Sensationalist title yes, but this is something that is partially true.
TLDR; I am not spreading FUD. This space can be more safe than many, for the privacy aspect it was actually designed to maintain, which is the complete opposite privacy principle to where most new people are coming from. A monolith platform provides a measure of control over how public your engagement is while leaving you open to being tracked; open federated protects you from being tracked with a cost of having less control over how public your engagement is (and will remain). Some people do not understand this and will change the way they engage if they understand.
There is a lot of misinformation I am seeing (or at least glossed over information) that will potentially lead less informed to peril. I am hoping to provide clarity and maybe shift the attitude of some of the more technical among the community. Not everyone is educated in the same domains, and not every one will grasp some of these concepts easily.
Every thread started along the lines of āDiscovered X in Lemmy is not privateā is followed up with a comment āEh, not really an issue. And I reviewed the code myself, an account deletion removes everything from the dbā. I push my glasses up: āAckchyually, that isnāt really true in practice. If defederation happens, or otherwise disconnected, (which always will happen in some capacity) a copy will remain in Lemmiverse, foreverā. This is followed up with āwell duh, that is how federation works, and everything you post on the internet is copied and there forever. It is no different than a scrape or a screenshotā.
There are nuanced but very important distinctions to a scrape or screenshot and a federated, distributed, indexed copy. Those distinctions will change the way many engage with the platform.
Most people are not having screenshots taken of every post they make, when they make them. Most donāt have to be concerned with wildly compromising material tanking their run for office. It takes a high degree of intent and effort for someone to go to external, and unauthorized sources of duplication. It may not be a complete profile history. Most archives are not going to be indexed and easily searchable on mainstream search engines. Unauthorized archives can get sued into oblivion or otherwise disappear.
Not everyone is able to grasp a platform that acts kind of like a single entity but is not a single entity, especially if they are a refugee from a monolith platform. Many just see it as a single entity initially and when they see āremoved from the dbā they will assume any such action means platform wide.
A federated copy is automatic and effectively instant by design. A federated copy will be a complete profile. A federated copy will show up in federated searches. A federated copy could end up readily showing up in external indexes. A federated copy may have engagement the user isnāt notified of. A user on an instance where defederation has happened may easily come across an entire profile history in a frozen state. Attention can be brought to content that the user desires censored because it will say āeditedā or ādeleted by user Xā and a SnoopyJerkison could just switch to an instance account that has a copy with two clicks in the official app.
I have made an informed decision on how I will engage by recognizing this. Iāve accepted the folks my local are always going to see my spelling as impecabā¦ impeccibahhā¦ very good, while some other local may see me as the philistine that I am before an edit. I will inevitably doxx myself in some way but it might be nice to have a stalker. Itās just me and the damn dog on our private fiberglass island here and she isnāt much of a conversationalist. I am in a place in life where Iām pretty comfortable with myself and have no problem walking around here with no pants on. Not sure why I recently got onto using pant idioms at every opportunity, but I have accepted that if it follows me around with folks replying, āI know you, youāre that guy with no pants!ā, I wonāt be able to go back and remove the sources of the reference platform wide.
Iāve made comments I cringe a little at. Entirely benign and nothing Iām losing sleep over, but in haste they were not expressed in my usual voice nor really contributed to the discussion. If I had hesitated longer I would not have responded. Point being: Iām the one ringing alarm bells about this and I am still having to remind myself of the nature of federation.
Some people may not be comfortable with this, or could become less comfortable later. They should not be led to believe that it is a simple matter of āthe internet doesnāt forget, but you can delete it from the platformā and understand they need to be very cognizant and thoughtful in how they engage because federation is very unforgiving and really doesnāt forget. This is a feature, not a bug. At its core, federation is balancing many goals. From censorship resistance, community safety, to privacy. It can actually provide an extreme level of privacy. But people will make mistakes, that will remain here, right in their face, if they arenāt extra careful. It wonāt be in some dark archive. It wonāt be in a screenshot never taken and never posted. The reminder of an accidental slip up will be here to perpetually haunt them. They will leave (likely traumatized by it for years to come).
