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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Tell me if I’m wrong, but federated systems don’t seem to be the best for privacy because you can’t ever delete all of the copies of your posts and comments? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by GuyDudeman@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I was thinking about this recently… By going to a federated system, one that essentially copies all of your content from one instance to another, when you delete a comment, does that comment get deleted on every instance? Is that even possible?

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[–] Irisos@lemmy.umainfo.live 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not just posts. Any message you are sending to anyone is unencrypted and can easily be looked at by instance owners.

Unextended ActivityPub makes it so that everything is shared without privacy, any operation is "best-effort" and also depends on the goodwill of the target (ie: a server could refuse all delete on purpose or refuse to deliver messages/posts without any hints)

[–] Arcaneslime@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

To be fair, this is how almost every social media site works. If you really need private comms away from all prying eyes, it'd be better to exchange email/pgp, matrix, or xmpp details through an ostensibly "private" message (i.e not a comment) here (or wherever) and do your super secret stuff there. That of course isn't perfect as they can save the logs and all so if they're compromised at any point it is possible to be an issue, but whaddayagonnado. Depends on your threat model anyway.

It's also possible that you can use pgp here (though that also lacks forward secrecy), but I haven't tested it. You'd likely have to use three of these ` to indicate code for it to format correctly though.

Still though, such is life for social media, assume nothing is private unless you make it so, and even then hope that stays uncracked.