New to fediverse. Joined mostly because reddit has been annoying me for a while for it’s algorithm use and general admin stuff. Joining piefed was still a big leap since I have some interest in privacy and security on the internet and joining anonymous server felt a bit suss. Some stranger somewhere would have my email and be able to monitor everything I do and say.
Now, of course reddit does the same and I had no problem (well a little problem) with it. They not only have the data, but they also use it to advertise to me and most definitely sell the data forward. Still, there is a difference on a company with a public leadership whose names are known, and who have to follow laws and mark down their privacy notice publicly. If a server admin gets funny with the data, I’m shit out of luck.
Well I joined so obviously I accepted the trade of but came here to see what others thought. Surprised there was not a discussion about this already.
Yes, votes being public is probably my biggest gripe with Lemmy.
It enables a very detailed dragnet of user profile data. There is nothing public at the moment, but I expect it’s a matter of time before organizations start building detailed user profiles that consider how users vote each post and comment to build psychoanalytical profiles. In addition to the user’s public posts and comments it would make for a highly privacy-invasive dataset.
People don’t care much yet because Lemmy is small still and under the radar, but with the data there for the taking its a matter of time.
Rotating alts is probably the easiest way to reduce profiling. And that can be either switching one main account every few months, or rotate between different alts depending on topics.
As soon as an alt is tied to your profile this does f all.
How would it be tied, especially if the alt is on a different instance?
Email address, device, wifi. If you log onto anything on a device enough it is tied to your profile. They just append everything on all your accounts to one internet profile.
The internet knows who you are and where you are. It’s not hard to tie you to any account you log on. This can be circumvented, but it is a major hassle and not user friendly.
Sure, but instance admins only have that data for the alt on their instance, they can’t crosscheck it with previous alts on other instances
No, but an analytics tool already know you are the same user. As soon as a tool identifies you it can data mine your account and append it to your profile. The instance owner isn’t the threat. Your open profile is.
The internet profile cat has been let out, though, so stopping it is near impossible.
Agreed, but that post was about Lemmy itself. The overall privacy situation is quite bad, as you said.
I’ll probably end up doing what I used to do with Reddit and simply delete my account every year and start anew. I’ve been too lazy to do that yet on Lemmy tho.
Additional benefit: it can be an opportunity to give a try to another instance!