I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
at least Reddit is safe.
Lmao, what!? Reddit tries their best to know exactly who you are, where you live, your education, where you work, etc… And then they sell that data to anyone.
Yes, exactly! This is just what they hoard on iOS devices:
A lot of people here still refuse to understand that Lemmy, as it currently exists, is a privacy nightmare, and the voting thing is just the top of the iceberg. There are several de-anonymization attacks possible involving dynamically serving different content to different users. This, combined with the public voting makes it possible that someone can dox an account and expose a lot more information than other forums where that information is more private.
Public votes also open the fediverse up to much worse astroturfing IMO. It’s incredible feedback for bots and trolls to see exactly who is interacting with their posts and comments. It’s frustrating that a bunch of people here have convinced themselves of the opposite, and insist that public voting is the only way to combat brigades and trolls, which is an incredibly shortsighted stance which doesn’t scale nearly as well as it does in the other direction.
iirc someone got banned from like 25 subs because they downvoted a single post that said “I want YOU to generate more AI slop” and the mod got pissed and power tripped super hard
What do you mean by dox here? I usually think of dox as being, real name, real address, etc. But I’m having trouble seeing how even my Lemmy instance admin could figure that out about me.
Nobody sets out to be doxxed, but it happens. And as it stands on the fediverse, when it happens the consequences are potentially even greater because all activity is available to all subscribers. All I am asking is for these simple facts to be acknowledged when we have this discussion. The potential risk profile for using Lemmy is greater than reddit in many ways. My frustration with how people approach this conversation is that they all too frequently dismiss or ignore this simple fact.
It doesn’t need to be like this though. There are simple ways to mitigate this, but people are weirdly hostile to them, and I believe it is specifically because they do not acknowledge this additional risk.
Here’s the link (scroll all the way down):
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.htmlTBH, I haven’t really searched for any info regarding IP address.
I just assumed that everyone here on Lemmy lives behind layers of adblockers and has their VPN Kill Switch toggled ON.Assuming people use a vpn is a bit of a stretch. I dont know anyone that does that constantly.
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I’ll downvote everyone here if I damn well please it!!!
I try not to downvote without commenting so they should be aware
this is the way. I HATE when people downvote for no reason and don’t even attempt to have a conversation about it
edit: goddamn it you goofballs 😂
I’ll downvote something if it is irrelevant to the community at hand, or if someone creates a community specifically to bypass community blocks users have made. We don’t need 10 communities about the same thing, and users should absolutely be penalized for making superfluous communities to evade community blocks.
I want you to know
that you are skibidi sigma rizzler from ohio ?
?
They want you to know that they downvoted you
whats the problem with it . you did not liked it you downvoted . its not like they can ban your account
If you’re an instance admin, for any post, you can just click “view votes” and see everything tied to usernames, even outside your own instance. Moderators can too, but it’s restricted to the communities they moderate.
So if a bad actor wanted to get aces to vote data, they could setup and instance and have it federate with any instance they want to extract voting data from?
Yes, it’s very simple too. You don’t even need to extract anything from a database or do some complicated stuff. As an admin you have free access to all moderation tools no matter where the post is from, including the option to “view votes”.
The IP address thing is not real, though
Just choose a nickname that is random word+4 random digits and don’t reuse it on other services
This is the way. Randomise your usernames and use a password manager to keep track of them.
Sir, this is the Fediverse.
It is nowhere explicitly made clear to users that voting is public. It should be made clear if it is going to be
An EU resident could sue for emotional damages under the GDPR. Or maybe just complain to data protection authorities.
One day it will happen.
Why would it need to be made clear? Likes on Facebook are public, nowhere does it say “liking this photo will alert every friend you have that you just liked your stepdaughters’ friends’ bikini pic from 2 years ago.”
I like the public vote system. Anonymous systems have a much greater potential for abuse.
Accounts are easy enough to make that you can just burn your account every few months if you’re that worried.
I think its a fair assumption that most people make that whatever data which isnt explicitly displayed to a regular user is not public. Having likes be public but hidden is misleading.
It is made clear because there is an option to see all the votes right next to the like button. Similarly, many sites allow you to go through activity of people you follow.
You can see the number of votes here too. Why does your hand need to be held? It’s the fucking internet, guy.
I can see the number of votes but not who voted. This gives the impression that this information is not available publicly. However, it can be accessed by anyone on third party websites.
Then don’t vote? Nobody is forcing you to interact with the content and it’s kind of hilarious you’d consider it a security/privacy violation.
And then you put the cherry on top by saying “reddit is safe.”
It’s the other way around here: Everything is public except where it’s made clear that it won’t be (e.g. email address, password).
