I have been working on Lemvotes, a tool to check who voted on a Lemmy post. In this blog post, I will describe how it works and the ethics of such a tool.
  • Draconic NEO@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    All the people complaining about this tool are pathetic. These votes are publicly exposed with your actor (account) over activitypub. They were never intended to be private or hidden. Mastodon lets you see everyone who liked a post pretty transparently and is very transparent about the fact that the data isn’t private.

    @lena@gregtech.eu isn’t leaking anything or exposing some hidden 0-day exploit. She is merely doing what anyone who can subscribe to see the ActivityPub stream can do. That’s any Admin or any user who can host a server with Activitypub compatible software on a domain.

    Trying to bully people out of making tools like this, or get people to snitch on server admins running them is attempting to reinforce a false sense of privacy, and is a losing battle ultimately, especially when we have defederation bypassing tools out there, which when used for viewing only (not posting content) are practically undetectable.

  • tyler@programming.dev
    9·
    1 month ago

    The author has an article about why privacy still matters in the digital age. I’m interested in their arguments about reconciling the two between gathering user votes to stop bad actors and user privacy mattering.

    • Lena@gregtech.euEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      The user votes are already public, this tool only makes it simpler to get the votes. Companies like Meta, for example, could set up a Lemmy instance, not tell anyone they are running it and get all the votes.

    • cm0002@lemmy.worldOP
      51·
      1 month ago

      Well on Reddit the answer was straightforward and easy, needing to establish karma on an account to make it seem legit and organic and then either sell it or start using it for the original malicious purposes

      But here on Lemmy? I have absolutely no idea

  • enemenemu@lemm.ee
    42·
    1 month ago

    only admins can access this information, which makes it harder for users to report such behaviour to them.

    This sounds like a user wants to become an admin

    Since everything is public anyway, for me it begs the question: why hide it in the first place?

    Some day, someone will write a tool/bot where you can enter a user/ sub and get all votes.

    Currently only the technical people can see it, in the future, people with money will see it because they pay for such a service. Or someone will open an instance where you can see it.

    I understand that there is a big dilemmy and I am glad that I am not in a position to decide upon a solution.

    Btw, can only instance admins see their votes or all voting behaviors?