I was unsure where to cross-post this. But maybe we should discuss this to make sure Lemmygrad users are staying safe? Similar to the unspoken rule that we strongly discourage people using their real names or giving away too many personal details.
cross-posted from: https://mylemmy.win/post/89871
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.
"or giving away too many personal details" but hey! take our demographics survey!
I see the irony. I suppose two differences are that, one, the survey was optional, and two, although participants might not necessarily know who was reading the answers, the answers weren't (I don't think) generally accessible.
Voting data is not generally accessible, either, but it appears to be accessible to admins of other instances. If this is the case, it wouldn't be difficult to set up an instance, make a post through any account about a specific topic, and observing the data to see who up/downvotes it. This could narrow down the list of people that a bad actor might want to target for further data harvesting.
Considering how many billions are put into surveillance, data collection, and controlling (social) media, I don't think we should discount this fear as farfetched. Even if, on its own, it's fairly benign data.
I've also noticed that some of the new instances/users are a lot happier with 'local' communities. If this grows into, say, a list of 'things to do in my area' communities, it wouldn't take much for a fascist to identify local targets by a series of what I'm going to call 'voting traps'.
Maybe I'm paranoid.
The nice thing about these projects is that the community can review what kind of data is collected because it is FOSS. Obviously, things like votes, comments, DMs, posts, and posts marked as read are all logged in the DB and tied to your account. One could extrapolate a lot about a person by extracting and doing data analysis against that data. Because of how federation works, it also means you can't just rely on your instance operators to be trustworthy.
DM's I think operate more like an Email message and likely are not federated in a way other instance hosts, other than the origin and destination hosts, can view. But the Origin host and the Destination host obviously could do a database query and pull your DMs. It should be noted, this is also true of Email unless you are using encrypted mail.
At some point, DMs could be built to be end-to-end encrypted with PGP if the devs/community desire that, but that's not how it works now.
I'm sure that as a Lemmy Instance operator, you can also use your host server to log connections (read, IP addresses), but I'm unsure if Lemmy itself logs that information in its database alongside your account information (probably not?). You would probably want to log the connections as good operators, so you can find patterns and remove bad actors trying to say DDOS your box.
However, if more robust moderation tools were to be implemented, which include an IP-based ban, then that would have to be tied to your account to make it work.
There are platforms like Nostr for example, where everything is encrypted, even the primary content, and you have to provide the system some kind of encryption key to even view the feed.
This is useful to know.
I'm fairly sure that Lemmygrad admins don't collect any data except for knowing your country code.
Is that right? Maybe you know, @[email protected]?
To be clear, if I'm the operator of the Linux server on which Lemmy is deployed, I can use tools like tcpspy to pull information about the TCP/IP connections to my server on a given port. Obviously, this is simply the TCP/IP packets, which is going to be a sea of bots, internet crawlers, and other automated systems attempting to access my box because it's on the internet, which will likely dwarf the legitimate connections to the box.
I guess it's more likely though, you'll be monitoring the box between the outside internet and the actual server (like an Nginx reverse proxy) but I could probably extract which IPs were going to Mylemmy.ml instead of my boxes IP address directly, but that's outside the scope of my knowledge. I simply know that, once you own the box that someone else is connecting to, there is networking data you now have access to that can lead to identifying a person.
Do you know if this would work if I viewed information on that instance/server through Lemmygrad? I.e. could the other instance associate my IP with my LG account even if LG doesn't collect that data?
Content is effectively "Synced" to Lemmygrad. So if you are reading something from [email protected], you're actually reading it from the Lemmygrad server located at lemmygrad.ml/c/[email protected]. So no, unless you are connecting to their domain address explicitly, those domains are not getting your TCP/IP connection.
I'll note, this is why you should probably use a VPN to access the internet generally if you are concerned about privacy.
Using a VPN means all your ISP/Mobile provider sees is you sending data to a VPN server over HTTPS, and that's it. Services like NordVPN claim they do not keep logs on their system, and so if a government was to request your account's history, they likely can't provide that. They operate a Warrant Canary, here which in principle should give you faith that they have upheld that mission statement.
I use Nord on my phone and via their browser extension, and I have them set to auto-connect so they never turn off, and use their local discovery and bypass features to allow list sites and local services that get angry about my devices being on a VPN. I've been doing this for maybe two years now, and I've never noticed any material impact on the quality and speed of my connection.
This is not an ad for Nord 😅, I just think they're practicing what they preach.
That's reassuring to know.
I would assume that security services can log everything even for VPN users. Plus, as Sakai observes, relying on technology for the security of revolutionaries is only part of the solution. The main risk comes from other people (who may appear to be comrades but are spies).
The state isn't the only one to be worried about, though. With reactionary politics sliding into open fascism more and more, there are ordinary members of the public who don't have access to the same powers as the state but who could get access to similar data if we're not careful.
One thing I've always wondered is whether using a VPN puts you in a list for trying to hide your internet activity. They're paranoid. I'm paranoid. It's the age of paranoia!