Excellent point.

For very long, I have thought vocabulary alone would be enough footprint to ID someone. If you had enough sample of their writing ofc. It’s like browser fingerprints. The words you use, and how often you use them, is a fingerprint. As UnknowableNight points out, some patterns are very unique, nearly enough alone. Yet even without those, you have enough signals. Sentence length. Whether you spell colour or color. Regional expressions. Word use frequency. Whether you bring in vocabulary used mostly in a certain profession, like medicine or law. Whether you use more paragraphs or more single liners. None alone are enough. All together, with the 100 other ones smart people can figure out? Probably enough.

Long ago it would be too much effort, only good for targeted cases. Today? Maybe you can do it dragnet, seeking to ID every person who writes online.

I do not know if that happens today. Yet I do not see anything to stop it.

Also California and others.

About that, here is the statement from FDroid:

If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications. (How many F-Droid users are there, exactly? We don’t know, because we don’t track users or have any registration: “No user accounts, by design”)

The two phone OSs which have together 98% of market would be under locked control of big tech companies. You could argue Android is still slightly less locked than iOS. But it seems like a distinction with not so much practical difference.

It’s a corporate capture of mobile computing. Not only they sell you the device, but the device will answer to its master only. That is not you.

I don’t know if it was a bot account or not. Maybe? If it was, I got fooled by it once. It replied to one of my posts in another thread. I felt the reply was insightful and made a valid point. Of course, it could still have been a bot. Or maybe a person falsely accused as a bot? I legit have no idea.

I worry that over time it will get harder and harder to detect bots by content, and attempts to do that based on meta-info will further erode privacy. It always risks sweeping up real humans. Especially those with a more formal writing style. I have changed my own writing style to try to avoid that. As somebody on the spectrum I always wrote with a very bullet-list style, sometimes even using sub-heading in longer posts to structure them. That is exactly what bots do. So I now I don’t!

There are “LLM detectors”, but those have poor accuracy. then there are “humanizers” who try to modify writing to avoid triggering the LLM detectors. It’s a mess.

posted out of context on the internet with brainrot edits and sound effects mocking people minding their own business because they happened to act a little funny but ultimately harmless in public.

This bothers me too. There are whole sites dedicated to doing that, making fun of people who suffered a medical issue or accident or just did something foolish or awkward. It’s even worse now that face recog can dox them.

Over time I think this risks driving the empathy out of society. People are click fodder for streamers, instead of human beings who probably do not want their worst moments recorded for a million strangers to laugh at. Everyone becomes more guarded, more on edge in public places. It is an erosion of the social fabric.

deleted by creator

People are on places where many other people are

More on that idea here: Network effect

It’s a reason so many big tech companies hate interoperability. Without interoperability you get locked into their system. Then they can enshittify their service to extreme levels, and you are trapped.

Unfortunately there is a harmful incentive structure. The more abusive a service is, the more money it makes from its malicious but profitable aspects which we all know. Meanwhile less harmful services struggle because they lack the monetization stream.

Hopefully it can stay up. Reportedly Flock has been very aggressive about trying to take these sites down with DMCA complaints toward hosting providers and things like that.

I cannot get out of my neighborhood without passing a Flock camera. This pisses me TF off.

But there have been successes. In some cities in Oregon, California, other states too. The community has come together to put pressure on the city government to cancel the contracts. We don’t have to accept this. We can fight back against dragnet surveillance. It takes community effort and grassroots organization but we can do it.

For sure.

I talk to my pa, he was around in the earliest days of personal computing in the 1970’s when you didn’t need a whole room for a computer any more. You could get one in your very own house! He remembers feeling like we were headed into a utopia. There was no spyware. Computers would do all these great things for us.

Honestly we did get some pieces of a utopia. I can now talk to my friend who speaks only German while I cannot speak any German at all. We use a computer to translate for us. That’s straight up sci fi! We got some good parts, but we got even more bad parts. We got all this dystopian big-tech corp, mass surveillance, Orwellian BS.

