Privacy Concerns on Lemmy: A Call for More User Control

I’ve been grappling with a concern that I believe many of us share: the lack of privacy controls on Lemmy. As it stands, our profiles are public, and all our posts and comments are visible to anyone who cares to look. I don’t even care about privacy all that much, but this level of transparency feels to me akin to sharing my browser history with the world, a discomforting thought to say the least.

While the open nature of Lemmy can foster community and transparency, it also opens the door to potential misuse. Our post history can be scrutinized by creeps or stalkers, our opinions can be nitpicked based on past statements, and we can even become targets for mass downvoting. This lack of privacy control can deter users from actively participating in discussions and sharing their thoughts freely.

Even platforms like Twitter and Facebook, often criticized for their handling of user data, provide some level of access control. Users can choose who sees their timeline: friends/followers, the public or nobody. This flexibility allows users to control their online presence and decide who gets to see their content.

The current state of affairs on Lemmy forces us into a cycle of creating new accounts or deleting old posts to maintain some semblance of privacy. This is not only time-consuming but also detracts from the user experience. It’s high time we address this issue and discuss potential solutions.

One possible solution could be the introduction of profile privacy settings, similar to those found on other social media platforms. This would give users the flexibility to choose their level of privacy and control over their content without having to resort to manual deletion or account purging.

I believe that privacy is a fundamental right, and we should have the ability to control who sees our content. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter. How do you feel about the current privacy settings on Lemmy? What changes would you like to see? Let’s start a conversation and work towards making Lemmy a platform that respects and upholds our privacy.

risencode,

The only privacy setting I can encourage on any social media site is don’t share private stuff about yourself and never link to your account from other accounts

LemmyHead,

That is part of the problem though. Proper privacy allows you to express what you want to, without self censorship. The issue is not: don’t speak about x, but rather: speak about it and feel comfortable that you can do it in a safe environment. I fully agree with the account linking though

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

Technical question: How would posts federate if private?

exocrinous,

The admin of Blahaj is openly interested in exposing trans people’s alt accounts and outing them on their mains. And somehow it’s the biggest trans instance. We need a community and admin reaction in favour of defederating people who do that.

magnor,
@magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh avatar

Wait what? Do you have a source for this?

exocrinous,

lemm.ee/post/14609313

magnor,
@magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh avatar

I don’t see much proof. Did anyone corroborate?

exocrinous,

In order to show you proof I would have to help Ada in her attempts at doxxing, but I asked a friend who saw the whole thing to confirm.

magnor,
@magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh avatar

I understand this is hard to prove without doxxing. This situation is very concerning, and if true absolutely disgusting.

LWD,

There’s a grim tragedy in how many people in this comment section have either succumbed to defeat or actively seek to advocate against privacy.

The comments can mostly be boiled down to:

  • My data is online already, and I give up
  • Your data is online already, and you don’t deserve control over it
  • I have nothing to hide and nothing to fear (and you should too)

You will find Fediverse types are far more cynical and antagonistic to privacy than people on other platforms.

Tangent5280,

But why? Is there a compromise taken on privacy in favour of visibility and mass adoption of whatever fediverse client they’re using? I don’t understand this, especially since I also find the strongest advocates for privacy right here.

LWD,

A lot of Lemmy adopters joined with rose tinted glasses, and came with a lot of good ideas, like getting data out of the hands of big companies, making it easy to access it (as Reddit locked down APIs), etc. Which is all good, but a subset of them believe “not officially belonging to one company” is good enough. As for how your data is handled online, a subset of them believe nothing can be improved, and a subset believes it shouldn’t be improved because your data shouldn’t belong to you at all.

And Lemmy is made up of all sorts, so there’s overlap between Reddit refugees and diehard fans. That interaction is a lot more implicit here, but the friction is a lot more visible on sites like Mastodon where similar privacy discussions have been happening.

Devorlon,

I’ve not seen any of these arguments. Though it may be all downvoted to hell and back.

My main gripe with adding privacy features to Lemmy is that the whole point of Lemmy is that all data is already publicly available and for Lemmy to continue working the way it does it’ll need to remain that way. And because of that there’s nothing that can be done to stop bad actors setting up an instance and selling all the data they collect.

At least in the EU (and UK to a lesser extent) no major corporation would be able to get away with selling that data, so the spent man hours on allowing privacy settings would be wasted time.

