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.

  • @VeltossEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Same. I understand why it’s like that, all instances need to be able to see the information. But there must be a way to do this without the instances understanding exactly which users are doing what. Something like zkproofs or hashes or whatever (I’m not a programmer, clearly), there is surely some way to do it while maintaining some privacy.

    It gives a lot of data on users to see exactly what they upvote and downvote. Especially with AI being able to go through that data very quickly. It wouldn’t be hard to find out a user’s political leanings, general IRL location, age, gender, so many personal details they don’t want to share that could be used against them through advertising or worse.

    • Boz (he/him)English
      1•1 year ago

      I think I personally give out more information in what I say than how I vote, and I think that’s going to be true for a lot of people here. I want to share, and that requires me to sacrifice some privacy.

      No shade intended, but if you’re concerned about what your voting history will say about you, you might consider not interacting with posts at all, and if you’re really concerned, don’t curate a news feed, either. It’s totally fine to browse logged out if you really want to be safe. I think any level of concern about privacy is valid, but it’s useful to think about the whole picture when you evaluate your risk tolerance.

      • @VeltossEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Unless you don’t vote on much, I think you underestimate how much information can be attained from the pure data of up/down votes.

        There is also the fact that people traditionally vote on stuff they wouldn’t comment on because they see it as more private.

        • Boz (he/him)English
          1•1 year ago

          I agree that a lot of information can be inferred from vote history, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry if I came across as trying to minimize the risk there.

          What I meant is that exponentially more information of the type you describe can be inferred from post history, particularly for those of us who use this space to connect with other members of marginalized groups we belong to. Voting history is a minor risk to me when just the fact that I have replied with “I have also had this experience” to a certain post or posted a meme in a certain group could cause serious trouble for me in my offline life. I don’t understand the use case where someone would become concerned about privacy because they found out their vote history could be accessed by unknown parties if they weren’t already concerned about privacy because their posts and comments are visible to anyone and everyone.

          I guess the tl;dr is that I just don’t understand how the hyper focus on the risks associated with voting history is consistent with an assessment of personal risk in a broader sense. I am conscious of taking a huge risk by being on the fediverse, and I decided it was worth it. The stakes were high enough to begin with that I just assumed that the only source of privacy I had would come from anonymity, not the technology, which might be why I am confused by some of the responses I am seeing.