I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
It is nowhere explicitly made clear to users that voting is public. It should be made clear if it is going to be
An EU resident could sue for emotional damages under the GDPR. Or maybe just complain to data protection authorities.
One day it will happen.
Why would it need to be made clear? Likes on Facebook are public, nowhere does it say “liking this photo will alert every friend you have that you just liked your stepdaughters’ friends’ bikini pic from 2 years ago.”
I like the public vote system. Anonymous systems have a much greater potential for abuse.
Accounts are easy enough to make that you can just burn your account every few months if you’re that worried.
It is made clear because there is an option to see all the votes right next to the like button. Similarly, many sites allow you to go through activity of people you follow.
You can see the number of votes here too. Why does your hand need to be held? It’s the fucking internet, guy.
I can see the number of votes but not who voted. This gives the impression that this information is not available publicly. However, it can be accessed by anyone on third party websites.
Then don’t vote? Nobody is forcing you to interact with the content and it’s kind of hilarious you’d consider it a security/privacy violation.
And then you put the cherry on top by saying “reddit is safe.”
It’s the other way around here: Everything is public except where it’s made clear that it won’t be (e.g. email address, password).
For what it’s worth, your instance of choice is particularly negligent in regard to informing its users. Compare lemmy.today/legal to lemmy.world/legal, or their respective signup pages for examples. There’s little that Lemmy itself or the community at large can do about that 😞