this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Honestly, I am not down for this at all. It's one thing to be able to get that info by hosting your own instance and another thing to be publicly called out like that. From a privacy perspective, I just don't need the average joe seeing what I've been upvoting and downvoting.
I'm with you on that. It definitely has me reevaluating how I interact with Lemmy.
This is something of a ticking time bomb, I think. I don't think the majority of people coming to Lemmy right now appreciate that their votes are public, and sooner or later somebody is going to write a bot or addon that uses that data to harass or censor users and it's going to be a scandal that scares people away.
Making votes public is a really bad idea because it disincentivizes users to vote how they like, for fear of reprisal. This is quintessential to a democratic system, and to a social media platform.
You want this place to grow, and order for it to grow, users have to interact. They are the engine behind the content aggregation, they should never feel hesitation to vote.
I didn't even realize votes are public here. On Reddit I've got that shit hidden because it's extremely personal data. Just through upvote/downvote patterns you can figure out what someone's likely political beliefs are, how religious they are, what their hobbies are, what disgusts them, what arouses them, what they find offensive...
It's genuinely insane that this stuff is public at all. I'm probably gonna stop using Lemmy because that shit being public is just way too dangerous imo, and I don't trust myself enough to not participate if I keep coming back.
If only reddit didn't commit seppeku, then I'd never have even considered something so poorly thought out.