By seeying most reactions ro your post, I can only think that most lemmy users don’t care about privacy at all. Or, at least, didn’t fully understand the implications.
Yeah, I almost want to make it now to drive the point home to those folks. (Edit: emphasis on almost)
who cares if they can see my public posts
Misses the whole point, Open Lemmy Stats probably wouldn’t display your posts (lemmy itself does that), it would display all of the analytical inferences to be made from those posts, votes and other activity, revealing more about you than you intended or even were aware of. Which isn’t readily public in the way some folks are making it out to be, it takes some work to get that data and you need sysadmin/database/programming skills to make it manageable and useful. OpenLemmyStats will let anyone of any skill level query your data that otherwise would require you to be, at a minimum, an instance admin to get to.
I like the idea too, but I’d prefer to wait and see what the official devs think about it, and if adding privacy measures is part of the roadmap. Lemmy is still too new and things are still unstable.
For myself, I’ve already just assumed this stuff is public. I don’t know why I’d assume it was private, in fact. I have a few different accounts and I use them for different things, but anything I want to keep off the public internet doesn’t go on the public internet, on Lemmy or Reddit or Facebook or anywhere. It’s 2023, I think most people have some understanding of this already. Threatening to out data I already assumed no privacy on is not terribly threatening.
Assuming everything is public, on one hand, can help develop better practices, but, on the other, can lead us to stop fighting for our privacy, so I’m always cautious with it.
About the upvotes/downvotes, they give a lot of information about you, and your pattern can be so unique, that a new account could be identified by it. It can also be used for doxing. Having public votes can also lead to metadrama, just like happens in places like facebook with their like system. And don’t forget that it takes just a small mistake to have your identity leaked, and then you have this data available and tied to your person, exposing your psychological behavior and positions on every theme.
Another thing worth mentioning is the email used to join lemmy. This is basically public, eliminating the expected anonymity from a lot o people (remember, most people aren’t tech-savy enough to create a fake one). In time, bots and trolls will become more common and most instances will probably ban fake or temporary emails, forcing the users to use real ones.
It all might not be a great issue now, when we’re small, but if we expect to grow, I think these things will need to be addressed at some point.
Frankly, I think someone should actually do that. Except maybe use open source AI instead of ChatGPT.
The fact is, in a federated setting all this data will be accessible. For example, if lemmy tried to hide who made each vote, and just federate totals, that would allow my malicious instance to report 1M upvotes for my post.
When lemmy tries to hide this data, all this does is instill a false sense of privacy with users. IMHO the best thing is to make all this de facto public data, officially public, so everyone knows and can act accordingly.
As for privacy, I’d say the best thing to do is, keep your account anonymous.
It’s actually a real problem on reddit where people spin up fake users to manipulate votes. Reddit hasn’t published how they detect that exactly, but one way to do that is to look for bad voting patters, like if one account systematically upvotes/downvotes another. But you pretty much can’t without knowing the votes.
I actually think something like that would be great. Not only for Reddit but also for the data your internet provider, email provider, WhatsApp, Google, Apple, etc. has. People don’t realise that these companies have all kinds of sensitive data. And with “companies” I don’t mean some abstract organisation but literal employees, as in people.
I am more shocked about people being shocked that Lemmy instances can see your upvotes.
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