this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
3421 points (96.1% liked)
You Should Know
33235 readers
299 users here now
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content.
**
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Bad post. Ofc the person running the server can see who votes. Your original post made it seem like anyone has access to this data.
There's a bit of a difference here...
Suppose I'm the President of the Democratic People's Republic of Leopards Eating People's Facia, And now, I want to post a propaganda piece on how Leopards are friendly, cuddly, and do not eat people's faces.
On Reddit, I can post this and get downvoted to oblivion, I could try to request Reddit to hand over the list of users that downvoted my post, but I'm most likely going to be told to kick rocks and I can't do anything. (Assuming I'm not the US/a five eyes country).
With Lemmy/Kbin, I don't even need to ask the owner for this information. All I need to do is spin up my own separate instance and the original server will happily send over the list of usernames that have downvoted the original post. Maybe I can use this list and send out a few friendly leopards...
It's quite literally anyone who has 30 min to set up an instance has access to this data. There's some discussions on GitHub on how to potentially fix this but right now this is the case.
A genuinely good privacy concern.
Not just YOUR server admin... Anybody capable of setting up a Lemmy instance has access to this data.
While most people at discuss.tchncs.de may assume that /u/milan and /u/erAck can see this type of thing, it may not be obvious that so can /u/muddybulldog@mylemmy.win or /u/ruud@lemmy.world and every other instance admin in the world can, as well.
Is that what you found out during your experiments?
That seems like a really inefficient and useless implementation to have all instances provide those details to one another, when every instance can simply keep track of it for their own users and pass along the total number.
They would have to pass that total along every time it changed. Different info, same number of server interactions.
I would expect they’d collate that information and pass it on at regular intervals to the instance that holds the true version of the post, who then subsequently disseminates that information to subscriber instances.
Then again, I guess you could collate the detailed information in a similar manner.
Not disputing what you’re saying, I assume you’ve tested this out and that’s what you’re reporting, just commenting on the choices made by the project to implement it this way.
TIL
Literally anyone can access this data. It's not private at all just by the way ActivityPub works.
It is a pretty big deal. What it essentially means is that you are completely exposed, if you pardon the pun.
And yes, absolutely everyone with basic IT skills has access to this data as it is shared across instances. All it takes is a couple minutes to deploy a docker image and boom, I'm somewhat of an admin myself.
The fact that this data is stored in plain is a major security and privacy issue that makes me rethink this platform.
Just don't vote then? Reddit also told advertisers what you're into, it was just over backchannels with money involved.
Or create an account that has no links to your private live, then you can vote as much as you want.
No-one should have to do that, as that information nobody else's business, less it breaks the law
The moment you make votes anonymous (which would theoretically be possible) you open up a million ways in which votes can be manipulated. So congratulations, that ad post from some random company has 12k upvotes now.
Only alternative is still connecting it to a user, but only registering that they voted (but not if it's an upvote or downvote, that's anonymous again), but then you can never change your vote again afterwards. So if you misclick the downvote button there is no way back.
With the current solutions in place, if you want to remain anonymous: Don't create an account, just lurk. Or don't upvote/downvote/comment on things. It's as easy as that.
Just like putting your real name online and then complaining when others can see it on Facebook.. your account is as anonymous as you want to make it.