Ask Lemmy
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At this very moment, there is a choice between two options
Hopefully in the near future some features such as the one highlighted by OP will be integrated in the platform, but right now, it's not, which is why I said that if people cannot search a bit about the current state of Lemmy, they should probably head back to Reddit. And I say that hoping that once the platform is polished enough, they'll come back.
How does posting and reading posts work - and how do you know that nobody tracks their users? I was under the assumption that admins of a node have totals access to data going in/out/through their instance.
Just have a look at the data accessed by the apps, both stores display them. It's something else than the Reddit app.
There might be some data agregation on the server side indeed, but compared to the ads promotion machine than Reddit has become (and even announced openly, with subreddits now being platform to promote products), it's a completely different story.
What app? As far as I’m concerned there’s no reason to believe that fediverse users aren’t tracked. Probably not all, but where there’s users interacting with each other discussing different subjects there’s money to be made, and data to sell to AI companies for training.
https://lemmy.world/post/2807814?scrollToComments=true
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The app works between an instance/server and the user. This does not affect what the admins/owners of an instance/server can track.
It's already better than what Reddit does with its app then.
If you want to improve your privacy, browse Lemmy using a VPN and a fingerprint protected browser such as Mullvad browser, and you're pretty much set against potential data collection from our instance admin. You can even share your account with a few other people to make your ghost profile harder to populate.
I’m not sure you understand how the fediverse works on protocol level or how posts are stored. None of what you suggest will protect you. There is no way you can protect yourself from tracking by those with access to raw data.
I'm indeed not sure we are talking about the same thing.
You are talking about tracking the data and selling it to AI for training.
I don't even know why AI companies would bother with buying that data when they can just parse that information directly from the website and then train their model on it.
I was talking about selling user profiles to advertising companies willing to reach specific potential customer audiences. In that scenario, the measures I explained prevent your profiling.
I’m talking about tracking and profiling in general. This is possible by crawling to a certain extent, but it’s 100% possible when you have the data of who’s voting up/down on what, and what posts they are shown and how they interact with them.
This is possible from app or website, and that part can be mitigated somewhat by the stuff you proposed. But if you control to the code and database you have 100% access to this information. How you interact with posts are very interesting for AI training and analysis, similar to what Cambridge Analytica had a great run at using Facebook data.
I guess the only way to really avoid that would have to host your own instance, cut from the rest of the Fediverse, and only allow people you trust to join.
But then that kind of defeats the purpose of a Lemmy-like platform
Indeed - or in other words you can trust the fediverse as much as you can trust Reddit
Reddit is worse, to me, for reasons stated above, but we can agree to disagree