There's no way that isn't going to be abused. Some marketing or tracking agency will setup a fediverse server and just collect all data like this for free. Or worse, take advantage of a friendica instance to bombard it with requests for data collection purposes.

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

What can they use that data for?

It would only be usable data if they could show personalized ads to the users. They can’t.

All they know is that Meldrik up/downvoted this and that, but outside of Lemmy they have no idea who Meldrik is.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 10 points 6 months ago

If you think metadata is worthless, I would like to make you aware about Snowden and his revelations. Look them up.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 4 points 6 months ago

I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.

Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.

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