Lol. kids these days would post their bank info online if the banks didn’t prevent them from doing so.

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.

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.

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.

That is why I am as my username states: intentionally anonymous

The thing is, there is really no way to know is trustworthy as a home instance…?

or: pgp :)

This person internets. 👏

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!

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.

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.

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.

Jesus Fucking Christ !

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?

That was pretty interesting. I want to see graphs.

Gpt has to small of a context window to get someone’s entire post history in. U have to embed everythibg they have said then u can make queries against their knowledge base or grouping user content embeddings and comparing to known data points. Not that i have the compute to do this at any kind of scale.

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.

I’m going to start throwing “edit: thanks for the gold kind stranger!” on the end of my comments just to induce some nostalgic cringe.

Redditisms are cringe and always have been. Yes I agree we should leave them behind.

This.

EDIT: Thanks for the awards kind stranger!

EDIT 2: Rip my inbox

This is all examples of reddit shit that is really dumb. We don’t need to bring it over here

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

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.

Agreed, I am incredibly confused by what seems to be the majority reaction to this.

I’ve never been particularly involved with the FOSS community, though I do use a few FOSS apps and generally appreciate their view on what FOSS means. I also strongly appreciate data privacy, and it was my observation that the FOSS community was (generally) relatively the same way. So to see this reaction is very surprising. It’s quite literally the same terrible argument of “Why fear it if you have nothing to hide” used against multiple data privacy concerns throughout the years.

I think the worst are the bad faith “But Reddit…!” arguments. For one, we’re not on Reddit anymore, this is about Lemmy’s issues that can be corrected. And for two, whilst Reddit potentially outsourcing that data to the highest bidder is far from ideal, at the very least the data wasn’t outright PUBLIC to anyone who wishes to set up a simple server.

You’re following up to a post made almost 3 months ago so it’s not surprising you’ve seen similar since.

How about both are bad.

Ah, the old Reddit Lemmy switcharoo.

You are probably seeing two very different vocal minorities, and conflating the two.

Also, there’s a very clear difference in expectations between posting/commenting and upvoting. I blame the UI. We naturally expect public actions to be easily visible. The lack of universal accessibilty to the public data makes people unaware that the data is public. Lemmy UIs, including apps, need to make this information (a list of upvoting users) universally publicly accessible before people will change their expectations.

Probably safer to assume your password is public to

There are a number of things you can do, depending on how serious you want to get about it (think about who and what you want to protect against - harassment from other users? Admins?).

Create an account using an email alias or an email account not linked with something you can trace back to your real identity.

If you’re concerned about retaliation/harassment from downvoting something, you could create 2 accounts - one for normal use and the other you only use for downvoting, or one for participating in discussions on controversial topics.

You could retire an account and start using a new one after a period of time, so your entire history isn’t linked to a single account.

The above might be able to shield you from other users but not from admins.

If you want to stay anonymous from admins:

An admin would be able to see the IP address the account uses to connect to the service. If 2 accounts connect with the same IP address and the IP is consistently the same, they’d be able to conclude it’s likely the same person (or someone else in their household) is connecting to the service with both accounts.

If you use a VPN or Tor when connecting to the site, that won’t be as easy to see because many people would connect to the service from the same IP address and the account would likely frequently connect using different IP addresses.

Be aware that if you access the site on a mobile device app with a VPN, it’s possible that the app could contact the server when the VPN is down (for example, if the VPN connection is closed when the device is locked). To avoid that, you could try using using something like OpenVPN with its “Kill Switch” enabled).

Note that the admin of the VPN service would be able to see your connections to Lemmy’s servers (but not specially what you’re doing on Lemmy), so you aren’t fully anonymous. Lemmy’s admins would see part of the picture, the VPN’s admins would see another part, and you’re counting on the 2 not talking to each other (and a good VPN service shouldn’t, unless they’re legally required to).

I use a VPN in general for all connections to the Internet but don’t always care to keep my IP address hidden from some services (banking, primary email addresses, etc - services that will have my personal info anyway). It can be very challenging to keep your IP address hidden over the long haul with a frequently used service - you could end up connecting with the VPN down due to a technical reason or carelessness.

With some services I might have multiple accounts - on one I might not really care if my real IP is revealed, but another on the same service that I’m very careful with to keep hidden.

You could use a browser with protections against fingerprinting like Tor or Mullvad Browser.

It’s simple. Just don’t comment or upvote on anything that interests you.