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.

  • plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    Could replace the usernames with UUIDs, and keep the username-UUID map back on the source instance? Then you get an audit trail, but not associated with user identity. There’s also no guarantee that people don’t use bob_jones as their username, and this is Personally Identifiable Information, which brings up some GDPR stuff too.

    • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winOPEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      The problem with that is that every interaction that any user has with a post or a comment would require calls back to the home instance in order to lookup those usernames. That’s a LOT of extra load

        • plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          Yeah I just meant for the votes. If you make a comment with your username it’s pretty clear you consented for the input and the username to be visible side by side.