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So I was going through /all and this admin is snooping at vote counts for posts in his instance and then posting it publicly.

Just a reminder that these kind of petty people exist. Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

Archive: https://archive.md/oybyL

  •  Max-P   ( @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ) 
    70•5 months ago

    The votes are public. Kbin displays them right in the UI. Lemmy semi-hides it, but it’s never been designed to be private in any way.

    Changing instance won’t do shit if that’s a concern to you. As an admin I can see them even if my instance isn’t involved with the post at all:

  •  LWD   ( @LWD@lemm.ee ) 
    65•5 months ago

    To illustrate op’s point I’m going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.

    Then I’m going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.

    Additionally, I’ll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user’s political affiliations and display the results.

    Worst of all, I’m not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I’m spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.

    I’ll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.

    Just kidding I’m not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.

    •  A1kmm   ( @A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.com ) English
      8•5 months ago

      How to work out what instance(s) if someone does this: A Lemmy instance doesn’t have to send the same voting data to every instance, it could send different votes to different instances (stock Lemmy federates the same thing consistently, but there is no reason a modified Lemmy designed to catch someone doing this has to), encoding a signal into the voting pattern. Then, just check to see what signal shows up. If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

      •  nybble41   ( @nybble41@programming.dev ) 
        1•5 months ago

        If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

        A smarter system won’t just take the mean of the votes from different instances but rather discard outliers as invalid input (flagging repeat offenders to be ignored in the future) and use the median or mode of the remainder. The results should also be quantitized to avoid leaking details about sources or internal algorithms; only the larger trends need to be reported.

        Of course you could always just keep the collected data private and only provide it to customers willing to pay $$$ for access, which handily limits instance operators’ ability to reverse-engineer the source of the data. And nothing prevents you from using separate instances for public and private data sets.

  •  mozz   ( @mozz@mbin.grits.dev ) 
    51•5 months ago

    Every up and down vote you make is public. Friendica, kbin, and mbin all expose who voted on every post to any user, and anyone tech savvy on any software can dig out the totals at any time.

    In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it’s not what people expect. But votes are very public.

  •  davel [he/him]   ( @davel@lemmy.ml ) 
    English
    37•5 months ago

    We do see the votes. Publicly posting them sounds like poor form, but then what do you expect from crypto bros?

    Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

    Running your own instance isn’t going to hide your votes.

    •  On   ( @On@kbin.social ) 
      5•5 months ago

      I’m curious, If I delete my account periodically, are the profile and activity like comments/votes still out there in other instances? are votes deducted? I’m not sure if this is the right question but does deleting accounts federate?

      •  LWD   ( @LWD@lemm.ee ) 
        1•5 months ago

        I can’t answer your question about the votes, but posts and comments are retained when you hit the delete button. The only way to delete them is to edit the content beforehand. I believe moderators are capable of restoring posts, but I haven’t checked the comments yet.

        There’s no reason where this has to be the behavior by default; federation alone is a challenge but not an excuse. Ironically, when it comes to privacy, a company like Reddit (with sketchy privacy policies) might be better than Lemmy (a series of entities in a variety of jurisdictions where your data is protected by the weakest of all of their privacy policies)

      •  7heo   ( @7heo@lemmy.ml ) 
        5•5 months ago

        No. A simple website won’t help, it needs to be a Lemmy instance. Moreover, it needs to be a federated one.

        And then, that “invisible” data being available to other admins, is a problem with federation, not with Lemmy.

        Now, there could very well be efforts made to make the cleartext data of each instance users available only to the admins of that instance (and only share aggregated data with other instances), but that would also require a lot more consideration wrt mutual instance trust in the network.

        Right now, since votes and other actions are public (to the federated instances admins anyway), it is doable to detect and assert foul play. The downside of this is that it allows abusers to malevolently collect data and do the same bad things that you are so certain the alternatives to Lemmy don’t do (yeah, as if).

        If the instances shared only aggregated data with one another, it would be much harder for abusive small instance owners to spy on any user on the network (still possible, but it would essentially would be as hard as for anyone else, as it would involve heuristics and lots of intelligence, to interpolate the missing information); but it would also be much harder for legit admins trying to enforce moderation to inspect what happened on federated instances. They would have to take those instance’s admins at their words.

        As an additional note: that “invisible” data that other platforms allegedly don’t share, is for sale. That’s what surveillance capitalism is all about… At least with Lemmy, the barrier of entry to get our data is “federation”, not “money”.

