Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Lemmy instance admin snooping at votes (monero.town)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by pop@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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So I was going through /all and this admin is snooping at vote counts for posts in his instance and then posting it publicly.

Just a reminder that these kind of petty people exist. Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

Archive: https://archive.md/oybyL

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[–] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago

If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

A smarter system won't just take the mean of the votes from different instances but rather discard outliers as invalid input (flagging repeat offenders to be ignored in the future) and use the median or mode of the remainder. The results should also be quantitized to avoid leaking details about sources or internal algorithms; only the larger trends need to be reported.

Of course you could always just keep the collected data private and only provide it to customers willing to pay $$$ for access, which handily limits instance operators' ability to reverse-engineer the source of the data. And nothing prevents you from using separate instances for public and private data sets.