I’ve been feeling uneasy about the privacy implications of using Lemmy and similar platforms. The ability for anyone to view your entire posting history feels to me like publicly sharing my browser history. In contrast, most other social media platforms allow you to limit your feed visibility to just friends or followers.
I’m curious to hear from the community - what are the most private social media platforms you’ve come across? I vaguely remember stumbling upon one that automatically removed content after six months and had some other interesting privacy features. Can anyone refresh my memory or recommend some other private alternatives?
Pitch is basically twitter but on Tor.
I think privacy and social media are inherently at odds. Social media is built around the concept of sharing personal metadata through memes, opinions and is generally the point of socializing. Your personal data is the currency of social media.
Well there is another kind of privacy concern that’s called “device fingerprinting”. If you decide you don’t want to have a public life anymore, you can disable/delete the account, change your online identity and, as long as you behave differently, nobody will guess it’s you. But when the website collects absolutely unnecessary data (such as location, mouse movements, login dates and browser fingerprints), it’s not as easy and in fact almost impossible
You could argue that content (as opposed to person) focused forums or message boards that allow anonymous posts are probably the closest to private social media.
I think that’s why most of us are here on Lemmy. However I don’t want to assume the motives of others.
Well, I was thinking more of the kind of anonymous comments you get on message boards like some of the *chan ones.
Your own website hosted on Tor/I2P, I think.
Group messages in Threema or Signal.
In contrast, most other social media platforms allow you to limit your feed visibility to just friends or followers.
Yes but they will sell all of it plus where your mouse pointer was and how long you viewed what topic happily.
Mastodon I think has a built in feature to delete posts after x days. But I wouldn’t use it since people who want to stalk or surveil you will find the hdd space to save your posts within these days but friends and people interested in your posts will not find it after 6 months. So I don’t think that’s a solution to your problem.
What could be of interest to you is the mastodon feature to only post to followers. That means that you will also have to approve followers as well, since it’s pointless to post to a limited amount of people if that’s potentially everyone.
You would still have to trust their server administrators somewhat but since most servers aren’t run with profit in mind you won’t find that many sell the user data.
I think privacy and social media are inherently at odds
It doesn’t have to be.
I’ve spent decades online on Usenet, IRC, Slashdot and elsewhere before modern social media, and today on (some) social media sites, and nobody knows who am I because I’ve always been super-careful to keep my online personae and my real identity totally separate. It takes a bit of paranoia, but it’s possible to have an online footprint that’s watertight and completely divorced from real-life.
I have many, many online identities and none of them tie back to the real me. But Big Tech sure is aggressively trying to deanonymize me, and it takes a lot more care and effort than it used to to make sure that they never do.
On Mastodon (and maybe also Akkoma/Pleroma/Misskey/firefish and so on) there is an option in the settings to auto delete your posts (formerly known as toots) with fine tune options if you for instance want to delete your posts but save your favorites and boosts. Several people have their toots older than one month automatically deleted. Before this was an option in Mastodon, people already did this with help of other software.
Lemmy is not very similar as StackExchange/SuperUser/Quora but in some threads Lemmy resembles a Q&A site so it makes sense to leave the conversations as is.
Regarding the most private social media question I’d think of Friendica, Hubzilla, and Pixelfed as best.
mastodon on a homeserver. no public posting.
I don’t think deleting old posts or comments can really be relied on to hide your data. Once it is out there it ends up in search indices, web archives,… so while it is a good additional safety mechanism it shouldn’t mean that you should freely post personal stuff.
That is true to some extend (Though search engines would afaik correct 404 pages and delete the old fetched data), but the automatic deletion does stop part of the audience of having a lot of data to create a fingerprint.
The thing is whoever you pick you are trusting someone else to host your data pictures whatever
If you have a username attached to a publicly posted comment, people will be able to see your history. The internet is forever. Publicly posted comments are, by definition, not private. Treating them as such, in any capacity, is a mistake.
The biggest thing is to not post personal details, or to even post accumulations of details over many comments that can narrow things down. The weather where you are at the time, what type of car you drive (or your lack of a car), what type of job you have, etc, etc, etc. On their own, each of these pieces of information don’t mean much, but you start putting them together and you can narrow things down considerably.
It is also not a bad idea to occasionally throw in some misinformation about yourself. Maybe you don’t drive a Corolla, but instead a Hilux.
i drive a Hilux
I drive a hard bargain.
As an olympic swimming medalist in istanbul I find my hilux to be the perfect blend of comfort and rugged dependability.
What sort people are you trying throw off your trail? Genuine question as I’m not a frequenter of privacy communities.
Unless you’re a investigative journalist, what are the odds details such as weather, car, type of job would be compiled by someone to identify you?
There are lots of random assholes on the internet. I like when they are forced to stay on the internet and not able to bring their asshollery into one’s real life.
Sure, but what random psycho would go through all your comments collecting data like weather on a specific day, car, job, etc… just to mess with you in real life. That’s like one in a billion unless you specifically seek out those kind of people.
Sure, but what random psycho would go through all your comments collecting data like weather on a specific day, car, job, etc… just to mess with you in real life. That’s like one in a billion unless you specifically seek out those kind of people.
Scraping experiments have been done in the Fediverse several times and with the booming A.I. such an action does not seem very unlikely to me.
do some research
Social media is not private. Never will be
thats not entirely true.
You’re right, it isn’t entirely true. A perfectly private social media service could be constructed but it likely won’t because there is no profit motive. Even if it were, how many people would truly use it.
We had things like this in the beginning of the internet. Anonymous chat rooms and message boards were incredibly popular but I doubt they will ever reach that level of popularity again.
A perfectly private social media service could be constructed but it likely won’t because there is no profit motive.
And here it is, that thing you said most likely won’t be…
https://gadgeteer.co.za/gotosocial-is-a-new-activitypub-social-network-server-for-the-fediverse/
Even if it were, how many people would truly use it.
To be social, 3 people, maybe 5 is all you’d need.
As to proft motive, maybe you’re not aware of FOSS?
besides p2p/onion type stuff hiding your IP on top of whatever you use, I think imageboards are the most private/anonymous.
here’s a list: https://chan.city/
The most private platform:
spoiler
Is the ones you don’t use
The most private in your home with your friends and some beer.
