Mastodon thinks Lemmy’s privacy stinks. What say you?

In my opinion it's unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system. Even if the official codebase is updated to do complete deletion & overwrite, it's impossible to prevent some bad actor from federating in a fork that just ignores deletion requests.

Seems sensible to just not post anything that you don't want to be available for the lifetime of the internet.

So, I was born in the late 90's - I don't know if they still have "computer literacy" as a core course in schools these days, but they did when I was going through K-12 (or, well K-9.. once you were in high school they assumed you knew the basics of how to use a computer, and had more advance courses).

One of the very first things we learned about the internet is that once you put something on the internet, there is no way to take it back. At the time, uploading pictures to the "cloud" and such wasn't really a thing so we learnt this by using email: Once you've sent an email to someone, you cannot "unsend" it. You can kindly ask the other party to delete the copy of the email without opening it, but you cannot guarantee that the email wasn't saved on another computer, or saved somewhere else along the route between your computer and the receiver's computer. Clicking the send button was taught to us as "etching your letter into stone".

Because of this, I've always (or at least, as far as I can remember) made sure that anything I put on the internet, or even "put into digital form" (such as even writing something in a file on your computer - you can recover deleted files from a hard drive unless you really put in the effort to actually erase it... there is a huge difference between erasing a file, and marking it as "deleted") is something that I'm okay being tied with me forever. I'm sure if you looked hard enough, you could find me participating on message boards as a young teenager - and to that I just say "Oh well". Is some of it probably very cringe-inducing and embarrassing? I have no doubt.

(This is also why you should take extreme caution when talking about say, your friend, on the internet - if you post something about them on the internet, you're condemning them to this same exact thing)

Now funnily enough, as far as I understand the ActivityPub protocol, it is for all intents and purposes the exact same as email in this regard. Once you've sent something, there are no "take backs". All you can do is kindly ask others to delete their copy, and that comes with zero guarantees. If I had a mastodon server, and someone deletes their toot - I could take down my server and my server would never receive that delete request. Or, just simply change the source code of the Mastodon instance on my server to straight up ignore deletion requests.

Would it be nice for Lemmy to have a way to actually delete your content? Sure. But that's not technically feasible, and personally (as controversial as it may seem) I would rather Lemmy not try to give you the false sense that everything was completely gone forever. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to delete your account off a Lemmy instance, but it shouldn't come with an option that says "Check here to remove your data/media from all federated instances" because Lemmy/no one can promise that, and I really hate it when software (or really anyone/anything) attempts to make a promise in bad-faith knowing that they can't possibly ever uphold it.

Anyone who thinks Reddit is "better" than Lemmy in this regard probably doesn't realize that Reddit is making a claim they can't keep. The most obvious example of this is all of these subreddits that have gone dark? You can bring up most of their posts on the Wayback Machine or Google Cache. That would be the case regardless of whether they were set to private, or even if they were just straight up "deleted".

We really should not be setting the belief for people that there exists a way to completely nuke a piece of data off the internet, because you cannot make a guarantee of that being the case.

First - we're all using alpha/beta software (Lemmy is 0.17.4, Kbin is 0.10.). None of these services are "production quality" software yet, so let's keep that in our minds - we're all early adopters.

The points mentioned in the OP are a bad look. Naturally. User should have expectation of their data being deleted on request - especially since this request might be regulatory privacy request (GDPR related). It's a clear failure from the software and should be improved and iterated upon.

The expectation shouldn't be "oh well it's on the Internet, live with it". While Facebook might keep mining your data after deletion request, our software shouldn't behave like that, we should strive to be better with this stuff.

And finally, ensuring privacy in federated system is hard. Mastodon suffers from same problems. We shouldn't give up on the idea though.

Did anyone use reddit thinking it was private? With stuff like push shift and way back machine people shouldn't be posting stuff they aren't comfortable sharing anyways on a wide open message board.

Always weirded me out the people who'd treat their reddit accounts like Facebook.

It is reasonable that people should be able to delete their posts / comments. However I don't see how is this related to "privacy". How can something you post on a public forum be private?

What does this have to do with Mastodon?

The same privacy issues also exist with Mastodon and all distributed systems.

BTW, the OP on Raddle was spamming that message around Reddit last week and directing people to Raddle. I think he has a bone to pick with the developers' politics more than anything.

