These and Instagram seem to be the main locii of conversation for a topic I’m interested in. Instagram is a no because Meta. Just trying to keep myself off of the big data mining sites and search results are a bit of a hot mess.
Edit: Please, no more splaining how there isn’t any privacy on the net. There’s what can be scraped, what can be gathered from cookies (which I’m as careful as I can be about), and there’s what we make it easy for corporations to collect by using their products. I’m asking about the latter for Discord and Tumblr. It’s not that I’m unaware of the general problem (otherwise I wouldn’t be asking), it’s just that I’m out of the loop on specifics for these sites.
Those services have total surveillance. Total data retention. No expectation of privacy.
To be fair Lemmy also has no expectation of privacy. It’s even worse because the platforms totally open, so anybody can mine your data here. They don’t even have to sign a contract with meta. But I think we all accept that trade off to have an open public square.
I expect the things I say in a public square to be read and parsed for what they are, but it is not reasonable that people need to have an expectation of their data being mined and a shadow profile created for them to be plugged into an advertising and surveillance network.
If I walked into a public space and got stalked by a bunch of creeps who measured every single thing I did, down to collecting my DNA and fingerprinting my gait, it would be extremely unsettling and an obvious abuse of that public space.
It happens, obviously, but it should not be accepted as inevitable or necessary to a public square functioning as a way for people to exchange ideas.
It would be nice if countries could set expectations of privacy laws and forbid cameras and public squares
Yeah so basically anything do in social media, any social media, is going to not be private in any way. There’s no way around it. The big difference Lemmy makes is that it’s not developed with data mining or profit in mind, so you are (somewhat more) safe from shitty changes to the platform that could compromise your privacy or just make experience worse (like mtx or ads). You can use the platform using a browser or application that doesn’t spy on you.
I think there’s some confusion in your post. You have zero privacy on this platform. Lemmy has zero privacy at all. Activity pub publishes everything you do to everyone in the world. It is a perfect platform for data miners. You were literally being spied on 100% for everything you do on Lemmy.
Which is fine, because it’s the public square. But I want you to understand that. It’s very important. Lemmy is actually worse for privacy than meta.
That’s what I said, first sentence.
Is “everything you do” including everything you look at and all of the telemetry? I assume that’s client dependent. And would be surprised if any Lemmy clients are doing that kind of thing. Everything you post being public is one thing. But I’ve always found the behavioral telemetry more offensive.
It’s all visible to your instance administrator. If you’re on an instance of only a few people then anyone can see what that instance subscribes to.
Your upvotes and downvoats are also public
I still think I’m pretty ok with that. In comparison to trying to correlate how long I look at something and my scrolling patterns and build this into a larger profile with finger printing and ip’s.