I’ve been sent this article about privacy on Lemmy and I would like to have more opinions about it.
I come from the Matrix world where there is no history deletion neither but at least everything is encrypted.
Can we hope anything about privacy on Lemmy ?
Especially with all the attention it’s getting right now.
“Arguably worse for privacy than Reddit”
This poster clearly has some sort of vendetta against Lemmy and/or its creators with the comments on politics, etc.
Reddit takes your activity and packages/sells your data to advertisers. Lemmy does not. To say Lemmy is worse than Reddit for privacy is just not true.
I’d take that post with a hefty grain of salt.
Yeah, that’s really some bad faith arguments they made, it seems they want to promote their Reddit alternative by slandering Lemmy.
On lemmy (and mastodon, kbin, etc) it seems like it’s extremely easy for a third party company to datamine everyone’s data, even deleted ones. Federated software is terrible for privacy because it creates hundreds of backups to the federated instances. Any one of those instances can decide not to actually delete anything when requested.
Just like on reddit, treat everything here as public. Do not post things that you want to be private to either site; this goes for literally any website you don’t own.
The article is written by a absolute idiot…
And the comments are even more so.
So for the start.
-
Lemmy isn’t own by anyone its open source and open development
-
Even though the original dev might or might not be politically questionable, instances like exploding heads (literally nazis) and instances like lemmygrad (literally stalinists and genocide deniers) are here, polar opposites, if the devs would have had political intentions they could hard code it into the system, they didn’t.
-
This is a forum, you post and write to the world, the world listens and doesn’t forget, lemmy offers dms but also offers a matrix link directly next to it for safer communication. (there is no encryption so far because it would be completely useless for most things here)
-
The deletion of content is currently not sufficient, but they apparently work on that, but at the moment other things are more important for it to function properly (mod tools, script efficiency…)
This puts the words on what I was feeling but could not express. Thank you !
-
It reads like someone has just discovered that if you toss out public data on the public internet via federation it becomes public and out of your direct control.
That’s how all federated services basically work: once it is relayed to someone else’s server, there’s essentially nothing you can do to force deletion.
Easy example: if you send me an email, but delete it from your sent messages, did you delete the message I got?
Privacy is tricky. I’ve seen complaints that anything you post stays forever. But honestly, is that what you consider private?
Do you think it’s more private to make and delete posts than to just use a VPN and an anonymous account? Having the ability to delete posts doesn’t help your privacy at all. At least there’s no advertisers being sold all our data.
And the chat thing really needs fixed. But for quick one-off messages, it’s fine. Maybe just too exchange secured accounts
Might sound dumb, but why privacy? All you do here is post publicly random cat photos, it isnt a messenger where you have private conversations.
Sites like these cannot be private by design. Their whole purpose is making data publicly avaliable.
If you want none of data here linked to you, register on an instance that does not require email and don’t use your nickname, that’s all there is to it.
Everything you post on lemmy is intended to be public, so there really isn’t a point to it having privacy features like encryption. There is the one sticking point of dms being readable by the relevant instance admins, perhaps that will change at some point, but for now lemmy supports attaching a matrix handle to your account for secure messaging.
That said, something the underlying protocol (ActivityPub) does have, are standards for both editing and deleting your own posts. It will be quite possible to have everything or anything you’ve put out there changed or removed, much like on reddit. The action will propagate to all federated instances.
Also I’m not sure what you mean by there being no history deletion in matrix? I run a node, and purging a room, or an entire account, is absolutely possible. You can even set a node up to only retain data for a certain amount of time. Or are you referring to the fact that you can’t make another node that has the history for people you’ve talked to on it, delete it?
There ActivityPub has matrix beat, if you delete your comment, any instances it was visible on (unless they defederated since) will also delete it.
Any claims made about privacy on a social media site, especially ones run by private companies or individuals, should be met with extreme skepticism. The reality of privacy on the internet is that it is not something you can get by picking a different service, it is something you must constantly maintain with vigilance and an up to date understanding of infosec practices.
Lemmy is meant to be a public website with public content. And in general, that post is either very uninformed or in bad-faith as most of these things are unavoidable in federation or even protect former users from impersonation.
Since Lemmy is free software, can someone just fork it and change it to be more privacy-focused?
