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.
…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.
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.
What would a “fix” look like in your eyes? Do you have na implementation in mind?
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