A federated copy will have the perception of being more legitimate, true or not. The common, non-technical, person wonāt understand if they find something you post hosted on a site you are ideologically opposed to, which it will be. Imagine my embarrassment at the next Pantless-Meeting-Pantless event when I get stopped at the door and shown the posts they believe I have actively made on ānever-nude.socialā. āButā¦ butā¦ federation!ā. āOk Captain Kirk. Hereās your pants. Now scram!ā
Some want to have assurance they can remove content platform wide for other reasons. Revoking support for a platform is one that seems to be in vogue right now. Iāve seen posts like āthat site we hate is restoring our retracted posts!ā. But Iāve seen cases right here on Lemmy where a user has censored all their content, only to come across that same content on other widely used instances completely intact.
This loss of edit access happens fast. Every user at this local will be aware of the high profile cases of defederation. This is a feature by design, and one you can expect more of I suspect. There are also simply errors in federation at times. Iāve lost access to copies on a popular instance the second I posted them.
Maybe this will change. It will be a monumental challenge. And it isnāt the case now. Users have to fully understand this.
āSo what, screw the normies. Let them find out the hard way. Itās getting too crowded here anyway. Like you pantless sinnerdotbin! Git outta here if you donāt like it here in the wwwild-wild-westā.
Yet another aspect some are failing to recognize: many of the instances exist in places where they do take privacy very seriously. There are laws about disclosing collection, use and retention of data. One day you may visit your trusty local and you may find a blank page with a single statement: āI keep having very expensive embodied suits appear on my doorstep holding crisp manilla envelopes. I may be breaking the law. I am shuttering immediatelyā. Hope I didnāt want a reputation of wearing buttless-chaps instead of no pants ācause I aināt got access to modify any of it now.
Iāve seen admins advising others to block EU in their firewall because they are aware of this liability and the lack of a privacy policy. That is a big part of the world that will have limited contribution to this movement.
Policies go a long way to establish user trust. I have gained a high level of confidence in some admins. They are competent, capable, and thoughtful about their users. People have been investigating hardening beyond what I would expect from any admin. They could showcase this level of care and intent by explaining it in their policies.
Privacy policy frameworks can also help new admins navigate responsibilities that keep their users, and the wider platform, safe.
Donāt hand wave this aspect away with ādonāt post anything you donāt want public on the internetā. This is a totally different beast. Educate those not as fortunate as you to understand how this actually works. It is designed for your actual traceable information to be kept safe by the gatekeepers, the admins. Users must be highly aware: everything else you do here is public in a way you may never have experienced before.
Donāt hand wave the concern about post/profile/vote/message privacy, explain how the privacy goal is different here and how one might mitigate the aspects they are not comfortable with.
I have started a project where I intend to provide basic policy frameworks that one might use as a point of reference and I would very much like further input on it.
https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/
These policies are going to be terrifying for the uninitiated. I have drafted an optional privacy policy preface that may help admins express the clear distinctions between their responsibility, their usersā responsibility, and the actual real privacy goals in this emerging space.
https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/optional-privacy-policy-intro.md
- End transmission, engage pantalon. Zip
I donāt personally have that big of a problem with my posts/comments being āpersistentā, as I have a fairly high threshold for commenting and refrain from commenting anything too incendiary. And anyway, posts/comments, as I see it, are public and should be considered as such.
However, what Iām still a bit unclear on is the privacy of my votes/saves in the Fediverse. Should I start exercising the same caution in what I upvote or save? I understand that my home instance admins will have access to this data, but is that it?
Votes are entirely public, Lemmy just made a UI choice not to show them. They show up if someone views it from kbin and ultimately something that could be mined from a self hosted admin.
I think this information may make some of those who profess everything is saved on the internet and why care change their tune.
Saves I am not sure about yet. Think that may be locals only.
Well thatās pretty unfortunate. I quite liked Redditās āanonymous likesā approach.
Yeah. I can see a case made on either side.
This is the point I am trying to drive home. Even with zero comments, zero posts, you could doxx yourself accidentally with votes alone. You came here from another platform and had a certain expectation of how privacy works here. It does intuitively feel like it should be private.
You are trading some privacy for censorship resistance and community safety in this case, because the goals are different here.
