3 ms·

The Fediverse is a privacy nightmare

14 points by vmoore 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago
> To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of. This conclusion doesn't seem that radical? The same can be said for Threads or Twitter. Or even their blog, which I can trivially copy if I want. Should I realistically expect anything on the internet to be private?
- EA-3167 3y ago
  That was my reaction too, glad to see that it wasn't unreasonable. I feel like the expectation should be that when we essentially broadcast ourselves, that's it for privacy. Then again I feel the same way about license plates on cars, but I know that plenty of people here feel they should be subject to privacy as well. At this point I don't know what people even mean by privacy anymore. Is it freedom from invasion into your home and personal dealings, without due cause? Is it control over the information we naturally generate throughout our lives? Is it the right to delete things? I feel like there's a lot of "I feel" in the mix that confuses things.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Then again I feel the same way about license plates on cars, but I know that plenty of people here feel they should be subject to privacy as well. I’d say probably the vast majority of society not only fully understands what you mean by this but fully understand why they agree with you! And it’s not because they can’t figure out how to compile their own Linux kernel rather they’ve thought about the trade-offs and explicitly don’t read privacy-extremist website on the day to day!
- DamonHD 3y ago
  And indeed USENET for example. Especially when you post on a decentralised public social media system more or less definitionally your words are potentially exposed to at least anyone on the path to the intended recipients. Even unencrypted email is visible to all the nodes it passes through, and as an ISP back in ~1995 I wish I could unsee some of the email and USENET traffic in my UUCP queues that I had to open up when troubleshooting...
brucethemoose2 3y ago
My issue is not with my information getting out... Thats a given if you post publicly on the internet. Its how it comes back. As one example of many, I really hate ads about very personal family medical/psychological conditions are. Or personalized scam ads targeting older family members.
jrflowers 3y ago
This is a really wordy argument that the entire internet outside of Meta is a privacy nightmare.
shmapf 3y ago
Does activity pub not use public key cryptography? (I don't know the answer to this but assumed it would have) If each post is encrypted and signed by the author, and Sig chains are verified by servers when recieving updates that each link in the chain is an approved follower, then while posts could be more widely reshared by recipients, they wouldn't show up as from the original author, because the sharer and the Sig wouldn't match. Seems to me this would be equivalent to using a centralised system like Facebook, where anyone with access to your posts can just copy paste to re share them.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/2106/ https://xkcd.com/2106/

14 points by vmoore 3y ago

> To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of. This conclusion doesn't seem that radical? The same can be said for Threads or Twitter. Or even their blog, which I can trivially copy if I want. Should I realistically expect anything on the internet to be private?

EA-3167 3y ago
That was my reaction too, glad to see that it wasn't unreasonable. I feel like the expectation should be that when we essentially broadcast ourselves, that's it for privacy. Then again I feel the same way about license plates on cars, but I know that plenty of people here feel they should be subject to privacy as well. At this point I don't know what people even mean by privacy anymore. Is it freedom from invasion into your home and personal dealings, without due cause? Is it control over the information we naturally generate throughout our lives? Is it the right to delete things? I feel like there's a lot of "I feel" in the mix that confuses things.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Then again I feel the same way about license plates on cars, but I know that plenty of people here feel they should be subject to privacy as well. I’d say probably the vast majority of society not only fully understands what you mean by this but fully understand why they agree with you! And it’s not because they can’t figure out how to compile their own Linux kernel rather they’ve thought about the trade-offs and explicitly don’t read privacy-extremist website on the day to day!
DamonHD 3y ago
And indeed USENET for example. Especially when you post on a decentralised public social media system more or less definitionally your words are potentially exposed to at least anyone on the path to the intended recipients. Even unencrypted email is visible to all the nodes it passes through, and as an ISP back in ~1995 I wish I could unsee some of the email and USENET traffic in my UUCP queues that I had to open up when troubleshooting...

brucethemoose2 3y ago

My issue is not with my information getting out... Thats a given if you post publicly on the internet. Its how it comes back. As one example of many, I really hate ads about very personal family medical/psychological conditions are. Or personalized scam ads targeting older family members.

jrflowers 3y ago

This is a really wordy argument that the entire internet outside of Meta is a privacy nightmare.

shmapf 3y ago

Does activity pub not use public key cryptography? (I don't know the answer to this but assumed it would have) If each post is encrypted and signed by the author, and Sig chains are verified by servers when recieving updates that each link in the chain is an approved follower, then while posts could be more widely reshared by recipients, they wouldn't show up as from the original author, because the sharer and the Sig wouldn't match. Seems to me this would be equivalent to using a centralised system like Facebook, where anyone with access to your posts can just copy paste to re share them.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

https://xkcd.com/2106/ https://xkcd.com/2106/