I don’t disagree really… Just pointing out that as long as you’re logged in Reddit has always tracked posts viewed as far as I’m aware… Facebook similarly tracks all activities and always has.
These are obviously not models to aspire to but I think that it’s helpful to be aware of what we’ve dealt with up until this point.
Facebook was notoriously evil and I actuallly have all their domains that I know of blocked from my computer at the DNS level in order to avoid their spying. That Reddit tracks posts viewed is new to me but I guess not that surprising. Usenet never tracked posts viewed and basically couldn’t. Wikipedia emphatically doesn’t track that, though it doesn’t track view counts. Arxiv.org doesn’t track (or at least publish) view counts for individual papers (see here) though they do publish stats about the entire site. A real privacy focused site would avoid publishing any about what viewers are doing. There is a whole topic in cryptography called private information retrieval about how to run a server in which the clients can verify that the server can’t know what they are reading. This is what Lemmy should aspire to, imho. (Aspirations aren’t meant to be achieved literally, but only to provide guidance).
I may open a thread in /c/[email protected] asking about this, but the answer might be to launch my own Lemmy instance and retrieve all of the Lemmy posts so I can browse the ones that interest me without leaking any info. I’m sort of in a position to do that, but most people unfortunately aren’t.
I don’t disagree really… Just pointing out that as long as you’re logged in Reddit has always tracked posts viewed as far as I’m aware… Facebook similarly tracks all activities and always has.
These are obviously not models to aspire to but I think that it’s helpful to be aware of what we’ve dealt with up until this point.
Facebook was notoriously evil and I actuallly have all their domains that I know of blocked from my computer at the DNS level in order to avoid their spying. That Reddit tracks posts viewed is new to me but I guess not that surprising. Usenet never tracked posts viewed and basically couldn’t. Wikipedia emphatically doesn’t track that, though it doesn’t track view counts. Arxiv.org doesn’t track (or at least publish) view counts for individual papers (see here) though they do publish stats about the entire site. A real privacy focused site would avoid publishing any about what viewers are doing. There is a whole topic in cryptography called private information retrieval about how to run a server in which the clients can verify that the server can’t know what they are reading. This is what Lemmy should aspire to, imho. (Aspirations aren’t meant to be achieved literally, but only to provide guidance).
I may open a thread in /c/[email protected] asking about this, but the answer might be to launch my own Lemmy instance and retrieve all of the Lemmy posts so I can browse the ones that interest me without leaking any info. I’m sort of in a position to do that, but most people unfortunately aren’t.