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.

  • 17000HerbsAndSpices@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    What information is stored/publicly accessible for our accounts?

    I don’t see it being a problem that your votes are public so long as there’s no way to tie the account to you irl. Like, so long as the instance (? I’m very new here I don’t really understand the data structure) doesn’t store your IP address or anything does it matter?

    Like yeah you can see that u/randomdickhead (again, not familiar with naming conventions) upvote some weird shit but so long as that’s where the bill ends that user could just make another account aaaaaaaaaaand… No issue?

    If I have the wrong idea please let me know I’m genuinely confused about this