understand the risks.

All the more reason to join trusted instances with solid admins, and to keep your Lemmy profile separate from your real identity.

A possible workflow right now might be to browse on one account, and post comments from another. Boost on Reddit made that easier, but I don't think the Lemmy one does that yet

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

The table rendering does not work, at least for me on mobile (jerboa android)

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Connect app makes it work. Some are slow to implement the uniformal markdown.

[–] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

Works in Voyager Android

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I think the table should be off site on a guide website

As for the rendering, which app are you using? I've found that too (Boost misses most rendering for me)

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 10 months ago

Rendering broken in Memmy for me.

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Jerboa.

i have seen tables with this app in other communitites therefore I thought its a typo.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

Odd, I wonder what the difference is

[–] jimmydoreisalefty@lemmus.org 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I remember seeing this a while back on the lemmy threads, thanks for the reminder!

Burner accounts for all! You get a burner and you get a burner and you as well!

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Haha. If all of us would do so, we'd sure up this usercount to combat Meta's Threads and dying Twitter.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 8 points 10 months ago

@andrew_bidlaw You can simply see this data on any Friendica instance if you have an account. Just hover your mouse over the like/dislike numbers, and you can see who upvoted/downvoted shit. You can even receive notifications about this on your own posts, just as on Facebook.

To me, it was funny back in the day to see all tankies brigading to downvote me on any single post or comment I made, the moment I started showing my political stances 😆 (yes, even stuff posted before that had no political stuff in them, lol). But yea. To some people, this might be a drawback.

The good thing, however, is that neither Kbin nor Friendica show you a centralized place in your profile to see what did you downvote. You just have to search every post you can find to see this info.

[–] kreynen@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

@andrew_bidlaw this feature request for KBin to change voting so it is NOT public from 5 months ago has a lot of examples of why public voting can be dangerous, but there doesn't appear to be much interest in changing how this works in KBin or MBin.

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/455

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

Thank you for the link.

I can imagine a couple of ways it can be obfuscated, but here in your link I've been reminded ActivityPub also serves Mastodon, where interactions are way less impersonal by design.

[–] CJOtheReal@ani.social 4 points 10 months ago

Since there isn't a Karma system i don't think its a problem unless advertisers federate.

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Makes me think...

Is there a plugin for like firefox, available which tracks what you write? Something which analyzes your output stream, or lets say, fetch all lemmy posts of a user and analyze how "easy" the writing patterns are and how easily the user is traceable via shadow linking multiple accounts etc.

I know in order to compare this data privacy violations are necessary, but I am genuinely interested in how ad companies are tracking myself and how easy I am to follow through patterns in my texts.

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As far as I know, LLMs are not that clever yet, and it would require a lot of work to automate tracking of so many targets. But a dedicated person tracking one user can see these. Unknowingly, we leave a lot of cues to know who we are. Not only patterns, but exact word-markers, like calling something by a regional-accepted name. Like how my english teachers insisted London's metro is called Tube.

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I am not interested in criminal behaviour or personal threats. i know a human would be capable to extract much information if on purpose.

I am more interested in like temperature mapping of my text. From a statistical point of view If my patterns are behavioral and forecastable?

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's mainly keywords at that point. This process is sure to have steps. To step into a suspected category, to be elevated into those who are to be studied closer, you should ring some alerts.