LemmyHead,

It doesn’t necessarily need to remain that way. For example,we should have the option to make our profiles private. We should also be able to create pseudonyms for content we submit. The content will still be federated, but not necessarily linked to one user ID

TexMexBazooka,

Bruh what? If you’re repeatedly making new accounts because you don’t want people reading your post history you’re doing something wrong.

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

What you’re describing is an issue with all of social media. While your concerns are valid, I don’t see your arguments as privacy issue. I honestly prefer post and comment history being transparent and accessible. It’s much like Reddit and this format fits much better with an open forum style of platform.

Don’t post private information and it’s a non-issue.

Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?

Outtatime,
@Outtatime@sh.itjust.works avatar

Would still be nice to hide that information

drndramrndra,

Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?

Not really AFAIK. Your comment is spread across many instances, and they’re not required to follow your deletion request.

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

Oh, I see

LWD,

It’s no required, but if a server is misbehaving, people could notice and those servers could be defederated. By default, deletions are federated.

bamboo,

Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?

Nothing ever dies on the Internet. With the federated nature of Lemmy, it’s possible for deletes to not sync across instances, especially if there’s defederation that happens.

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

Makes sense, when I think about it

Zerush,
@Zerush@lemmy.ml avatar

What irritates me many times when I enter Lemmy is that instead of my Nick at the top right, someone else’s Nickname appears for a moment, before changing it to mine. This is a sign of an open account sharing channel, which is quite serious and should be fixed quickly. Security at Lemmy is apparently non-existent.

Sal,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

Do you see a random nickname from a stranger, or a nickname of an account that was previously logged into using the same computer?

What is an open account sharing channel?

Zerush, (edited )
@Zerush@lemmy.ml avatar

It occurres sometimes, I see a random nick from strangers. It means that my account obviously is públic and even shared. I will be attentive and I will try to take a screenshot, before the nickname changes to mine while Lemmy loads.

Sal,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

I will also pay close attention and see if I can catch that happening.

Zerush,
@Zerush@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s not easy to catch, because it’s only a moment when Lemmy loads and just sometimes. For now I always have my eyes to the top right corner when I enter Lemmy.

leraje,
@leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

To me, it’s an issue of personal responsibility.

Lemmy is, like a lot of Fediverse platforms, about as private as it can be. There’s no trackers, you’re not forced to use real names or any other identifying information, no adverts follow you from site to site, no browser fingerprinting and no instance owners are trying to sell your data.

Beyond that, what you choose to say on Lemmy is your responsibility and yours alone.

pl_woah,

The lemmy devs would probably take something sensible like that and flat out shoot it down because they think they know better.

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

I personally enjoy that this sort of information is public, it keeps people honest and gives a tool to use against bad faith actors. People lie. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s forcing you to post personal information online. Some level of responsibility needs to be put on the user.

toastal,

If Lemmy cared about privacy, contributing source code & opening tickets would not require opening accounts with a for-profit, US-based, closed, prorietary service owned by a publicly-traded megacorporation that has shareholders to appease & a history (as well as current) record of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

that also uses your code for their AI.

drndramrndra, (edited )

Copilot gets trained on Dessalines’ essays and becomes a Marxist

toastal,

I mean it took the code production of from workers for the Commons, packaged it up, & sold it back to the workers—often in violation of the license if not the spirit of free, ethical, or similar software. All AI generations should be CC0 / 0BSD licensed.

toastal,

Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.

—Matt Lee, www.linuxjournal.com/…/opinion-github-vs-gitlab

chicken,

I remember a little while ago a thread with someone from kbin gloating that they could see what everyone was voting, and accusing the people upvoting comments they disagreed with of being bigots in a vaguely threatening way obviously intended to produce a chilling effect, and people found this surprising because that information is not public on most instances.

I basically agree with the people saying open info is just the nature of posting on a public forum and of federation, but there could be improvements, even just in awareness of what is and isn’t private.

bamboo,

This is a great point because in the Lemmy UI, this information isn’t shown, and you can’t even list out all posts you’ve upvoted. As most of us coming from Reddit, we’re used to upvotes being private, and probably assume it’s the same. I understand the technical reasons for having the information public, but it is not clear from a user perspective that it’s public.

chicken, (edited )

What’s extra confusing is that I’ve seen people asking about how to get this information from the API, with the answer being that you can’t (I guess to protect privacy?). It’s only accessible to federated servers, but then those can do what they want with it including publishing it to everyone.

knobbysideup,
@knobbysideup@sh.itjust.works avatar

If you don’t want to share information on a public forum, then don’t.