If you trust your admin to keep your IP and email private, and you manage your comments and posts carefully, I encourage you to let your voice be heard and upvote every sinnerdotbinās pantless picture post of the week (just donāt like the posts in a different, very small and niche category that can link to you publically as you are the chair of the board at never-nude.social, and there are only 5 members who always like the same posts) . If you are in a country where that support might end with you in a work camp, Iād maybe advise against it in case your local turns out to be a honeypot.
There is a privacy component to federation that the world really would benefit from, but it will be lost if people are not informed. Incredibly private if you are aware how to navigate it. Horrible if you arenāt.
This is an aspect Iāve given a fair bit of thought to. With good app support we could create multiple identities and subscribe to different communities with each and then the app could know to always intact with a given (subscribed) community under a given identity. That would allow a smooth experience without accidentally over sharing. It would also to a degree allow a user to avoid the pain of defederation.
Iāve had a similar idea. Want to race to deliver? (youāll have a head start, Iām heading into the domain of managing federation block lists next)
I believe that votes are private in the sense that they are out of view unless you go digging for them. A bit like stepping behind a curtain to have a conversation in a room full of people.
As for saved posts, Looking at the documentation, I think that that is local to your home server only.
Unless a user is viewing from kbin, which interoperates here. It is entirely in view to the kbin UI (and Mastodon I believe).
Saving this to read later, when I have time. So my apologies if this is not relevant.
When using any sort of social media you are effectively shouting, at the top of you lungs, in the middle of town square. What privacy are you expecting? If you want privacy, join me in ābedā. For āpillow talk.ā
I do expect my account to be secure, in that no one should be able to pretend to be me. But privacy? Not in town square, while standing on the bullpup. Holding a megaphone.
When you shout in a town square, does everything else youāve ever shouted, everything youāve ever voiced your support for, everything you follow closely echo and remain in that square?
Again, this is a feature. But one people really have to understand before they engage here.
Yes.
You must have either grown up post-internet or in one of the bigger cities. I assure you, in small towns like where I grew up, (particularly before the internet) old miss Busy Body down the street would never let ANYONE forget every embarrassing moment anyone ever had. The more scandalous or embarrassing the moment, the more likely it was to be retold. And retold. And retold. Till EVERYONE knew.
The only thing that has changed is the detail of the retelling. The tales still seem to get bigger and more scandalous with each retelling.
Booo to miss Busy Body.
Quite. But she is usually sweet and was often the first to help pick you up when you fell. āCause god knows she was probably there watching.
But now that Iāve actually had time to read your post, I stand by my original comment except to add this:
What in Godās name makes you think that you arenāt being tracked on the Fediverse! Itās an open damned platform! Everyone can see everything! Whether they care or not is another matter entirely.
If you self host, or find an admin you have incredible trust in, you should remain untraceable if you manage your engagement responsibly.
Though another thing I highlight in the policies is this is experimental software. Leaks can and will happen. We have a voice and can play an active part in preserving that privacy.
Recorder is always on by default with your engagement; recorder is always off by default when it comes to things that automatically identify you. It is the opposite in a monolith service.
Only if your home server remains unfederated. Even then other users of the server will be able to see everything. And will be more likely to remember, like miss Busy Body.
As for this being experimental software. Yes? So? So is the internet. It has really only been under strain for 20 years. (It older then that, I know. I grew up using dialup to BBSs. Then USENET. Then AOL.) We are still making this shit up as we go along. But itās best not to forget human nature.
As for your last statement, yeaā¦ā¦ Iām going to just let that one beā¦
Youāre almost there.
Only if your home server remains unfederated. Even then other users of the server will be able to see everything. And will be more likely to remember, like miss Busy Body.
Uh, a, if not the primary point in my post?
Your IP, your email, will remain at your local if your admin is responsible. If you act to your comfort level in your engagement, you will remain private in the public sphere.
@VexCatalyst@lemmy.fmhy.ml is using a metaphor to convey social media interaction. In this context, yes, everything echos and remains in that square. Itās no different that Reddit, or Facebook or any others. The mechanics of it on Lemmy may be different, but the end result is the same.
I explain the distinction in the post. It is very different on a platform designed to distribute at instant of hitting submit.
Alsoā¦
I do expect my account to be secure, in that no one should be able to pretend to be me.