        Edit: WTF bro, a day and a half before writing this wrong comment I’m answering to, you wrote a properly worded, technically correct (top level) comment… Were you half asleep on this one??

        Edit 2: nah, the reason why your other comment was technically correct and properly worded is that you stole it (would have been so easy to give credit…) SMH. 😮‍💨

        Edit 3: So I checked your comment history (after seeing that other comment of yours about the user that mass downvoted you, I was legit curious how bad it could have been), you seem technically knowledgeable, and also educated. Thus, I reiterate, this specific comment, what gives!?

        Edit 4: lol at your edit. 😶‍🌫️

        •  LWD   ( @LWD@lemm.ee ) 
          2•5 months ago

          Off day 😉

          I should have been more specific when I said website, as… If you scan my other comments, you might have the hint that I have access to one such Lemmy instance. And they federate with minimal effort. I don’t know how to automate it yet, but it wasn’t hard to do so manually.

          •  7heo   ( @7heo@lemmy.ml ) 
            1•5 months ago

            I’m actually curious to know if federated instances share the data of their federated instances… if so, there is a proper reason to be actually alarmed, as ACLs would essentially be cosmetic only.

            •  LWD   ( @LWD@lemm.ee ) 
              1•5 months ago

              Can you be more specific? I might be able to hunt down answers.

              Recently, federation vulnerabilities got exploited by an ex-Truth Social employee who apparently believes consent is only when someone shouts “no” at him, so pretty much anything is possible (without even going through the effort of spinning some kind of proxy server, if I’m reading this correctly).

              •  7heo   ( @7heo@lemmy.ml ) 
                1•5 months ago

                Well, as in let’s say instance A is federated to B, B federated to C, A blacklisted C.

                So, clearly, A isn’t getting data about C. It will drop it on ingress (I expect).

                But, will C have access to the exact same data about A, through B, that it would have access to from A if not blocked by A?

                •  LWD   ( @LWD@lemm.ee ) 
                  2•5 months ago

                  “Indirect federation” (what I ended up eventually trying to find info on) appears non-existent.

                  That answered the question, I think, but it caused me to ask a few more, like this one:

                  What happens if a community is on Server A and Person C wants to check out how Person B is interacting on it. I think, in that case, that Person C can check out Person B’s profile and see comments left on a Server A community, but they cannot navigate to the post itself because Server A would not send the content to their server.

                  It’s relatively easy to switch servers, by clicking the little rainbow icon next to a particular comment to see the server where it would have been viewed in Person B’s context, but servers on their own are not running around scraping missing data… At least, not as they are currently designed.

                  ETA: More background on the major defederation in question (mostly political, not technical)

  •  Annoyed_🦀 🏅   ( @Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc ) 
    5•5 months ago

    I think the main complain anyone would have with this is, only we admin can look at the vote, and no one else can. This isn’t a problem in Kbin or any other platform that allow one to do so.

    I only check the vote to see if there’s any brigading, other than that, i have no issue with other admins snooping or whatever. Ohh to be clear, all of us admin can see the vote everywhere, getting a new instance yourself will not solve anything.

  •  forgotmylastusername   ( @forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml ) 
    3•5 months ago

    You would think adversarial actors would find this problematic in their own way. Does no one remember anymore way back when reddit was exposed as being an American state apparatus? Reddit owners its earlier more naive era used to share site metrics. They inadvertently revealed that large amounts of activity comes from a US military base. Then they wiped evidence and disavowed all knowledge that any of that ever happened. And now the narrative on there is that other state actors are the ones in control of that platform. How convenient.

    White hat actors could be using such open access to data to reveal whats in the data. That’s what the big social platforms are so scared of themselves. Not only is it their financial bread and butter. Contained within is who know how many skeletons piled up over the years.

    Everyones privacy these days is basically long gone. There’s illusion that internet platforms are in any way shape or form fair or balanced because of the paper thin concept of internet votes == democracy or something. Yet a lot of people stubbornly persist. It’s past due time to shine a light on the adversarial actors run amok. Show us the anomalies in data that reveal how the typical real human user is powerless against adversarial actors.

    I’d like to think it would be the last straw for the whole concept of social platforms at least the way that it is now. Who knows though. It’s also shown us how dumb people are. They could very well just “meh” and go back to mindlessly infinite scrolling.