I understand the impulse but the way some people get so hung up on trying to make a way to permanently and universally delete posts made on public facing social media and framing it as a "privacy" issue feels kinda like saying something you regret on mic at a town hall and being mad that you can't permanently delete the memory of it from the minds of everyone present, and claiming that they violated your privacy by remembering it

Anything put on the internet is forever. No one should be publicly posting anything with the expectation that they have any control of it after it goes out. If it’s not held by the server, there’s the way back machine or even just folks taking screenshots.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977

It's not like they're doing it on purpose, there's a lot of things being worked on, and this is one of them.

The illusion of Privacy is Mastodon (or social media in general)

There's a reason why when you go to "private mentions" on Mastodon, this appears:

While yes, we should be able to delete our content if we want, but it's a bit naive to think there could be true privacy in any decentralised social media platform.

There's a reason why one of the think people tell you when you come to the fediverse is not to share personal and sensible information.

The only decentralised social media that has some level of privacy is Matrix, and that's why it has it's own protocol and only federates within/between its own servers.

The same is true for raddle. They kid themselves if they think anyone can't record anything in there forever.

Anyway it's also inaccurate. Deleted accounts are purged from the DB, so they're definitelly not visible anymore

Likewise you you edit your comment, it's edited in the DB.

The fediverse is the real internet, it's not a company providing a service. On the real internet, once something gets out there, there can never be a guarantee that it's taken back. Even on Reddit, once you post something, Reddit might fully delete it but someone out there may have copied it.

This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of digital privacy. You can never be guaranteed that data is deleted, just like you can never be guaranteed that someone has "forgotten" something. It doesn't matter what any entity claims they are doing under the hood, you have to assume they can't be trusted. That's not an expectation you can have, and not something privacy advocates are asking for.

I'm posting this comment publicly, and there's nothing stopping any random user (or non-user) from scraping this lemmy instance and archiving the data themselves. I know that when I post it. Same for reddit, raddle, any mastodon instance, etc. I can copy the text and usernames of everyone involved in that raddle thread and do whatever I want with it, there's nothing anyone can do to stop me.

To think otherwise reminds me of that first day on the internet kid meme. "I deleted my comments off of their servers, hah, they'll never get them now!"

What I can demand is: if I send a message directly to another party, I want to be able to verify that that party and ONLY that party can read the message (end-to-end encryption). I can also demand that they not require me to dox myself to them, that they not run weird js-based fingerprinting/port scanning processes on my system/network, and that I am allowed to connect to their services through a VPN should I so choose.

i mean raddle is a site that has an anti doctor post pinned in the mental health community ... like c'mon I and many others need medicine to survive and you are encouraging anti-psychiatrist posting, Church of Scientology levels of anti-medicalist posting

Given the beta status of Lemmy, I don't even think it's a great idea to give the appearance of privacy. I think the core purpose of a webapp like Lemmy is public messages.

I think it's a can of worms for server operators to get into the business of thinking they can safely hold private messages between users/strangers. None of the Lemmy instances I've joined have had a "terms of service" or anything like that on SIgn Up, I really think the message should be sent far and wide that Lemmy is about posting IN PUBLIC and that messages are being FEDERATED to peers, even people that you don't know could be collecting the data for a search engine.

With small-time server operators opening up hundreds of Lemmy instances, without giving away their experience or human identity, how can you have any confidence that someone is properly securing a server they only have part-time job to update and operate? Major corporations are having their database stolen, Valve, Sony, Nintendo, health care companies, mobile network companies (AT&T)... you think a low-budget shoestring server by a hobbyist running Lemmy should be held to the same standards as a corporation who has an entire team and services to defend their data?

Opposite to Instagram or Facebook, on Lemmy or Mastodon you can create an anonymous account. Yes it will be logged (normal public internet), but you won't be treacable. The UI doesn't have any tracking scripts, and many instances don't require an email even to sign up. Use the Tor browser to spoof your IP.

I didn't know anything about Raddle besides the name until now. But gosh, is that a toxic pit. There's a poor guy there getting completely beaten up by an admin and some others which seem to be enjoying their time-wasting public bullying. Oh well...

Damn, Raddle seems worse than Reddit when it comes to toxic attitudes. I never looked much into it since it's just another centralized platform like Reddit with different management, but boy oh boy are those comments just awful. Great community you folks got over there 😬

It’s no different than me sending an email to someone and then sending a request to delete it. There likely is still a copy on the email provider’s server and the recipient could have potentially backed up their emails to something outside of the email ecosystem.

