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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The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring (www.404media.co)

submitted 2 days ago by drascus@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

ActivityPub DMs are not encrypted between servers

It is insofar as TLS/SSL/HTTPS encryption is used in transit. That’s what I mean by encrypted in transit.

i could read anyone’s DMs to users on other servers

If you’re an administrator for (WordPress) ActivityPub server A, you can see all the DMs coming to and leaving from your server, yes. And they’re not encrypted at rest, so you can read them any time. But how would you see DMs going between server B and server C, when your server isn’t involved in the transaction?

[–] arotrios@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It apparently scrapes everything on the public feed. So when I subscribed to users on Mastodon server A from Wordpress, DMs from Mastodon server A going to Mastodon server B became visible.

I had a separate account on Mastodon server A to confirm that I couldn't see these DMs as Mastodon user on server A, and that the Wordpress scrape was grabbing messages normally not meant for public view.

This was using the ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress about six months ago.

EDIT: I should be clear that I was as surprised as the other commentators that the DMs weren't encrypted and that I could see them at all through a 3rd party software. I did NOT see DMs between local users - only cross-instance.