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.

MajorHavoc, (edited )

It gets weird fast, because before privacy controls in the Lemmy source code mean anything, we need trusted third party verification of a server’s patch level, and security controls.

That can be done, and I think Lemmy has a shot at getting to that point, but it’ll be awhile.

In the meantime, I suspect the Lemmy developers are hesitant to add and advertise features that you can’t be sure are actually correctly enabled on your instance.

But yeah, let’s not let perfect be the enemy of moving toward better.

Edit: Assuming you completely trust your instance admin, we could start adding some basic privacy to actions taken on your home instance.

But as soon as the user starts interacting via federation, all bets are off - because the federated instance may he malicious.

I think we might see one or more “trusted fediverse” groups emerge in the next few years, with instance admins making commitments to security controls, moderation, code of conduct, etc.

So, in theory, the lemmy software could start implementing privacy controls that allow users to limit their visibility to whichever part of the fediverse their instance admin has marked as highly trusted.

But even then, there’s risks from bad actors on highly trusted instances that still allow open signups.

Anyway, I totally agree with you. It’s just a genuinely complex problem.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

If all the people complaining would just contribute to the codebase this wouldn’t even be an issue.

Often, you even see the devs coming into threads like this and making suggestions, like “make a pull request.” They want more people contributing.

It’s tons of people whining, very few people contributing. Guess what? While at a certain point, adding developers stops increasing productivity, there’s a small window where adding developers does increase productivity.

If I am correct, Lemmy only has four main developers. That’s well within the range to add more developers and increase the productivity, making new features and security come faster.

So I get it, but things take time, and are complicated, which you thankfully can see.

People whinging about it in threads does nothing to change it. Donating to Lemmy’s development costs or contributing code does.

So much of it sounds like it sounds like its from less-technically-inclined people (some of its valid critique from experts, but they generally… write bug reports and do pull requests…) who just want it to be better but the only way they know how is to “bring awareness.” Well, all that “awareness-bringing” just amounts to spreading FUD.

Sal,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

I think we might see one or more “trusted fediverse” groups emerge in the next few years, with instance admins making commitments to security controls, moderation, code of conduct, etc.

There is now at least one system in place for admins to vouch for other instances being non-malicious, and to report suspected instances. It is called the fediseer: gui.fediseer.com

MajorHavoc,

Very cool.

Creddit,

When you have privacy settings, what you really have is a lie.

It starts out with good intentions, like those in this post, but eventually everyone forgets that the platform still sees your posts and does not give a shit about selling them.

I would rather acknowledge from the very beginning that this entire system is not private, so there is never such a misunderstanding.

Everyone should post and comment with caution, just like you use caution with what you say in public places.

blackbrook,

The way you use caution saying something in a public place that you don’t want everyone to hear is by keeping your voice down so that only certain people can hear it. Without privacy settings there is no equivalent to that.

Bocky,

They have protocols for this, setup and manage your own server

user224,
@user224@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Sup. And all this data would still be federating, it has to be. That just means that some data-collecting company could make a fake instance and get everything together. Or someone could just fork it back.

amanneedsamaid,

The way I see it, community-based social media is a public forum, where every post / comment is public (Obviously less applicable on an individualized platform like Instagram). Everyone has an inherent right to privacy, but not when they’re using a platform like Lemmy. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally different platforms. You can’t expect privacy while using lemmy, so use a different platform to post private content.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

These people should be looking into spinning up Matrix servers if they want a private club with real privacy so bad.

It’s definitely a weird thing to constantly be upset about: “People can see what I posted in public when I post them publicly!”

It’s like complaining about people being able to take photos with you in the background in public. It’s a public space, there is no expectation of privacy.

If you want a private internet experience, you have to put some work in.

shortwavesurfer,

I have a feeling that you might be misunderstanding what the actual purpose of lemmy is. lemmy has taken quite a few design decisions from Reddit which is exactly the same way. Both platforms are public places where all content is shared. Anyone using them needs to be aware of that fact. Mastodon might be a better fit for you as it is more focused on individuals rather than public communities.

LWD,

Well, not exactly.

Reddit Lemmy
Content is public Content is public
API access is limited API access is limitless
Vote data is inaccessible Vote data is accessible
No email needed Email or something else often required
One privacy policy Basically no privacy policy
SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

If you’re not running your own server privacy policies are not even worth the pixels they’re presented on.

