Copying my own reply from a similar thread last month, the problem is that most users don’t know they’re public:
I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn’t. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don’t want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
Basically the issue is you’re revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you’d have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.
We are in a world where big data is being collected and stored and analyzed by AI for every activity on the Internet, as well as an era of creeping global authoritarianism, and you are confused by why some people might be concerned about leaving an extremely granular, public, and permanent record of how they vote? Or rather, why they might strongly prefer that not be public?
Making it truly private, from what I understand, would require a monumental change to how the fediverse works, and I just don’t think it would add enough value to be worth it.
And you also have to consider how other platforms treat upvotes and downvotes.
On many platforms, your upvotes and downvotes are not only visible, but sometimes result in a notification alert (i.e. someone commented on your post, someone liked your post, someone downvoted your post, etc.). It is not anonymous at all.
A hypothetical way to dox someone would be using the extra data available. Maybe they don’t comment much about their particular interests, but they upvote stuff in location-specific communities, downvote people expressing a particular ideology, and anything else that would allow a (ridiculously dedicated) bad actor to work our a lot of personal info about them. Unlikely, but theoretically possible.
who cares, yall are so paranoid about everything, have the self awareness to know that you aren’t important, let the corpos dox me and have all my upvote/downvotr information ill survive
Copying my own reply from a similar thread last month, the problem is that most users don’t know they’re public:
We are in a world where big data is being collected and stored and analyzed by AI for every activity on the Internet, as well as an era of creeping global authoritarianism, and you are confused by why some people might be concerned about leaving an extremely granular, public, and permanent record of how they vote? Or rather, why they might strongly prefer that not be public?
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Piefed does https://piefed.social/post/205362
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And you also have to consider how other platforms treat upvotes and downvotes.
On many platforms, your upvotes and downvotes are not only visible, but sometimes result in a notification alert (i.e. someone commented on your post, someone liked your post, someone downvoted your post, etc.). It is not anonymous at all.
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A hypothetical way to dox someone would be using the extra data available. Maybe they don’t comment much about their particular interests, but they upvote stuff in location-specific communities, downvote people expressing a particular ideology, and anything else that would allow a (ridiculously dedicated) bad actor to work our a lot of personal info about them. Unlikely, but theoretically possible.
Also apparently Lemmy votes are marked as private but any software can choose to just ignore that request, which seems pretty open to abuse.
who cares, yall are so paranoid about everything, have the self awareness to know that you aren’t important, let the corpos dox me and have all my upvote/downvotr information ill survive