YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
There's something amusing about people feeling violated by their activity being made public, but not necessarily by corporations hoarding and capitalizing on that activity & data. I mean, one of them is out in the open. The other is pure abuse.
You are probably seeing two very different vocal minorities, and conflating the two.
Also, there's a very clear difference in expectations between posting/commenting and upvoting. I blame the UI. We naturally expect public actions to be easily visible. The lack of universal accessibilty to the public data makes people unaware that the data is public. Lemmy UIs, including apps, need to make this information (a list of upvoting users) universally publicly accessible before people will change their expectations.
On the contrary, I'm not conflating two specifics. I'm speaking in general terms about the demonstrable public perception (read: billions of social media users who happily hand over their data vs. the palpable unease over data publication in all walks of tech discussion) and how it is innately hypocritical.
It is perfectly normal and useful to discuss societal contradictions. For example: "We hate school shootings, but we do fuck-all to stop them from occurring." That statement does not conflate two different vocal minorities, it purports to accurately describe the generalized societal contradiction at hand.
Why does the person have no problem sharing their address with the DMV but gets upset when their address is leaked publicly? Curious. They claim to value transparency, but oppose doxxing?
The DMV is government-regulated and has a legal duty to safeguard your data. Unlike the corporations we were happily discussing before you decided to try out as Ben Shapiro.
Capitalism causes enough actual problems that you don’t need to make up more. Making your data available to businesses is marginally more secure than publishing it freely.
Why? The masses have no issue forking data over to big tech. What difference does it make if it's one or a million corporations using that data when it's being sold willy-nilly to anybody with a checkbook?
The point is not how many actors have access to your data. The point is that in both scenarios (public data vs. single-corporation-controlled data), your data is pragmatically public from data sales, data leaks, and so on. However, in only one of them, your data is ostensibly "protected" by a corporation - the lie at hand. In the other scenario, you are under no spell that your data is protected or private - the truth.
My comment was simply pointing out how they're effectively the same thing. Giving your data to a big tech firm is effectively the same thing as making it public. Hence, the outrage over one not matching the outrage over the other is amusing to me because it implies how effective the corpo framing of this issue is.
Big cooperations may not respect me as an individual, but they have a self-preserving interest, a brand image to loose, and are checked by privacy watchdogs.
A Lemmy I stance can be run on any PC in some anonymous guys basement; there really no way of telling.
i dont think a humongous corporation can afford to screw me with this data as much as the random people running instances, what're they gonna do? give me midget porn ads?