Comment on YSK Lemvotes.org will show you votes on any post, comment, or by user, or anything on the fediverse
Substance_P@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Seems like a fantastic stalking tool for anyone looking to check if you have been a model of social media purity. I’d be shocked if it got used to find derisive upvotes by authorities looking to screen individuals for political reasons. But hey, call me paranoid.
If you’re really worried about that, there’s no reason why you need to have your private details associated to your account. You can even have a “clean” main account for show and a “real” secondary account.
Your votes being public is only a “problem” if your account can be associated with you.
I just had a realization. A lot of content on the fediverse that we interact with is region specific. A user could have no identifying info in their comments or profile but still get doxxed because they upvoted a post associated with things like their job, their home state, places they frequent, medical conditions.
Do you suppose this got posted today because there is a doxxing project happening right now on 4chan?
I have no doubt it’s incredibly easy to dox someone from upvotes alone. Maybe not on lemmy because interactions are just a lot more infrequent, but on reddit if you upvote posts about Omaha Nebraska, retro game collecting, Subaru wrx, and e bikes, you really narrow down your choice of people. If you just had one other bit of information about the user, like just a general photo or where they went to high school you could definitely nail someone down.
I really do hate this part of the Lemmyverse and wish it was all obfuscated. That with it being impossible to delete your posts really limits how much I want to interact with the site.
What could be done to limit the amount of information associated with a username is to awitch to a new account periodically.
That’s somewhat unfortunate in that it clashes with reputation, which is also important for making the Threadivwrse work.
This doesn’t really make sense. What you say is only identifying if you already have this information about someone. If you already do have all this info about someone, what else do you need?
That is pretty dark. I was hoping the admin would take people’s safety a little more seriously but I guess it’s going to be on us to make sure word gets around a lot more
lena@gregtech.eu 6 months ago
The authorities could do this without Lemvotes, just set up a lemmy instance and voilà, you have access to votes