this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
57 points (90.1% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26753 readers
1743 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But Lemmy gives it to any web scraper for free

Which is good. You either have an open system or a closed one. There's no in-between.

If you want to have advantages of public free decentralized network you can't obfuscate and centralize bits and pieces of it. Also, it's 2024, we need to stop this misinformation that email address is supposed to be private. What is private is email address association with the owner and Lemmy doesn't leak or infringe on. The address is literally called address because it's supposed to be public.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

...And attitudes like this towards privacy will keep Lemmy from progressing to a point where those issues will be fixed.

I have a fundamental problem with giant corporations scraping user data without user consent. That's a system-level issue. It doesn't become "good" just because they get to scrape without consent for free.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Nah it has nothing to do with attitude but with practicality. This would mean people's fingerprints need to be public and shared between servers or some other hack. It's just possible in any safety and its not really a hill worth dying on. Do we really care about users dodging subreddit bans that much? Its silly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What would a "fix" look like in your eyes? Do you have na implementation in mind?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I have a few suggestions for development concerns off the top of my head:

  • Scrub post metadata* after users request its deletion
  • Auto-purge deleted content* rather than letting it sit behind a "deleted" flag (something Facebook got a ton of flak for doing)
  • Auto-purge deleted media*
  • Consider seriously limiting opening data wide for scraping, since the problem is non-consensual scraping, not payment for non-consensual scraping

* either immediately or, to prevent spam, after some time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I agree with your first few points but I'm unsure about the scraping. This is a public forum, what could be done to mitigate scraping that wouldn't take away form that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

If we take "unlimited unauthenticated API access shouldn't be possible" for granted, I'm unfortunately not all that technically competent about what can be done next.

The first thing that comes to mind is treating website access and app access differently, maybe limiting app API access by default for people who haven't logged in.

Or creating a separate bot API that's rolled out across all servers at some point in the future... And I know federation could pose some serious chokepoints here so that's where my speculation ends.