Surprise! They very easily can here.
But I could pretend to be you anywhere. People do and have done that since forever on many social media platforms (and IRL for that matter). Sure, itās a problem but not unique to Lemmy. As I said, the mechanics are different but that doesnāt really matter, does it?
It does to many, thus the awareness of how it works here, that is all.
If you donāt think it matters, or you understand enough to be sure never to expose yourself in a way that you are uncomfortable with that is awesome! Many are waking up to a realization of the nature of things here they were previously not aware of, and some are growing very uncomfortable with that now that they canāt adapt their previous engagement to that knowledge.
Not by default, but it can. Generally in public, especially shouting in town square, you have no expectation of privacy against say, recording.
This is incredibly relevant for politicians, as many times political events, rallies, protests, all involve actions that they were recorded doing in public by the public. So while the difference of ārecorded forever by defaultā is important to understand, I do also feel it important to temper that by pointing out that this idea of non-privacy isnāt unique to forum posts.
The difference is that rather than just having no expectation of privacy against recording (Reddit model), in federated space you are guaranteed an official subtitled hologram with sound is recorded by design and shipped to other town squares all over the world and shown. And you have no expectation that youāll be able to convince those town squares to delete theirs once they have it and basically no chance to if your own town square is bulldozed or your town has gotten into a feud with theirs since you did your townsquare shouting.
Sure but practically this has always been true. Internet archive, ceddit, removedit, reveddit, whatever and they have been archiving information. Sure itāll get trickier without api access, but itās never been something you should reasonably expect anyway. I mean, what ever happened to the advice āonce itās on the internet itās there forever.ā Itās not strictly true, even for federated systems, but itās good advice.
Ultimately people just have this fantasy notion of privacy on the internet. A false idea of control over their data. Iām pretty privacy minded, but you can sure as hell bet that anything I willingly post on the internet Iām expecting it to stay there forever out of my control. But data harvesting? Manipulative posting and amplifying? These are genuine privacy problems not borne of simple impracticality.
Youāre not doing it, but the number of people I see who complain about privacy on lemmy, and then turn around and use every data harvested service known to man, from tik tok to google to reddit itself, Iām not sure I can take their complaints seriously. And ultimately this comes down to different conceptions of privacy, sure, but one of these conceptions is suspiciously impossible to fix yet simultaneously deflective of the other, that other being directly beneficial to companies and any seeking to control mass populations.
ceddit and others you have noted historically have broken for a variety of different reasons, and the others are are currently not functioning as the API they used was banned May 1st. Pushshift, which these services often used, had a mechanism to remove sensitive data you accidentally posted or otherwise wanted removed.
Archive.org is not searchable, not indexed in mainstream search engines. Also would be responsive to legal requests. It is hard to get a complete profile history on someone.
All of these external sources require a great deal of extra effort from someone to pry.
The concern to be aware of here isnāt that it could be scraped, which yes it can. The concern is that it is duplicated by design, wide and broad, on a platform that somewhat functions as a single entity, the instant you hit submit.
People make mistakes. The Unabomber got caught by doxxing himself with a single phrasing of an idiom. Not complaining, simply saying ābe very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very careful hereā
And ultimately this comes down to different conceptions of privacy, sure, but one of these conceptions is suspiciously impossible to fix yet simultaneously deflective of the other, that other being directly beneficial to companies and any seeking to control mass populations.
Exactly. The privacy goal on federation is different. If people are educated, they can be safer.
You canāt eat your cake and have it too.
The point Iām making is that thereās no reasonable way to expect that level of privacy in the first place. Those public facing services do it, anyone with a small server could do it (and they are, check out datahoarder). My explicit point here is that federated services just make this more obvious. In practice, federated servers will likely respond to and willingly comply with delete requests. A server that intentionally doesnāt can be easily defederated. Even moreso those servers which refuse delete requests on principle would undoubtedly run into legal trouble especially with GDPR. This parallels the fact that, in practice, most random comments on other social medias probably wont have a lot of interest in being backed up by anyone at all.