Never go full dystopia.

Those are good thoughts, thank you. I agree, account reputation and initial rate limits is a much better approach than IP blocking.

It’s especially annoying when IP blocking happens long after you sign up. I was a casual user of a popular e-marketplace, mostly buying. Over 10 entire years, 100% of my feedback was the highest possible rating. I literally never got anything else. Then one day, no warning, my account was disabled. They would only unlock it if I sent them an unredacted copy of my government ID. I would not do that, so it remains locked to this day. I am sure it was because I always used a VPN. Yet I acted in the most upstanding and good faith manner for a decade.

This is why I want to see privacy normalized. Today, sites don’t have to care about shedding a few good faith privacy minded users if the blunt tool can sweep up enough abusers. We’re collateral damage. If privacy was normalized and we had some critical mass, then more nuance is required, because they can’t afford to shed so many good faith users.

The article:

financial service providers increasingly utilize AI features, such as automated social media screening, to determine risk scores for their customers.

I wonder how long until the absence of a discoverable social media trail will be considered a “red flag” used to deny essential services required for remedial participation in society.

Gotcha, thanks. I had a browse over the GIT issues too for Lemmy. I didn’t stumble into the right search terms to find much about this though.

That’s just replies to my comments though, isn’t it? What I am after is to see just the new posts to a thread, which mostly are from other people.

Depends on how you access Lemmy.

D’oh! I should have specified, sorry!

I use the web interface through https://sh.itjust.works/.

The US and the UK trying to one-up each other for the worst tech laws and regs. We will not let you out-dumb us, Brits! You merely adopted the dumb. We were born in it. Molded by it.

It was widely predicted that age or geography restrictions lead to VPNs, and VPNs lead to banning VPNs, and banning VPNs lead to circumventions, and circumventions lead to better detections, and better detections leads to better circumventions, until everyone is dizzy and wants off the bloody ride.

It’s easy to think, this is ok, I can get around the surveillance. I’ll just tunnel over this and bounce through that and triple-rot13 it all. Take that, bureaucrats! Yet the difficulty goes up and up. More and more people are unable to do it. More and more do not want to deal with the hassle. More and more do not want the legal exposure, or are not even aware.

In countries that already ban VPNs, some people can get around that. It is never iron clad. But it is still effective again most people. It is risky for the others.

I do not believe this problem has a technical solution. Only a cultural and political one.

if it has cameras, microphones, gps, data mapping capabilities and speaks to a server outside of your home

It has also happened with baby monitors. Well, almost endless other IoT devices too. But baby monitors are a particular issue. They have speakers in them too. Attackers were exploiting it and playing very disturbing sounds to cause extreme distress to babies.

Donated.

I almost didn’t see this post or even this whole group. I found it in order to ask an unrelated question. Otherwise, I may never have known about the donation option.

All things considered, the budget feels very reasonable for running something like this. The donation seemed even cheaper since I was paying in $USD and it looks like it’s currently around 1:1.37 to $CAD.

I always felt this was the paradox of privacy. Those of us who want privacy but try to contribute in a positive way to a community get caught in the crossfire when the same privacy tools are used by bad faith actors, sometimes individuals, sometimes even nation state influence ops.

I don’t know about public servers, but that’s part of why I self host my own server for me and my mates. We all know each other, and we don’t federate the server with anything else, even though XMPP supports that. The only way for anyone to join is if i send them an invite link, so randos can’t show up.

It does for me, but I’m not sure whether it does in a general way, or if that’s because of some extension on the server I’m running.

I can send a message to my mates, or vice versa, and if we’re not online those will be delivered to us next time we connect. It’s been perfectly seamless.

However they have complained about multi-device support, where they want to log in sometimes from a phone and sometimes from a desktop. Apparently that is a less polished experience.