• Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    6 months ago

    Why would they need threads for that? A whole bunch of companies are already doing that without running actual social media services.

    They can analyse your likes and you wouldn’t even know it. All they need to do is follow the same servers you do here on Lemmy. On Mastodon they can set up a basic puppet domain, follow every user they can find, and then your Mastodon server will deliver your posts, likes, and re-tweet for them, no scraping or interaction necessary.

    If you’re trying not to get analysed, the Fediverse is not for you. It’s simply not designed for privacy.

    • infeeeee@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Afaik on lemmy only your host instance knows what you upvote/downvote, instances just sync the number of upvotes, not the users who voted. So they cannot analyze that, even if they spin up a their own lemmy instance l was wrong, see reply

      Comments are 100% public though, that’s true

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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        6 months ago

        Votes federate, but only for communities followed. I won’t see your votes in a community that I don’t follow, but I can see when you upvoted or downvoted what post in the community.

        A scraper could simply follow every community on a Lemmy server and, barring Lemmy performance issues, will receive all comments and votes.

        Just a quick and dirty SQL query of which votes of yours are in my server’s database:

        select comment_like.score as score,comment_like.published as when, person.actor_id as who, comment.ap_id as what from comment_like join person on person.id = comment_like.person_id join comment on comment.id = comment_like.comment_id where person.actor_id = 'https://lemmy.ml/u/GolfNovemberUniform' order by comment_like.published desc; 
        

        The same info is also available for posts, of course, I just didn’t want to bother making the query any longer.

        Server admins/mods on Lemmy also have a button to see who upvoted and downvoted each post. This is just the inverse of that.

        • infeeeee@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          I see, so all instance admins can see that theoretically, but regular users can’t. I don’t remember where I read what I wrote, can’t find it now.

          It’s a bit misleading that lemmy developers themself call votes “essentially anonymous” like in this issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4088

          With this in mind I will go back to upvote memes with my other accounts, and switch between them more regularly.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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        6 months ago

        Seems to me like they just want to greenwash (open wash?) their company by making it work with others. Saves a hell of a lot of trouble with legislators when it comes to stuff like the Digital Markets Act.

        I’m sure they’re selling ads to their users, but I think that’s about it. There’s no money to be made analysing random internet accounts if you can’t show them ads when you’re big enough for EU regulators to care.