These and Instagram seem to be the main locii of conversation for a topic I’m interested in. Instagram is a no because Meta. Just trying to keep myself off of the big data mining sites and search results are a bit of a hot mess.
Edit: Please, no more splaining how there isn’t any privacy on the net. There’s what can be scraped, what can be gathered from cookies (which I’m as careful as I can be about), and there’s what we make it easy for corporations to collect by using their products. I’m asking about the latter for Discord and Tumblr. It’s not that I’m unaware of the general problem (otherwise I wouldn’t be asking), it’s just that I’m out of the loop on specifics for these sites.
Those services have total surveillance. Total data retention. No expectation of privacy.
To be fair Lemmy also has no expectation of privacy. It’s even worse because the platforms totally open, so anybody can mine your data here. They don’t even have to sign a contract with meta. But I think we all accept that trade off to have an open public square.
Yeah so basically anything do in social media, any social media, is going to not be private in any way. There’s no way around it. The big difference Lemmy makes is that it’s not developed with data mining or profit in mind, so you are (somewhat more) safe from shitty changes to the platform that could compromise your privacy or just make experience worse (like mtx or ads). You can use the platform using a browser or application that doesn’t spy on you.
I think there’s some confusion in your post. You have zero privacy on this platform. Lemmy has zero privacy at all. Activity pub publishes everything you do to everyone in the world. It is a perfect platform for data miners. You were literally being spied on 100% for everything you do on Lemmy.
Which is fine, because it’s the public square. But I want you to understand that. It’s very important. Lemmy is actually worse for privacy than meta.
Is “everything you do” including everything you look at and all of the telemetry? I assume that’s client dependent. And would be surprised if any Lemmy clients are doing that kind of thing. Everything you post being public is one thing. But I’ve always found the behavioral telemetry more offensive.
I believe Discord is quite prolific for surveillance and data mining, but that’s just what I’ve heard. Tumblr, I’m not sure how they could really spy on you unless you’re using an app. If you’re using it exclusively through a web browser, as long as you have privacy browser extensions and/or are using a browser that enables privacy features by default then you’re probably pretty safe.
I believe Discord is quite prolific for surveillance and data mining,
Discord does not take any information from your PC other than what you input directly into the app. There has been confusion in the past because it’s game detection would scan your file system for known games, but it wouldn’t send that data anywhere and was only using it to detect when you were playing a game in order to update your status. As far as surveillance goes, I’ve not seen any evidence that they make profiles of individual users to sell to advertising firms, but I do believe that they track general trends inside of public community servers and use that information for something. They also integrate with a lot of 3rd parties such as OpenAI which may be doing something with the data they’re given. They do seem to genuinely delete messages if they are deleted, which is a plus.
Discord is awful for privacy. The owner has been caught a few times selling user data in ways they said they don’t do. And the general suspicion increased when a Chinese company bought a stake in them.
If you want some privacy, you need to self host. You can use Mumble as a replacement for discord that you can host yourself.
Self-hosting on Mumble isn’t going to help me join existing communities on Discord, is it? I already have an over-abundance of opportunities to talk to myself ;P
