I don’t think that site would be problematic. After all, we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.
A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).
Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:
Don’t use the same verified email address
Don’t reuse usernames, including across platforms
Try not to use the same instances, such that instance admins can see whether login activity is coming from the same place, unless you absolutely trust that the admins won’t analyze your data OR inadvertently leak their records.
Be aware of the techniques used to correlate users: analysis of timestamps, linguistic/grammatical quirks, etc.
This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.
Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.
The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:
Don’t log unnecessary metadata, such as views/visits, clicks, scrolls, time spent on specific posts, etc. Information that is never observed/logged can’t be shared/published.
Don’t share unnecessary information with other instances. For example, with an update to the protocol, an instance might be able to hide which local users voted for what in local threads, while maintaining the proper count internally of what the vote totals are, who has already voted, etc. Non-local users would have to have their votes publicly known, though.
Make the public nature of each action obvious. Make votes more obviously public through the interface (perhaps by allowing people to view who upvoted or downvoted). Make people’s comment history and like history easy to view within the native interface, so that people understand that the information isn’t private to begin with.
Commit to deletion in a public, auditable way. Let instance administrators know that being a good citizen on the fediverse requires adherence to norms about privacy and deletion, and have watchdogs publish stats on how long it takes for an instance to delete a comment or vote or whether it retains edit/delete history.
That last point is completely impossible. Don’t forget that I don’t have to run the official lemmy software on my instance. I can make changes: for example, I can add a feature to my instance like “log every post in a separate, local database before deleting it from lemmy”. Nobody else but me will know this feature exists. Or (to be AGPL compliant) have a separate tool to regularly back up my lemmy database, undoing deletions.
As for the second point: I’d say making local votes private and non-local public will be worse for privacy due to causing confusion.
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I don’t think that site would be problematic. After all, we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.
A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).
Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:
This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.
Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.
The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:
That last point is completely impossible. Don’t forget that I don’t have to run the official lemmy software on my instance. I can make changes: for example, I can add a feature to my instance like “log every post in a separate, local database before deleting it from lemmy”. Nobody else but me will know this feature exists. Or (to be AGPL compliant) have a separate tool to regularly back up my lemmy database, undoing deletions.
As for the second point: I’d say making local votes private and non-local public will be worse for privacy due to causing confusion.
removed by mod