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YSK: Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy (lemmy.today)
submitted 1 year ago* by to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world
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I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.

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[–] 186 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Why is public voting a massive privacy and physical threat but public posting and commenting is not?

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago (39 children)

    dude is just bent out of shape because they got called out for disagreeing Russia should go home and leave Ukraine alone.

    https://lemmy.world/comment/18706617

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I mean it is kind of a dick move to spy on downvotes and then demand that someone respond to you. The dude is wrong as hell, but I do agree with the overall principle that not every vote needs to be subject to someone getting interrogated as to why they voted that way.

    Their shock at finding out that it works that way is, of course, why the currently Lemmy UI is badly designed because it creates the illusion for people that their votes are private. They definitely should not do that.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    It's not something I usually do, but I'm tired of not calling out people on shitty opinions in regards to fascism. especially when it comes to a simple perspective of "this bad thing is bad".

    it's like someone downvoting because a comment said "fuck cancer". like...why? my mind can't even fathom why anyone would dislike that kind of message unless they themselves are cancer or advocate for the advancement of cancer.

    typically I don't give a shit about downvotes, but it just really rubbed me the wrong way.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I feel hat posts/comments are much more of a privacy exposure than any vote.
    If the OP wants private voting vs their post/comments then two account would be the solution to that - this is how it is done in the backend on piefed

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you're a lurker who votes, voting would be your only exposure.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Which only has rather limited information derivable from it. The most "identifying" would be to vote regularly on a community dedicated to your local area.

    If you don't trust your instance with knowing your IP-address, then the issue is not going to be solved by "anonymous voting". Because your instance has to know if you voted on something or not, so votes cannot be done multiple times. This is unavoidable and equal to the situation when using reddit. Except that you can choose a different instance if you distrust the current instance.

    OP either did not think through what he is claiming or he is driven by an agenda.

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