Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
What app? As far as I’m concerned there’s no reason to believe that fediverse users aren’t tracked. Probably not all, but where there’s users interacting with each other discussing different subjects there’s money to be made, and data to sell to AI companies for training.
https://lemmy.world/post/2807814?scrollToComments=true
Sort by Top
The app works between an instance/server and the user. This does not affect what the admins/owners of an instance/server can track.
It's already better than what Reddit does with its app then.
If you want to improve your privacy, browse Lemmy using a VPN and a fingerprint protected browser such as Mullvad browser, and you're pretty much set against potential data collection from our instance admin. You can even share your account with a few other people to make your ghost profile harder to populate.
I’m not sure you understand how the fediverse works on protocol level or how posts are stored. None of what you suggest will protect you. There is no way you can protect yourself from tracking by those with access to raw data.
I'm indeed not sure we are talking about the same thing.
You are talking about tracking the data and selling it to AI for training.
I don't even know why AI companies would bother with buying that data when they can just parse that information directly from the website and then train their model on it.
I was talking about selling user profiles to advertising companies willing to reach specific potential customer audiences. In that scenario, the measures I explained prevent your profiling.
I’m talking about tracking and profiling in general. This is possible by crawling to a certain extent, but it’s 100% possible when you have the data of who’s voting up/down on what, and what posts they are shown and how they interact with them.
This is possible from app or website, and that part can be mitigated somewhat by the stuff you proposed. But if you control to the code and database you have 100% access to this information. How you interact with posts are very interesting for AI training and analysis, similar to what Cambridge Analytica had a great run at using Facebook data.
I guess the only way to really avoid that would have to host your own instance, cut from the rest of the Fediverse, and only allow people you trust to join.
But then that kind of defeats the purpose of a Lemmy-like platform
Indeed - or in other words you can trust the fediverse as much as you can trust Reddit
Reddit is worse, to me, for reasons stated above, but we can agree to disagree