this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
905 points (86.3% liked)
Fediverse
28490 readers
1124 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not anti-Fediverse here, but tbf it would be ridiculously easy for data harvesting companies to plug into the API and fingerprint individual users from their activity. Admittedly, I don't see how browser based fingerprinting could be done without hosting an instance.
Sure, it'd be easy to do that but that's true for everything with an open API really. I don't think that makes Lemmy less privacy respecting. The only thing a harvester could grab is the things you've chosen to post publicly. Is that a good thing? No, not really but it's certainly much less invasive than being on a site/app that harvests both that and fingerprints your devices and tries to get all your OS/location data/etc at the same time.
True.