Unfortunately the only way to be absolutely sure that there isn’t information you don’t want on the internet is to not share it at all. There will always be an issue of making sure every system actually deletes content when you request it. Like I said, that doesn’t stop anyone from backing up the data to another system. (E.g. Reddit archives from 2005 to now are available to download, even content that has already been deleted)

Anyone who has open discussions on the Internet and thinks they're somehow private is a fool. Short of end to end encrypted chat I'm not sure what they expect.

I find all the "privacy isn't possible on the clearnet, lol" Commets quite troubling. Yes, the internet doesn't forget and we should always behave on the internet as if our moms could read it.

But that kind of "privacy realism" fosters an additude that doesn't care about privacy at all; no matter how it could be improved (even if it's never perfect). Just because anyone on the street can follow me home and therefore can find my home address, I'm not carrying a sign with my address when going to a protest.

According to this comment, privacy is worse than with mastodon. And while data always can be scraped, it still isn't too much to ask to properly federate deletions.

Yes, the internet is a public place and reddit is bad and you might not like raddle, but come on, people. Have you all given up on improving things already? And do only tech-savvy people with the knowledge and resources to run their own servers have a right to privacy on the internet?

I didn't even give this shit an email address

Mastodon's privacy issues are just the same as the rest of the fediverse/threadiverse.

With federation there is more openness, transparency and accountability. Take care of your privacy, use alts.

Use a pseudonym that you don’t use anywhere else and don’t dox yourself in your posts or comments

The privacy stinks you say? Did you know that Likes and Dislikes are public too? That was the most shocking to me. Because it is very much not like Reddit or others.

It's still a fantastic piece of software, with all its flaws, though.

It is all public just as most forums on Reddit. No real difference. No difference with Usenet either. Relax.

I assume anything I post online to remain there forever anyways. That's why I regularly make a new account so atleast everything isn't behind one username

This is a big issue because in the EU you have the right to remove your data. It could make Lemmy illegal in the EU

Personally when I want to share what I'm saying with the world I write a letter, burn it, and snort the ashes. This is the only truly private way to do this.

In order for me to be offended, I'd first have to care about that opinion. I don't.

One thing that mastodon does is proxying all the media from the federated servers, lemmy does not do this.. (yet)

For example on this comment page there are 9 domains trying to connect directly to me according to ublock origin. I suggest blocking all third party requests on your instance using ublock origins advanced mode because the website works fine without them, it might be mostly avatars?

If you think anything on the Internet can ever be forgotten... Your going to have a bad time. Passwords, one of the most protected data types, are compiled from beaches into huge databases so that hackers can use them to try to log into website. There are literally dozens of not hundreds of those password databases on the public Internet to be downloaded, not to mention private or dark web collections. If passwords are not safe, what makes you think publicly available social media would be any different?

Even if somehow the whole federation agreed to purge all post every year, things like the Internet archive and Google cache of pages would retain the data.

After reading some more comments, I think I came up with a good analogy to explain this issue, and I wanted to share.

Think of websites like a bar that also has an open mic.

Now, when I go to a bar, I don't want to have to give the bouncers and staff my full name as well as my address. I also wouldn't want them to know that I just came, for example, from a store where I was looking for a vacuum, and then have them warn a vacuum seller about it. A vacuum seller who is then going to sit next to me, while I'm trying to have a drink, and show me a pamphlet regarding the "amazing vacuum" he has for sale.

Ideally, I can also look for a bar that will allow me to come in costumed and not show my face. Or I could ask the bar to delete footage of me at some point, and to not store my ID if I do have to show it to a bouncer at the entrance.

All of that is relatively feasible and within the realm of reason; and all of that are things that privacy advocates might advocate for.

However, what is not feasible, or within the realm of reason, or what privacy advocates tend to advocate for, is the ability for me to willingly go up on stage, say something on the mic which I immediately regret, and then ask everyone present to forget it ever happened and delete any footage they might have of it. No reasonable person would ask for something like that, because it is not a reasonable request.

That is how regular websites work. With federated websites, that becomes enhanced; it's like if the bar you're in has a camera pointed at the microphone, and transmits both video and audio directly into several other bars. So when you go up to that mic, you better make sure you're okay with what you are saying being made public and available to anyone.

