The fediverse is a privacy nightmare
blog.bloonface.com
ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse (including Mastodon – same caveats as the first two times, will be used interchangeably, deal with it) is not private. It is not even semi-…

I think they are leaving out something quite important in this blog post - nobody is using their real names here.

It’s very different from Meta or Google or whatever big tech company people have accounts on, where they know your real name and many more details, such as phone number and address.

I don’t see the privacy danger in someone sweeping up what we are talking about here, since we are pseudo anonymous. Am I missing something?

Whats the value of random aliases discussing something and why is that a privacy issue?

  • cyanarchy@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    1 year ago

    It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable.

    This guy is either actively trying to spread fear and doubt about decentralized services, or is somehow only now understanding what the internet is and how it works. Did I step into some kind of time vortex a while back and end up in a world where people ever believed that anything on the internet was private or revocable?

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
      1·
      1 year ago

      Most of these discussions on privacy I run into are clearly filled with people who don’t understand a damn thing about the internet. Many of which are on Facebook… Using their real name and real photo as a PFP. They don’t actually care about privacy. They just like being scared and angry.

    • norb@infosec.pub
      1·
      1 year ago

      I really think that the corporate systems we’ve all grown used to have tricked people into thinking their data was “safe” just because some big company was “taking care of it.”

      Also possible this person works for Reddit or something 🤪

  • shrugal@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    The author of this blog post just realized that things posted publicly on the internet are indeed public, and that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V exist.

    This is not some special property of the Fediverse, it’s how the internet has always worked. If you post something publicly (say on your personal blog) then others can see it, make copies and redistribute them, even if you later decide to delete the original content. Companies like Google build massive indexes of everything posted by anyone ever, and there is nothing you can do about it if you want your content to be publicly accessible. If you share something with just a group of people, and someone decides to make it public, then it’s public. Nothing new about that.

    The GDPR works in exactly the same way in the Fediverse as with the existing services right now. If you want something deleted you have to send a notice to every service that has your content. In reality you’ll just send it to the X biggest services, because they represent 99% of the users that could potentially see that content, and that’s usually enough. You can do the same with the X most popular Fediverse instances. Even better, we might be able to create a standardized and automated process for it, because they all run the same set of Fediverse apps using ActivityPub after all.

    Afaik DMs work just like unencrypted (so regular!) emails. If you send your company secrets to [email protected] then you’re probably screwed, same thing with @[email protected].

  • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    Brain dead take. Sums up as “Wah! Information you publicize is public!” This guy completely misses the fact the the privacy nightmare of corporate social media is the apps that scrape every piece of traceable information off your phone to sell, and the cookies and browser tracking so they can follow you all over the web. AFAIK fediverse sites aren’t doing this.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
      2·
      1 year ago

      apps that scrape every piece of traceable information off your phone to sell

      The word “scrape” is a little bit generous IMO. Threads in particular with its endless scrolling list of required permissions is literally handing your entire phone to Facebook/Meta - saved contacts, payment information, fitness tracker and health information… half of those permissions I didn’t know even existed 😳

  • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is 100% FUD. The content of your profile, and the posts you send out to the world are not supposed to be private. What’s supposed to be private is:

    • Your IP address
    • Your location
    • Your email address
    • your contacts
    • your browsing data
    • your health data
    • your purchase history

    Etc. etc. These are the privacy issues you should be concerned with.