Literally, you’re just taking a random person’s word for it (whoever the admin is). A website is a black box, you have no idea what’s going on on the back-end.

The only way to be in complete control of your user data is to run your own server and be literally the only user on it.

Even then, any public comments you make are, you know… public.

otp,

Even then, any public comments you make are, you know… public.

As they should be.

Public comments is how you can find patterns of sketchy user behaviour.

henfredemars,

Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. It asks much less of my instance admins if it’s understood that my information was never private to begin with.

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Well there’s still the legal threat. You have to trust someone, unless you’re creating your own hardware and never connecting to the internet

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

True! All your data will pass over other hardware owned by other people.

The only real online privacy is not connecting to the internet to begin with.

The whole system is based on trust.

Which is why I think some of these privacy demands are straight silly.

FutileRecipe,

All your data will pass over other hardware owned by other people. The only real online privacy is not connecting to the internet to begin with.

And now we’re entering into the realm of encryption, especially end-to-end. Generally speaking, just because you’re sending information that touches other people’s hardware, doesn’t mean it’s public and readable.

Danitos,

Even then, AMD, Intel and now Apple CPU chips are suspected to be backdored. NIST has been slow to adapt a standard post-quantun E2EE algorithm, with some rumours of self-sabotage mandated by NSA (like they have already done in the past). The Tor network is extremely vulnerable to traffic correlation by big parties.

Encryption theoretically gives you what you describe, but in reality you still need to put a lot of thrust in things like your own hardware.

LWD, (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    SnotFlickerman, (edited )
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    I think that’s worth considering: an open-source volunteer project requires and leaks way more data than a private corporation it’s mimicking.

    It couldn’t be that one has had loads of VC funding for *checks notes… 15 years. Whereas one has been barely funded for five years and has more people complaining than adding code.

    Actually, it makes perfect sense that an open source project that doesn’t have a big organization behind it isn’t going to have the same capability anywhere near as quickly. Reddit also makes money from advertising. The money for Lemmy is from donations and an abysmally small set of grants.

    Hell, Matrix, an actual open source communications protocol is 9 years old and they still haven’t gotten encrypted video group chats working properly and if I recall correctly still offload a lot of that to JitsiMeet. I was using Matrix/Riot.IM (now Element) in 2016 and it was garbage that barely worked, and updates constantly broke what previously worked, etc. It took time to become better and Matrix does have a whole ass organization backing it.

    For comparison, Lemmy has been around for about five years and they’ve had far less financial backing and developers contributing to the project. Matrix has governments like France and Germany lining up for services for private communications, which means they’ve literally got people paying them for the service of helping manage their Matrix servers. Lemmy doesn’t have the same advantages. They don’t have a service or ads to sell (no ads is part of the appeal.).

    For what its worth, Veilid exists, if you’re looking for a better framework to start with than ActivityPub.

    henfredemars, (edited )

    I prefer the complete lack of privacy settings because it is open and honest about the reality of what Lemmy is able to provide.

    Even if you’re running your own instance, you are necessarily submitting your data to another party. I don’t have to trust the platform as much when my data isn’t private. It’s much easier to engineer a system around that assumption.

    If we suppose that anything I submit to Lemmy is submitted to the public, I can’t be misled. My data cannot be leaked because I’m presenting it to the world already. Lemmy is a young social project with many problems to solve, still trying to gain traction and hold on to users and with an uncertain future. In brief: bigger fish to fry.

    Maybe privacy controls could be on the list, but I don’t think it addresses the main problems or applications of the platform and creates its own set of issues. Keep it simple and stupid.

    solrize, (edited )

    Lemmy has many privacy problems that have nothing to do with public comments you make. For example, the “hide posts that you have already read” option requires that the server track what posts you have read. There is no public activity involved in reading a post. So the Lemmy server should not track that info. If that feature is to exist at all, it should be implemented purely on the client. The same can be said about subscriptions, and for that matter about voting (server should discard voting info after a brief interval for abuse detection). The Lemmy software in many ways naive about this stuff.

    SnotFlickerman, (edited )
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    I don’t disagree on those points, but I think it’s the nature of Lemmy being decentralized that makes all those things necessary.

    server should discard voting info after a brief interval for abuse detection

    What if the server has not federated out the votes yet? Some of that stuff can get backed up in a queue. There’s definitely a possibility that votes could get “lost” on the way. Hell, that already happens, and that’s with a system that tracks them.