LWD,

Chilling.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

the_post_of_tom_joad,

Nope, reading people’s history is the number one reason i liked Reddit and now lemmy. It’s just anonymous enough that you can keep your private life separate, and having a comment history stands in as an online barometer of who the other people your talking to are generally like

floofloof, (edited )

On Lemmy any comment you post gets federated out to other servers, so it’s available to anyone who sets up a server. So by design it is not possible to control who gets to see or archive your comments. I could set up a server to permanently archive every comment it sees, and if your server sends me your comment it goes into my archive. Probably people are already doing this for data mining. It’s not clear that you could bolt some kind of privacy control on to this architecture, which is fundamentally designed for sharing.

LWD,

Could ≠ Should.

Smarter defaults should be encouraged by products that are made for consumers, not corporations

andyburke,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

Although I agree that is how things work now, one could imagine a different approach:

For instance, I could maybe control who my content gets federated to. That is, if I decide I don't particularly want my content blasted to certain places that my instance would not call any blocked ones with my data.

If that causes some issues with ActivityPub, you can imagine encrypted blobs that could only be opened by others with a shared key.

We don't need to achieve perfection out of the gate, to me these questions are worth discussing so that we can build out more high quality tech for the fediverse, let's not try to just immediately shut down discussion.

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

How would you ensure other instances are not sharing your content?

To me this seems to be a question of ideology. I came here from Reddit because this is an open forum with transparent history.

Federetion by design ensures that accessibility (as far as I understand, correct me if I’m wrong). This design principle to me is the core. If that seems like an issue maybe this style of social media is not for you.

LWD,

Can you elaborate on what being “an open forum” means?

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

In this context, it’s an open public digital space. Noone is obligated share anything.

The part that is discussed as a privacy issue is a design element. It is by design post are visible to everyone, it is by design that comments are visible to everyone.

How is it a privacy issue when the user desides what to post for everyone to see?

If you are looking for a different design ideology then maybe you need a different social media platform.

LWD,

So regarding an open, public digital space like Twitter, how do you feel about people having the ability to lock their accounts and instantly hide all their tweets from the public?

Mastodon doesn’t have that, but it could.

My reaction to adding something like that will always be “that would be rad” regardless of previous assumptions about how public an app should be, or truisms like “the Internet is forever”, because I believe strongly that trying to fix issues is better than letting them languish unchecked.

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

I’ve never been on Twitter. Besides Reddit I really disliked all other main platforms. So answering your question: I don’t care, it’s a different platform for different style of social media interactions.

the Internet is forever

My position has nothing to do with this sentiment. Internet forgets, and often.

I like federated nature of Lemmy, I like that there is no “private” accounts. This is a feature not a bug.

I’m not trying to argue against privacy, but what you are describing isn’t a privacy issue or an issue at all. It’s a design element. And it’s this design is why I like it here.

As someone here has said, at some point the responsibility has to fall on the user. You don’t need to share anything. As long as the nature of the platform is clear (and it’s a separate discussion) the is no issue to be fixed.

If to you that is seems as an issue, well then maybe you are at the wrong place. And if the platform changes in the direction I don’t agree, I will leave.

LWD,

I like that there is no “private” accounts. This is a feature not a bug.

I’m not trying to argue against privacy…

I appreciate your honesty but this seems to conflict

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

How is this conflicting? You are a private person same as I, I don’t know who you are, you don’t know who I am.

How is selective hiding of post and comments privacy?

If you don’t want it to be seen – don’t post it.

LWD,

Choosing who to share your data with has been considered a privacy setting since the inception of Facebook and the subsequent erosion of those same settings.

For example, privacy settings on Facebook are available to all registered users: they can block certain individuals from seeing their profile, they can choose their “friends”, and they can limit who has access to their pictures and videos.

mr_satan,
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

And that is the different premise for the social network.

You do have the equivalent choice here.

If you want Facebook, go to Facebook. It’s not worse or better it’s different.

Well Facebook is worse, but the reasons are corporate not design issues (it’s more complicated than that, but that’s beyond the point).

LWD,

We were talking about the definition of privacy, and I was giving an example to bolster my definition of it. We can switch to a different topic if you want, but first I want to cement this definition.

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