The idea that this nonprivacy is unique to lemmy, and not the base assumption people should have been making the whole time theyāve been using the internet, is the absurd part.
lemmy could be scraped
Indeed it could, but the level of scraping is very very different. Other social media scraping isnāt just your public facing content submissions, but everything else about your usage of the media too. Dwell time, what links you click on, what posts you look at and read longer, private message information, who knows what data ads can scrape just existing, etc. etc. On the other hand, lemmy has three vulnerabilities for scraping/privacy like other social medias that I can see:
-
Public facing information, which anyone can scrape any time they want
-
Private facing information, which servers could scrape from their own users, but that could be noisy to other servers. Things like direct messages, clicks, etc.
-
Unlimited signups and federated servers allow for the potential of bot manipulations. Different servers will have different approaches to dealing with this, but it likely wont be encouraged by most servers. (Could be by some, though, and people need to watch out for that.)
Even so, neither of these approach the level of data scraping that other social medias perform constantly. Now that said, I would like to see changes to number 2 to make sure that attempts to do so are noisy, but whether thatās even possible is another question, given the nature of servers. Nonetheless thatās the point of having to entrust your information to a given server, you have to trust them. So you should only provide information you trust any server admin to have.
This focus on the other conception of privacy focusing on public facing content is detracting from discussions and effort to focus on these other two vulnerabilities.
I feel you didnāt read the original post. It isnāt about expecting privacy, it isnāt a criticism of the fundamentals of Lemmy as a minority seem to be taking it (there are many ways I explain how it is more private from being tracked and profiled).
It is about understanding how privacy is maintained on a federated platform.
Many users coming from other platforms do not understand the mechanisms here and how they are different.
Take a look for the comment here about vote privacy (the highest voted comment here) or dozens of the other posts where people are coming to this awareness. Many assumed was private due to coming from a platform where this was.
-
while standing on the bullpup
Boneappletea?
Thatās a new reference for me. I had to look that up. :-)
I may have gotten to word wrong. Iām afraid speak only two languages. Horrible English and even worse Spanish.
I meant the box that old timey politicians used to stand on so they could be seen by a crowd while they spewed nonsense out of their mouths.
I guess you meant āpulpitā?
excellent post and something I think people arenāt fully considering
Use alts, switch accouts after 1 year or 1000 posts.
As a person you evolve, the shit you said 10 years ago does not represent you right now.Iām always in favour of more transparency and better acknowledgement of how data is transferred so that new users are aware when posting publicly.
Iām still in the camp of when you post publicly online, you should assume itās there forever. Even in real life, your words travel farther and longer than you would expect.
This platform as it stands is in a beta state, so we still rely on trust of each other and trust of admins to keep things going smoothly and cordially.
Itās the same camp.
Iām not making the claim other platforms are better because you might be able to slip in a ninja edit before it is captured. I am making the claim that if you are not on high alert here, more than ever, it will bite you.
For better or worse, some people are coming here from other services expecting a measure of control of their data that you donāt get here.
The experimental aspect of this space is the other thing I feel warrants more explicit warning about, and noted in my policy template.
Isnāt the āproperā way to deal with this just some kind of feature that ties defederation with the appropriate purging of your db?
Even some kind of unfederatable purge feature would work.
Of course the bottom line is malicious admins, but itās just the same as malicious companies. Or anything else reallyā¦
Unfortunately not that easy. There is discussion on solutions. There isnāt any now. Platform currently isnāt stable enough to respect mutually federated changes all the time.
Also I did put a disproportionate focus on this no take back component, but the scope is wider than that (see comment below about votes being public when almost everyone coming from a monolith assumes it is private)
I donāt really see how you can force/verify another instance has purged their DB. Like the worst case scenario, they can simply make another DB for all the deleted info.
Such purge is harder to ensure than for large companies. Since large companies are (mostly?) Bounded by laws like GDPR. Where such law is harder to enforce on a random fedi instance on the internet.
doesnāt AGPL give some ability to verify? iām pretty sure it stipulates that you have to distribute the code a network server is being run with. it would at least let people know if an instance has taken steps to keep data it shouldnāt be keeping.
Providing a service with server side code is not considered distribution, so the GPL does not apply.
AGPL is not GPL. server side distribution isnāt considered distribution under GPL, but AGPL was made to close that loophole.
