Edit: Accidently hit send while I was drafting this, so sorry if you saw it before when it was chaotic.
You really want every post you've ever voted on archived forever by every instance on the fediverse? You don't see any deeper security or privacy concerns with that?
Well, with that history someone could certainly see small impressions of me, like what I like and dislike and how much I engage with different topics. I could only see that being used against my account in these ways:
- For targeted advertising
- To shame me to other users
- To ban me from a community/instance for wrongthink essentially
- To train AI to better impersonate real people
1 seems unlikely to be an issue anytime soon just with the way the fediverse is set up. Unless the host of my account is the one sending ads, the only way to direct ads to me specifically would be through another user account either DMing me or replying to my comments/posts, and I could just block and report that user.
2 and 3 would be more practical concerns, except with or without public voting, they already have a better insight available. Just by looking at my profile, a user can already see my posts/comments, and those are going to reveal much more than voting ever would. So I don't see public voting making this more of something to worry about.
4 is feasible, as votes are much easier to digest than comments/posts, but really AI is probably already at a level where it could vote like whatever kind of person it intends to imitate already. And honestly, any particular individual's contribution to big data is going to be almost negligible.
I don't see any real life consequences for me based on my user voting be publicly available. If someone did want to harass me irl, I would need to first give away enough revealing information so that they could identify me. And in that case, once again, my comments/posts would surely be what would incite them, not my voting. So long as issues are limited to virtual me, I can easily make an alt on the off-chance my reputation in unsalvageable or something.
The tracking with PieFed you described does seem impressive, so I guess the benefits I mentioned earlier aren't as relevant. I guess I should admit I personally like being able to look at people's activity and make judgements about them. So seeing their voting history helps satisfy my own nosiness. ๐
Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear about that. Here's another post with some unrelated drama that mentions a few of their known alts:
https://lemmy.zip/post/32584584