New to fediverse. Joined mostly because reddit has been annoying me for a while for it's algorithm use and general admin stuff. Joining piefed was still a big leap since I have some interest in privacy and security on the internet and joining anonymous server felt a bit suss. Some stranger somewhere would have my email and be able to monitor everything I do and say.
Now, of course reddit does the same and I had no problem (well a little problem) with it. They not only have the data, but they also use it to advertise to me and most definitely sell the data forward. Still, there is a difference on a company with a public leadership whose names are known, and who have to follow laws and mark down their privacy notice publicly. If a server admin gets funny with the data, I'm shit out of luck.
Well I joined so obviously I accepted the trade of but came here to see what others thought. Surprised there was not a discussion about this already.
Lemmy is built to be scraped in as many ways as possible (public APIs for both clients and servers), and you can probably tell that a vocal minority scoff at the idea you deserve privacy either here or anywhere. That includes with votes and voting patterns.
This attitude of entitlement to your data will extend across most of the Fediverse and to other similar federated services. It's like something is in the water.
Yes, votes being public is probably my biggest gripe with Lemmy.
It enables a very detailed dragnet of user profile data. There is nothing public at the moment, but I expect it's a matter of time before organizations start building detailed user profiles that consider how users vote each post and comment to build psychoanalytical profiles. In addition to the user's public posts and comments it would make for a highly privacy-invasive dataset.
People don't care much yet because Lemmy is small still and under the radar, but with the data there for the taking its a matter of time.
Rotating alts is probably the easiest way to reduce profiling. And that can be either switching one main account every few months, or rotate between different alts depending on topics.
I'll probably end up doing what I used to do with Reddit and simply delete my account every year and start anew. I've been too lazy to do that yet on Lemmy tho.
Additional benefit: it can be an opportunity to give a try to another instance!