A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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Those services have total surveillance. Total data retention. No expectation of privacy.
To be fair Lemmy also has no expectation of privacy. It's even worse because the platforms totally open, so anybody can mine your data here. They don't even have to sign a contract with meta. But I think we all accept that trade off to have an open public square.
Yeah so basically anything do in social media, any social media, is going to not be private in any way. There's no way around it. The big difference Lemmy makes is that it's not developed with data mining or profit in mind, so you are (somewhat more) safe from shitty changes to the platform that could compromise your privacy or just make experience worse (like mtx or ads). You can use the platform using a browser or application that doesn't spy on you.
I think there's some confusion in your post. You have zero privacy on this platform. Lemmy has zero privacy at all. Activity pub publishes everything you do to everyone in the world. It is a perfect platform for data miners. You were literally being spied on 100% for everything you do on Lemmy.
Which is fine, because it's the public square. But I want you to understand that. It's very important. Lemmy is actually worse for privacy than meta.
That's what I said, first sentence.
Is “everything you do” including everything you look at and all of the telemetry? I assume that’s client dependent. And would be surprised if any Lemmy clients are doing that kind of thing. Everything you post being public is one thing. But I’ve always found the behavioral telemetry more offensive.
It's all visible to your instance administrator. If you're on an instance of only a few people then anyone can see what that instance subscribes to.
Your upvotes and downvoats are also public
I still think I’m pretty ok with that. In comparison to trying to correlate how long I look at something and my scrolling patterns and build this into a larger profile with finger printing and ip’s.
I believe Discord is quite prolific for surveillance and data mining, but that's just what I've heard. Tumblr, I'm not sure how they could really spy on you unless you're using an app. If you're using it exclusively through a web browser, as long as you have privacy browser extensions and/or are using a browser that enables privacy features by default then you're probably pretty safe.
I believe Discord is quite prolific for surveillance and data mining,
Discord does not take any information from your PC other than what you input directly into the app. There has been confusion in the past because it's game detection would scan your file system for known games, but it wouldn't send that data anywhere and was only using it to detect when you were playing a game in order to update your status. As far as surveillance goes, I've not seen any evidence that they make profiles of individual users to sell to advertising firms, but I do believe that they track general trends inside of public community servers and use that information for something. They also integrate with a lot of 3rd parties such as OpenAI which may be doing something with the data they're given. They do seem to genuinely delete messages if they are deleted, which is a plus.
I am careful that way. Thanks for this.
Discord is awful for privacy. The owner has been caught a few times selling user data in ways they said they don't do. And the general suspicion increased when a Chinese company bought a stake in them.
ok, thanks. this is the kind of info i'm looking for. disappointed to hear but better to know.
If you want some privacy, you need to self host. You can use Mumble as a replacement for discord that you can host yourself.
Self-hosting on Mumble isn't going to help me join existing communities on Discord, is it? I already have an over-abundance of opportunities to talk to myself ;P
No, Mumble can't interact with discord.
There's a certain (understandable) mindset that if the service you are using has some form of "gate" to it that prevents the information from being easily scrapped on the web that there are certain privacy expectations. Discord for instance requires you to make an account, find a server, and then either join or be invited to the server. So there is an expectation that what you post (even within private messages) to only be for the people that have "access".
But the reality is (and has been proven many times now) that so long as a company has access to your data and can read/understand the data, they will sell that data to whoever wants to pay them for it (most often advertisers). This is true across websites, apps, and even operating systems.
Privacy is hard, and there aren't a lot of apps/sites/OSes that truly support it. Thankfully though, as people have started to take it more seriously more companies have started providing options to support the demand (my personal favorites are Signal and Proton).
"When you're not paying for a product, then you're the product"
That should explain Tumblr and free Discord. You should expect them to gather all data possible about everything you do, their apps to gather all information from your device that you might let them, then sell it to "the big data mining sites" that everyone else is also selling to.
"Enshittification allows double-dipping"
That should explain paid Discord. Even when you're paying for the service, they can make even more by also selling any data they can gather about you.
As for cookies, they aren't required to track you, or to create a shadow profile:
https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
As far as I can tell, there is no meaningful difference between the surveillance levels and data sales of Meta, Google, Discord, Tumblr, ex-Twitter, or Reddit.