YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
i.imgur.com
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
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Can you explain what you mean here? How would someone else be using your account without your knowledge?
Sounds to me like they are trying to make scapegoats for looking at illicit content.
You’re reading too much into my comment.
I am a software engineer, and am always thinking of user experiences in my day job. This is simply the scenario that popped into my mind, but many do exist.
Besides hacking, phishing scams, and pranks. Users trick others all the time into viewing content they didn’t mean to view.
My concern isn’t so much that this can happen at all, but rather that if views were public, how it’d be trivial to write software that auto bans users based on those views. Without great moderation tools, and petitioning it wouldn’t scale well.
I may have replied to the incorrect content, but, I meant to reply to this one above.
Your friend or classmate would be like "You've got games on your phone?" then when you're not looking they'll try to access your social media.
I suppose, but then they're going to look up illicit content on said account in the hopes of framing you for a crime? That's quite a stretch.
I was just providing a scenario that came to mind. I am sure many exist outside the one I described.
Nobody has mentioned crime, so I am not sure where that came from. Accountability can come in many forms, and often on the internet users will be banned or excluded based on their direct actions. However, if views were public, it would be trivial to setup a bot to autoban users from communities before they even join, based solely on what they’ve seen.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, this is just what popped into my mind.
Many scenarios exist where you view content you did not intend on viewing.
For example, have you ever been Rick Rolled?
Hacked passwords?
But that could apply to any online account not something unique to Lemmy.