Privacy

31931 readers

1108 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Lemmy and privacy issues (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by NicestDicerest@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So. I thought about the potential of bad actors sniffing on lemmy data. In theory, you'ld have to trust your lemmy-instance hosted to not be a bad actor and every single server they federated with. That means, it should be really - REALLY - easy for a bad actor of even a nation state actor to set up an instance and just wait for the data of users to pour in.

Theoretically they could see all the posts you ever made, and, every post you upvoted. Which also gives clues on: When are you active, what region are you from, what you like and dislike (obviously), political views, etc.

I mean - Maybe I'm too suspicious but tbh the more I read into this, the more I get a bad feeling about this...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] beigegull@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Before the recent API purge, you could access public data from sites like Reddit and Twitter pretty easily too. I mean it's still easy now, just not free. The same thing used to be true for Facebook, but their API purge was several years ago and their data model made less data straightforwardly public.

Personally I'd rather have my public posts be straightforwardly public than the illusion of privacy provided by sites like Facebook. Maybe a lot of people can get away with treating messages to a private Facebook group as private a lot of the time, but it's simply a wrong mental model that will lead to wrong decisions. A message can either be private or be broadcast to an open-ended set of people - not both.