YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private - eviltoast

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • kennydidwhat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Why? The masses have no issue forking data over to big tech. What difference does it make if it’s one or a million corporations using that data when it’s being sold willy-nilly to anybody with a checkbook?

    The point is not how many actors have access to your data. The point is that in both scenarios (public data vs. single-corporation-controlled data), your data is pragmatically public from data sales, data leaks, and so on. However, in only one of them, your data is ostensibly “protected” by a corporation - the lie at hand. In the other scenario, you are under no spell that your data is protected or private - the truth.

    My comment was simply pointing out how they’re effectively the same thing. Giving your data to a big tech firm is effectively the same thing as making it public. Hence, the outrage over one not matching the outrage over the other is amusing to me because it implies how effective the corpo framing of this issue is.