You Should Know

the comment_like database table in Lemmy also has a timestamp on it, "published" field, that discloses what time you voted. This reveals patterns of your Lemmy usage to other federated servers.

I would hope this would be obvious to anyone. If your client can highlight which posts you have upvoted in the web and app UI then the fact that your user specifically upvoted that post must be recoverable from the instance server and thus must be recoverable by the instance admins. I would not expect anything different.

Reddit always had this too though. In every app I used there was an "up voted" and "down voted" tab when I would look at someone's profile

Maybe it was an api thing?

Now we know who are the people stalling the liftoff of the bean's meme to the stratosphere.

I'm already questioning the whole system behind it, not just votes.

Say you have critical information that you want to delete but other instances can just ignore this deletion request, than I could technically write a plugin that uses an extra instance, to always display all deleted comments to me, despite me being a regular user.

For other sites you'd need a crawler, catching this information and all this in a rapid fashion to be usable, with a lot of programming extra work.

At this point we can as well remove the option to delete or edit a comment as everyone can host their own, which wouldn't be possible with proprietary tools.

If someone can simply see votes the same way, we can as well add a mouse hover function that will display the username of whoever upvoted.

Good find, albeit a bit horrifying.

I wonder what the GDPR implications of this is. As far as I understand, even free, privately run services are required to abide by GDPR and offer data insight and deletion. They're also required to state clearly what happens to user data.

Edit: Apparently people have varying takes and feelings on what the GDPR does and does not say, so I urge you to please read the summary of GDPR data privacy here: https://gdpr.eu/data-privacy/ as well as the summary of what constitutes personal data here: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ It's easier to have a good and fruitful discussion if we talk about what the GDPR actually says.

People have burner Reddit and Twitter accounts for posts or votes they think could bite them in the ass, so why wouldn't they do the same on Lemmy?

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

Our data has never been 'invisible'... We've just trusted that places like Reddit and their staff will do the right thing. That's literally how it already works.

If you sign up for Reddit, Reddit staff can see your posts and votes if they want to.

If you sign up for a private forum the admin there can also see database contents.

One way encryption is not possible without stopping functionality... If data about you was encrypted then posts you make couldn't be displayed. If you include a means to decrypt then there was no point encrypting anyway.

This is how it's always been, and Lemmy doesn't change this status quo much.

A faceless corporation that has had access to your data is just replaced by a variety of admins distributed across instances.

This isn't a good or bad thing, the potential for abuse does exist, but when we have literally made agreements with places like Reddit that they can use and sell our data... then what difference does it make it an admin takes a peek?

It wouldn't be great... but nothing is perfect.

It's still worth working on however, to see if a better solution can be found, but at this time I'd say just be aware that it is possible that your data can be seen and understand the only safeguard against that if you need to communicate something private would be to use direct messaging with end to end encryption.

Sounds like a "non-issue" to me, really. That's kind of the point with the fediverse. If I run an instance, I have access to its database and, thus, everything stored in it. That was the case with old PHPBB forums, admins could see everything.

The questions is what ends up stored from outside my own instance. I haven't looked at the source, but I would hazard a guess that it's mostly some json blobs and/or pointers to users/instances.

I'm fine with it.

I mean... you can get information accessing the database. Can anyone access the instance DBs? No. How would you know reddit doesn't log these in its database somewhere?

On it's own, it's not a problem IMO. Why would you want to show all information stored on the frontend? But, if you have to investigate something, it's not that bad you have stuff in your database that can help it.

Granted, if an admin is a shitface, they can look at these information. And then...? Make fun of downvoting people? Go to other instance and that's it.

Well time to write a bot that creates a new account for every vote and comment

For as much as I love Lemmy, its obvious that it is an early software. Mark my words, that’s not the last privacy threat it will experience.

Beyond upvote/downvote data is there anything else that is seen beyond whether someone had an arbitrary influence on a post?

I'm safe, I upboated the beans

It's not just upvotes and downvotes. Instance admin also knows your email and can store your password in plaintext if they want to. It's up to user to decide whether to trust the instance admin

It shouldn't be like that. I hope it gets changed.

Admins can see literally everything. If you can see it (from your end, like whether you've upvoted something), it has to be stored somewhere and of course the server owners can see it

Is the poster's IP address, system, or other system identifier/location, tracked?

If I have users giantshortfacedbear and throwaway123. Then it could be inferred or impled that they are same person if there are from the same IP or phone.

I don't think that's necessarily bad. You upvote to indicate your approval of something. Usually people approve things to recommend it to others.

The things I upvote and downvote are in line with my personal values and I am not ashamed of that. I have no issues with anyone knowing my reaction to a post. On Discord anyone can see who leaves reactions on a message. Same with Facebook. It will show you who added what reaction.