If a server donāt obey GDPR, it is unlikely for them to obey AGPL. If the data is useful for the company, they will just pay the fine as cost of doing business.
i guess? weāre talking about copyleft licenses though. GDPR might be fuzzier because technically you donāt have an account with any instances your account is federated with (i assume), but AGPL is the license for the federated service itself. if they donāt provide their code, they are violating the terms of the license. that opens them up to litigation i think. i donāt know though, legal shit is very much not my wheelhouse.
That was an incredibly comprehensive, well articulated, and dare I say, exhaustive essay on some important issues you raised. On top of that, creating sample documents is next level.
Privacy
I donāt think the word āprivacyā is a good word for the concept. I believe āuser data controlā or āright to be forgottenā is more appropriate for the ādeletion issueā. However, there are few privacy issues such as instance admins having access to private messages and the potential for a hack to expose users e-mail addresses and usernames.
I believe you are 100% correct that we need to do a much better at communicating exactly who has access to their data and what (if any) control they have over that data once it is federated. I donāt believe we will ever have an guaranteed federated delete, and we need to make that crystal clear so users can proceed accordingly.
Legal
Running a self-hosted service is one thing, but running a public service raises a myriad of legal issues. In the US, children under 13 must not be allowed to have accounts (COPPA). CSAM (child pornography) is another problem that can expose admins to serious repercussions. In the US, it is not enough to delete it, it must be reported to the NCMEC. Federation will make this especially treacherous. Other issues such as criminal investigations, subpoenas, and possibly even national security letters are not a matter of āifā but āwhenā they will occur.
If Lemmy continues to grow, instance admins will need to be prepared for these issues. I would suggest that the public instance admins reach out to an organization like the EFF who has experience dealing with these issues. If not, Iām afraid a high profile incident may be all it takes to kill it.
I donāt think the word āprivacyā is a good word for the concept. I believe āuser data controlā or āright to be forgottenā is more appropriate for the ādeletion issueā. However, there are few privacy issues such as instance admins having access to private messages and the potential for a hack to expose users e-mail addresses and usernames.
This has been debated, and is very dependent on the context. It is a very broad concept to try to address and the lines do get blurred on the definition of what is āprivate dataā. The hope here is to partition the responsibilities of the admin from the user.
The whole CSAM issue is why Iād never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. Itās an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.
While Iād like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand āoh, youāre just some small time host, just delete that stuff and youāre goodā, my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldnāt trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didnāt handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.
And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.
Thanks for this.
Iām still refining my mental model of āfederationā - itās so different from my usual centralized reference frame that even if I understand the vulgarization/explanation when I read them, the images and reflexes my mind has about social media are changing slowly.
Privacy kind of matters to me, so Iām grateful for content that helps me understanding better how it works and doesnāt work in a federated setting.
I also think that, as pointed in comments, educating ourselves (the users) and reminding ourselves that privacy is also our job and responsibility is something important.
Anyway, not brining anything new to the discussion, this is mostly an appreciation comment.
I appreciate that you are reflecting on how you want to manage your own privacy in this space!
Summary. No one should assume anything publically published on the internet ever goes away. Assume Lemmy posts are public including some of your account info. Act accordingly.
There are stuff my younger self did in the real world that I am embarrassed about. Not bad, but not exemplary behaviour either. Guess what, there never was an edit/delete button for the real world. Why should we expect the online world to be any different? Itās a fiction. We live with our mistakes.
- Quoting people from the past against their present self to say āyouāre a hypocriteā is moronic behaviour and needs to die. People canāand should be able toāchange their opinions when presented with new facts and arguments.
- Teenagers (and some adults) are awkward and donāt have the life experience to always make great decisions. This is fine. Have some compassion and donāt judge them too harshly, especially when they come around to better decision making.
- Existing social media never really gave you a real edit/delete button anyway either. Itās all anonymity theater. The reality is that your data was always being scrapped and archived, somewhere by someone. This is just a reality created by digitization and virtually free recording/copying. No specific digital medium was ever going to protect you from this.
- In the early days of the internet, everyone knew to use pseudonyms and not share personal information. We seemed to have forgotten this lesson. Maybe itās time to relearn this lesson. Life is full of lessons. Let this be just one more.
