Well, a random creep messaged me on reddit, after a few messages exchanged he said he looked up my private profile on google and read through my posts. Outside of how angry I was at him for doing that, it surprised me that google does this, It even gave an AI OVERVIEW of who I am on reddit, (I have posted my age and country on reddit, and a few other things ofc, but the others describe what im into and what I do on reddit, not tied to any personal info, so its just my age and country really) But what the fuck google? I know you can look up people in places like ghostddit, so I wasn’t expecting my profile to be 100% private either, but it’s crazy you can find it straight on google. I guess its slowly coming to a point than ANYTHING you do online is gonna visible for EVERYONE. Yes we were already being surveilled, but this and then the discord thing with messages from servers showing up on google too? I’m pissed off man. (I know lemmy is not private either, but I don’t have a google account tied to here, the one email I used to register didn’t ask me for phone verification so its not as bad to hang out here, might look into matrix later)
That private post/comment setting has always been an illusion. You don’t need a tool. You can just search the username on reddit to circumvent that setting entirely.
pff, why even have it then? what a joke… Seems I’ll have to try and study up on alternatives all around and limit what I send anyways, man I miss the old internet
Pretty sure Reddit added it as bot accounts were complaining there were too easily identified by their history. Also probably something about harassment of people by going though all their posts, but that had been happening for years before the feature was added.
All my reddit accounts are throwaway. I always start the new year with a new email alias for a new reddit account. This way it limit the amount of data that they can use to build a profile.
I also avoid over sharing and talking about myself over there.