    Servers have to keep a lot of this info to pass to other servers. If I upvote something on Lemmy.blahaj.zone, it doesn’t mean that upvote has been federated outward to hundreds of other servers yet. I would assume this is part of how Lemmy is able to keep things “organized” between all servers.

    In other words, a lot of the privacy complaints come from technical limitations of how Lemmy works. Lemmy, by it’s decentralized nature, has to transfer tons of data back and forth between all Lemmy instances.

    However, there are technologies that are trying to work around this kind of technical limitation. You might be interested in something like Veilid. I’m not sure about the details of putting together a Veilid-based social-network, but I’m willing to believe it’s possible.

    solrize,
    1. I don’t see anything in your post that indicates any reason to track what posts a person has read. That should not be tracked at all. Reading posts should be completely anonymous.
    2. I don’t see why voting necessarily has to track who casts the votes. But, because untracked voting can be abused so easily, I can understand deciding to retain the info for let’s say 24 hours. Hopefully that is also enough to handle those propagation issues.

    Really, imho, server instances shouldn’t have a web interface at all, just an API. Web apps would make API calls to the server and reformat the response for use by the browser. The API call to read a post should not require any identifying info or require the user to be logged in. Read tracking and subscriptions should be handled by the client, and in the case of a public client (web app shared by many users), the private user info should be encrypted in case of a server breakin or seizure. The encryption key would be based on the user password and transformed to a browser cookie when the user logs in, so it is never stored by the web app. With most people using mobile clients these days, alternatively, the info can be kept completely on the client device and maintained by the mobile app.

    loki,

    Good features. If you make a fork, people would be interested in trying it out.

    morrowind,
    @morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

    I strongly agree, I wrote a post on this type of privacy and why it matters, which I’ve dubbed “casual privacy”. coship.bloggi.co/casual-privacy

    pop, (edited )

    pull requests would work a lot better than blog posts.

    morrowind,
    @morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

    It’s not smart to make a pull request before getting developers approval

    SheeEttin,

    You can control who sees it by how and where you post it. If you don’t want people to see it, just don’t put it on the Internet at all. Even sites with fine-grained privacy controls can have flaws that result in information leaks.

    Steve,

    The very nature of Lemmy and most social media, is that what you put out there is public. If you don’t want everyone in the world to read something you wrote, then social media may not be your kind of thing.

    LWD, (edited )

    deleted_by_author

    •
    SnotFlickerman, (edited )
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    And I believe privacy defeatism is unhealthy.

    Is there such a thing as “perfect privacy?”

    Because it seems that, to exist in society, is to give up some form of privacy by dint of existing in it.

    You cannot stop yourself from being observed by other people, if they can see you. That’s just basic reality.

    To be completely private, you would have to live in the woods and not interact with anyone or speak with anyone.

    Is it defeatist to be realistic about the limitations of the idea of privacy?

    As someone who has spent a lot of time seeking internet privacy, I’ve learned that more often than not I’m making myself more conspicuous. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on privacy, but it does mean that I’m going to consider its limitations.

    EDIT: I’m reminded of an interview with Mark Hossler from Negativland. The interview is long gone from the internet (it was on an obscure website pre-youtube) but the center of it always stuck with me.

    “If you really want full control of your art, don’t show it to anybody, keep it in your home.” His argument was Richard Dawkins’ argument for memes. The human mind functions by copying and mimicking. When someone else has viewed your artwork, they’ve already created an internal image of it in their memory. That memory is inconsistent with reality, but if they have a good memory, they can recreate it relatively easily (if they have similar artistic skills). You can’t really stop that kind of copying from happening, so the only way to fight it and keep “complete control” is to not share it at all.

    Similarly, the only way to have complete control over your privacy is by not interacting with anyone at all.

    turkalino,
    @turkalino@lemmy.yachts avatar

    Idk, doesn’t quite seem appropriate for a federated reddit clone. I think you’re better off on a chan board

    poVoq,
    @poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

    Given the state Lemmy is in (barely functional with loads of papercuts) and the barebones developer funding it has (barely above minimum wage), these honestly feel like low priority “nice to have” features for a software that is meant for public forums.

    SnotFlickerman,
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    No! How dare you suggest something so absurd!

    I don’t care how little money they have and how few developers they have, they need to bring a feature-set that is on par with corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal and thousands of developers! Fuck that, they need to even do better than those companies on the privacy issue!

    Big fat /S

    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.

    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

    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

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