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Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Yes, and this would be fairly easy to make them at least pseudonymous without even needing to modify activitypub itself.
That said, I still don't support anything which lowers the friction of vote stalking like exposing votes in even more places. Technically people can look up my address from my license plate number if they really care to, but that doesn't mean I want to list it in bold letters on my windshield.
I don't follow, what are people going to do from being able to see votes that they can't do by seeing your posts?
For starters datamining my voting patterns for building a deeper interest profile. It should be pretty obvious how this works in terms of user fingerprinting, and the ultimate monetization of Lemmy data. It would be super naive to think that Lemmy will be the one web space immune to this kind of thing. I guarantee you meta already has an army of silent instances doing this.
Worst case scenario, legit state actors use it to target deanonymization attacks at dissidents. I would not be shocked if the ...usual suspects... Are engaged in this kind of thing.
They can already datamine your posts.
But not my votes.
If I understand correctly they already can. It's not user-facing, but votes are federated if I understand correctly.
Yes, that is why I am arguing in favor of an additional layer of pseudonymous voting.
Incorporating that in a way that doesn't allow for vote manipulation by just lying to a server that different "anonymous" users have up or down voted a post sounds incredibly difficult, and not worth it for the narrow use case of "prevent my votes from being data mined even though all my comments can."