Acting like being forgotten on the internet is possible is not the solution. It never has been and it never will be.
Me too! The world is different now.
Existing social media never really gave you a real edit/delete button anyway either. Itās all anonymity theater. The reality is that your data was always being scrapped and archived, somewhere by someone. This is just a reality created by digitization and virtually free recording/copying. No specific digital medium was ever going to protect you from this.
I explain the distinction to federated in the post. It is very different than a scrape or archive.
In the early days of the internet, everyone knew to use pseudonyms and not share personal information. We seemed to have forgotten this lesson. Maybe itās time to relearn this lesson. Life is full of lessons. Let this be just one more.
Exactly. I am bringing awareness back to this.
No one should fool themselves into thinking they can use a pseudonym and not eventually doxx themselves accidentally if they have any level of engagement. People have grown accustom to being able to somewhat reverse that mistake. Many are also not accustom to their interests, their votes, and their voice is all retained, in one, easily digested and public place.
Maybe im so normie i donāt get it, but isnt it about the same personal advice we would have given for any platform?
Im sorry Iām from the forum days when you always knew you were responsible for how safe you are. Iām laughing because people canāt get their data deleted from corporate companies either, is it really still news anything you post is public and will probably not be removable?
I appreciate the care, i do, but on some level some of this is trying to bubble people who arenāt being responsible. If admins really wanted to protect people from themselves, then weād remove most personally identifiable things interesting and unique about posts.
Iād also argue stalking has more to do with the mental health issues of the stalker than the victim being to blame for how they interacted with the world. We donāt tell a student not to participate in lectures because someone may latch onto something they said and become infatuated. We punish stalkers instead.
Idk this is a ramble. I see so many things so often that used to be personal responsibility on online safety, that instead of teaching the skills we make tools. And i feel like not teaching good personal safety and protection is goong to doom any project ultimately.
You canāt fix ignorance without education.
Iād also argue stalking has more to do with the mental health issues of the stalker than the victim being to blame for how they interacted with the world. We donāt tell a student not to participate in lectures because someone may latch onto something they said and become infatuated. We punish stalkers instead.
If someone is aware and engaging to their comfort level, no matter how open, I would not blame them, the victim, for being stalked. If someone wanted to be cautious, but they didnāt know the risks here, I would feel guilty for not educating them on how they can protect themselves.
Idk this is a ramble. I see so many things so often that used to be personal responsibility on online safety, that instead of teaching the skills we make tools. And i feel like not teaching good personal safety and protection is goong to doom any project ultimately.
You canāt fix ignorance without education.
Which is the entire point of my post, to encourage education in this space (which again, again, again, is different than what many are coming from with its own unique set of risks)
Great post. Imho, a fundamental thing we should not ignore is letting people know what theyāre in for. Iāve seen some users glossing over the intricacies of the fediverse to get others to sign up. I understand their side, but imo thatās not a good way to have people come over. People should be educated enough of the pros and cons as much as possible, although that might mean some would get intimidated and refuse to join.
Clear policies will be very helpful in addressing that, i think.
Edit: just have to add that i havenāt opened the links yet and only read the whole post. Not at home so Iāll check them out later.
People should be educated enough of the pros and cons as much as possible, although that might mean some would get intimidated and refuse to join.
Bingo. Which would you rather do, talk someoneās pants off, or scare them off or otherwise have them caught with them down?
Also love your local domain.
Iāve seen admins advising others to block EU in their firewall because they are aware of this liability and the lack of a privacy policy.
At least in the US, courts will not recognize EU jurisdiction over you and will not enforce EU policies against you unless you are actively doing business in the EU. Note that ādoing businessā may be a lower bar than you think ā if you specifically advertise targeting people in the EU, that may qualify, say ā but it is a higher bar than merely not being firewalled.
Now, you may still want to just block the EU or God knows what jurisdiction if youāre worried about being hassled, but you shouldnāt normally need to confirm to a countryās laws just because people in that country can reach your computer on the Internet.
IANAL.
Also USA does have laws regarding site usage by children. Might be more of a TOS thing, but this was brought over from the Mastodon policy I adapted.
IANAL. Especially anywhere near children.