That's a non issue. You just cannot expect to be able to delete anything you post on the internet. Even the great reddit with the awesome deletion feature cannot help you. You might be able to delete your comment there, but there is https://www.unddit.com/ https://archive.is/ https://web.archive.org/ and many others, where your comment will still be available.

Not sure what the point of "Mastodon's" opinion is? Firstly, Mastodon is pretty big and decentralised, and it has no-one who really speaks on behalf of all its users. Lemmy is not a privacy central network like a direct messenger service. It never claimed to be privacy centric as far as I know. The point is to share posts in communities, and the more that see them, the better.

But it is federated which means posts do get shared to other servers everywhere, and deleting those is not as easy as for a centralised server. Whatever I post on any sharing type service, I consider to be public.

I think an option for full data deletion would be nice for those who want it, otherwise people should also expect others recording their data, which can be published later on.

I would encourage you to stay as far away from Raddle as possible. It has an incredibly toxic site-wide culture, and some serious security problems.

I wasn't planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.

In both services you are basically shouting into a giant megaphone. What’s so private about it? If you don’t want say it in public, don’t say it there.

If you need privacy there are much better tools available such as pgp encrypted email or encrypted Matrix DMs (a nonfederated Matrix sever would be even more secure but rather overkill).

Edit: specified encrypting Matrix DMs. I forgot for a moment that you can send unencrypted DMs over Matrix.

I'm not sure what this has to do with mastodon all I see are some salty idiots on raddle moaning.

If I wanted privacy, I wouldn't be browsing online.

As a life long anarchist, I personally find raddle to be a fucking embarrassment. The elitist bullshit is right up there with other political anarchist sites like anarchistnews.net, they're all a fucking shit show and shows why anarchists will never accomplish anything.

Other people have already commented on how federated social media often requires certain data just for implementations to work and make sense, and there's not much more to add to that.

If you want private, end-to-end-encrypted, decentralized communication, the best modern solution to that is #matrix.

I don't think much of Mastodon as it is, so they're free to rag on Lemmy all they want.

The stuff listed in OP doesn't really seem like much concern. "What you put on the internet is there forever!" is completely true, and things like this should only make it more concrete that you can't rely on your service provider to delete information somebody else already archived.
With that being said, default privacy settings - at least on Kbin - seem pretty bad.

This is a link to Raddle.me, what does this have to do with Mastodon?

@elbowmacaroni if instead of linking to the post you had boosted it, would all the replies here appear in beehaw?

Eww. Well, there is a reason why I try and be extremely careful about what I post nowadays. Don't want to regret dumb shit I said in the future.

So just to clarify this point:

Anything remains visible on federated servers!

If I delete a comment on beehaw.org, it doesn't get deleted when accessed from another Lemmy instance that federates with Beehaw?

Am I missing something or isnt it that no matter what Lemmy does all those same problems would still exist, just from the internet archival sites instead. Sure the privacy could be better to deter some of it, but none of those issues are fully solveable so long as thise archival sites run. I guess the media not deleting is likely the biggest thing you could effect that archives would be less likely to store in the first place.

Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible

This is a negative behavior by Lemmy, in my opinion. Deleted comments should be purged after some time. Tildes does the same thing - I think with 30 days?

Deleted account usernames remain visible too

These should be replaced with some random string of characters or something like DeleteUser<numberhere> or something.

Anything remains visible on federated servers!

This is just a concession of federation.

When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server

This is an issue, too, in my opinion.

I think this is a feature, well the media aspect anyway. Immutable media. The rest can be developed on.

Mastodon should just leave us alone!

It's a work in progress.

Kinda unsurprising as rumors have it that lemmy's developed by pro-China Tankies.

I’m at a loss. You’re saying that things that you said publicly are private? Or you’re saying that they become private because you delete your account? Assume you dox someone. I need to find out if that happened. As an admin I’d be able to see that

1. you
2. publicly posted
3. their data

I would need to be able to provide this to authorities if they provided needed legal documentation. Why do you think that privacy dictates you should be able to commit a crime, and get away with it by deleting your account?

i use kbin because I don't like lemmy's devs 🙃
bonus points that it actually deletes things

I switch accounts after some time and use other ones. It's quiet okay this way