this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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You Should Know

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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.

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[–] Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

If you're an instance admin, for any post, you can just click "view votes" and see everything tied to usernames, even outside your own instance. Moderators can too, but it's restricted to the communities they moderate.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

So if a bad actor wanted to get aces to vote data, they could setup and instance and have it federate with any instance they want to extract voting data from?

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 1 points 48 minutes ago

Yes, it's very simple too. You don't even need to extract anything from a database or do some complicated stuff. As an admin you have free access to all moderation tools no matter where the post is from, including the option to "view votes".

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 17 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

The IP address thing is not real, though

Just choose a nickname that is random word+4 random digits and don't reuse it on other services

[–] disobey2623@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 17 hours ago

This is the way. Randomise your usernames and use a password manager to keep track of them.

[–] gazby@lemmy.zip 19 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Sir, this is the Fediverse.

[–] npdean@lemmy.today 5 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

It is nowhere explicitly made clear to users that voting is public. It should be made clear if it is going to be

[–] dirtydocmark@sh.itjust.works 2 points 44 minutes ago* (last edited 42 minutes ago)

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.

[–] gazby@lemmy.zip 7 points 10 hours ago

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 😞

[–] Smeagol666@crazypeople.online 11 points 18 hours ago

Are you sure about that? Reddit is a fucking cesspool.

[–] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 12 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

No.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 27 minutes ago

It would be unusual to be able to exactly identify someone purely from their IP, but let's say someone posted from their work IP in a small company. It would substantially lower the bar to dox them.

Let's go further and ponder if an authoritarian regime setup an admin and started coorelating dissent ip's collected from user when they did things like paying parking fines, or signing their online tax forms.

Let's say that they collected all that and trained an LLM on it, then when you go to get a passport renewed or are stopped for a traffic violation and ask the LLM if you're a dangerous person based on their criteria.

It's not a direct problem, but it has slippery slope all over it.

[–] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 12 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Seems like a good thing to me. Should be a better known feature.

How would I go about seeing this information for myself?

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 48 minutes ago

Yeah, at worst it’s a necessary evil to prevent a rogue user on a second instance from mass downvoting. Your username is tied to your vote, because otherwise a rogue user could just spam downvotes at whatever they didn’t like.

Instance 1 has a post. Instance 2 has a user who disagrees with that post. User is able to spam downvotes, because instance 2 is not binding their username to the vote. So Instance 1 has no way of knowing if the votes are multiple different users, or all one user. The only real solution here is to disable external voting, but the entire point of the fediverse is cross-compatibility and self-hosting. By binding the username to the vote, instance 1 is able to detect repeat votes and disregard them.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 19 hours ago (4 children)
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[–] hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 16 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

this is why i vote at random, like two-face doing his quarter thing

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

You get 3 accounts. Say you want to upvote something. You downvote in 1 account (randomly selected), upvote on another, and upvote on the third. So it’s net +1 and the only way to see how you voted is to piece together all 3 of your accounts voting history. Need more privacy? No problem, just use 5 accounts instead of 3.

/s

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 23 minutes ago

wait, so what do i do with the first shell again?

[–] Dozzi92@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I did this last night putting my son to bed, said heads you go to bed, tails we stay up. Jokes on him though, double heads. And he fell for it, what a sucker. Hope it works when he's not four, or I at least don't need to do it.

[–] hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

you're raising a future supervillain

[–] jason@discuss.online 33 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Russia really should just leave Ukraine, though. (Sorry, I just saw the context for this a few minutes ago and can't help myself).

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[–] teft@piefed.social 40 points 1 day ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (7 children)

I like piefed because it lets you see at a glance if someone is a serial downvoter. On each piefed user profile is a thing called “attitude” and it’s a ratio of your upvotes vs downvotes. ~~100% means the person doesn’t downvote people. 50% means they downvote and upvote equally. 0% is only downvotes.~~ Edit: I saw someone today with negative % so it must be 100% is all upvotes. 0% is half upvotes half downvotes. -100% is all downvotes.

It shows up for people outside piefed too so i see you too lemmy angry people.

[–] poke@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

oh no. I should upvote more. I'm really bat about voting at all 😓

[–] Saprophyte@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I would never downvote cereal.

Unless it was grape nuts. That shit is like eating gravel.

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[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 83 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Why are you saying IP addresses are publicly shown here and why is (almost) no one correcting you? That would've been an enormous privacy risk that would've required intentionally fucking users over. Just doesn't even make sense to write what you did about IP addresses. Seems like you're just hoping to cause some panic.

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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 57 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Don't tell anyone, but your posts and comments are also public.

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[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 152 points 1 day ago (96 children)

Why is public voting a massive privacy and physical threat but public posting and commenting is not?

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[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

If you ever get banned for the way you vote then abandon that reddit space.

[–] npdean@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

What do you mean by Reddit space?

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Many subreddits ban you for interacting with subreddits they don't like for personal reasons.

If the same thing happens here it's our duty as users to abandon that space

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[–] 13igTyme@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I remember learning about this and not giving a fuck. I vote stuff on occasion, but generally don't vote or care about the votes on my comment.

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[–] 58008@lemmy.world 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

An entire thread of people missing the point 🙄

[–] Dozzi92@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago

I have to assume it was the same case on Reddit, except it was only info available privately, to whomever. Now, every psychopath and their mother can find people who disagree quietly and hunt them down!

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