For what it’s worth, your instance of choice is particularly negligent in regard to informing its users. Compare lemmy.today/legal to lemmy.world/legal, or their respective signup pages for examples. There’s little that Lemmy itself or the community at large can do about that 😞
Are you sure about that? Reddit is a fucking cesspool.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
No.
It would be unusual to be able to exactly identify someone purely from their IP, but let’s say someone posted from their work IP in a small company. It would substantially lower the bar to dox them.
Let’s go further and ponder if an authoritarian regime setup an admin and started coorelating dissent ip’s collected from user when they did things like paying parking fines, or signing their online tax forms.
Let’s say that they collected all that and trained an LLM on it, then when you go to get a passport renewed or are stopped for a traffic violation and ask the LLM if you’re a dangerous person based on their criteria.
It’s not a direct problem, but it has slippery slope all over it.
Let’s just say you don’t understand how IP or llms work.
ohh, so you can’t put train a small compendium everything a person wrote then infer things about that person based on their life. Good to know.
I’ve been dealing with IP’s for about 30 year now, also good to know.
Well I hope you have been, unless this is your first week going online.
IP addresses are not something that can be pulled from just any instance. You would need to be the administrator, and even then you’d only get access to the ip address of just your own instance users. AFAIK, at least - maybe they’ve made efforts to mask ips, too, but im not even sure how that’d work.
Federated posts and comments are copied from server to server. When someone from .world is looking at a comment from .dbzer0, what they are seeing is information that was synced from the dbzer0 server address, not the user’s.
There was a brief moment when there was a vulnerability with linked images sent via DM that could route you to an external server and log your IP address, but that has been patched now by most instances.
As with anything on the internet: assume your activity is not private at all times, or take active precautions to mask your identity, or both. No opsec is perfect and often the only thing standing in the way of a hack or dox is the endurance and motivation of the bad actor.
IP addresses are not something that can be pulled from just any instance.
That’s what I thought about votes too. I’d be very happy to know that you can’t access ips the same way you can votes on other nodes by simply being an admin on a given node. Honestly, I never would have guessed lemvotes could exist.
this is why i vote at random, like two-face doing his quarter thing
You get 3 accounts. Say you want to upvote something. You downvote in 1 account (randomly selected), upvote on another, and upvote on the third. So it’s net +1 and the only way to see how you voted is to piece together all 3 of your accounts voting history. Need more privacy? No problem, just use 5 accounts instead of 3.
/s
wait, so what do i do with the first shell again?
I did this last night putting my son to bed, said heads you go to bed, tails we stay up. Jokes on him though, double heads. And he fell for it, what a sucker. Hope it works when he’s not four, or I at least don’t need to do it.
you’re raising a future supervillain
Seems like a good thing to me. Should be a better known feature.
How would I go about seeing this information for myself?
I posted in the wrong spot, sorry. There’s a link and screenshot here:
Yeah, at worst it’s a necessary evil to prevent a rogue user on a second instance from mass downvoting. Your username is tied to your vote, because otherwise a rogue user could just spam downvotes at whatever they didn’t like.
Instance 1 has a post. Instance 2 has a user who disagrees with that post. User is able to spam downvotes, because instance 2 is not binding their username to the vote. So Instance 1 has no way of knowing if the votes are multiple different users, or all one user. The only real solution here is to disable external voting, but the entire point of the fediverse is cross-compatibility and self-hosting. By binding the username to the vote, instance 1 is able to detect repeat votes and disregard them.
Public votes do absolutely nothing to stop people from making a bunch of users on a bunch of instances and voting from those users. Voting agents are a simple solution to the issue, since you can still just ban the voting agent if it seems problematic.
But there’s a deeper context here, which is we are drawing a weird line between voting being a fundamental, if not critical part of the application, but also apparently grounds for imposing sanctions on users for doing it wrong? That’s a fundamentally flawed mechanic no matter how you swing it, since you can’t standardize any singular set of rules, and we are already seeing a rapid escalation of tit for tat vote bans. This is just unsustainable and is pushing things towards an obvious endpoint where there is such a chilling effect on voting that it negates the entire utility of the mechanic for sorting and content curation.
Important to note here, too, is that ip addresses of users arent synced across instances.
This is only a problem for people who care about the reputation of their user account - which is something people should be rotating out anyway if they care about their privacy.
Scroll all the way down: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
Sure, but how many people have read the docs?
🤦🏻♀️okay, good point.
This always givea me a 404
Just tested your post here, your instance def opted out.
your instance may have opted out.
Or just buggy results.
Russia really should just leave Ukraine, though. (Sorry, I just saw the context for this a few minutes ago and can’t help myself).
Dont care who knows but I too agree with this.
It is not the context for this post, people have made it the context. It is the reason for this post.
Maybe context is the wrong word.
E: how about catalyst.
