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.
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.
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.
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.
They have protocols for this, setup and manage your own server
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.
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
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.
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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.
Mark Hossler’s interview
Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2u9trKCBtAw
Audio: https://archive.org/download/MarkHoslerInterview
Full interview transcript: https://web.archive.org/web/20210127220030/https://thought-rot.net/?p=324
Not the interview in question
Give me some good hints and help, and I will dig it out from the depths of hell.
It was an mov file embedded in a wordpress personal blog. I remember no details about the blog save the interview with Hossler.
It was maybe a five minute interview, and I remember it was while Mark Hossler was setting up an art showing, so while he was literally hanging up paintings during the interview. It looked like a less professional interviewer, who was interviewing Hossler more as a fan than a journalist. The camerawork was pretty okay and a little more clear (from what I recall) than the videos already posted. I would guess the time from between 2002-2007ish, from before YouTube to right about when it came out.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=2u9trKCBtAw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If you don’t want to share information on a public forum, then don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you elaborate on what being “an open forum” means?
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.
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.
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.
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
Could ≠ Should.
Smarter defaults should be encouraged by products that are made for consumers, not corporations
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
A very stupid issue. Lemmy is similar to Reddit, not Twitter. Do not post something on public forums that you do not want the world to see. Lemmy does not need to become a private forum, as it will lead to horrific levels of federation abuse. All federation must be public.
Plus Lemmy is really good about allowing you to stay anonymous as it doesn’t pull any data other than what you write out. Meanwhile reddit or facebook monitor what you look at and for how long.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Makes sense, when I think about it
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.
Oh, I see. TIL
It’s no required, but if a server is misbehaving, people could notice and those servers could be defederated. By default, deletions are federated.
Would still be nice to hide that information
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.
