Just dont use Reddit already

Good thing we're not on reddit

Govt makes it, why wouldn't Reddit do it?

Every now and then I've been tempted to make a Reddit account to post in some subreddits but shit like this reminds me not to fucking do it.

yepowertrippinbastards++

This is a great example of how profiles on all of us are going to be made by governments and corporations unless we take privacy seriously.

Corporations have been already making profiles of various types for a while now in the form of adtech, social media, data brokers, people search websites, credit scores, devices and services that harvest sensitive and intimate data (e.g. mobile phone apps, watching habits from smart TVs, driving data from cars).

Our society has been set up for mass surveillance in a thousand different ways as a form of social control and dominance by those who wield power.

It's time people realize that privacy is a right instead of normalizing abuses of consent.

Is Lemmy somehow invulnerable to this? Can't it just be scraped the same way.

Yep.

And if anyone doubts this, 15 years ago I had made a tool that created these types of profiles as a proof of concept.

I had scraped tons of subreddits, then you could pass in a user and based on both their subreddits and key words would categorize users across a few axes. That was just using naïve bayes, but worked pretty well.

The AI is just much much better at natural language processing to pull out more detailed info about patterns.

It can, but it's not built-in into the system and shown to every moderator in their UI.

That's probably a massive GDPR violation. Automated processing of extra sensitive data like political beliefs and religion is not outright forbidden but it's subject to extra protections.

Also your email and IP address is only available to the instance owner. So the only PII is what you share.

Since anyone can create their own subreddit and become a mod there, does this mean that anyone can look at these profiles?

*Have been made long ago and are being constantly updated.

Snowden already warned us about this over a DECADE ago. Their scopes and powers will have increased exponentially. And that was under 'trustworthy' administration. I guarantee there's a type of system in place that flags people before they do anything, just on pattern recognition alone. Of course, they can't use that system as a legal basis for anything, so they don't and use parallel constructions instead.

Anyone who thinks "this is coming" hasn't been paying attention. We're already there and beyond.

100% it can, and worse yet, it can be scraped and analyzed like this by Meta, or Reddit, or your nearest fascist dictator.

But that's also pretty much the entire internet in any forum or social media platform, so although I don't like it, I figure that's more or less just part of using the internet.

To me it's much like the whole "There's no expectation of privacy in public."

I hope it doesn't take AI to figure out my attitudes when I regularly proclaim that there are no maga in my life more than required by various pre-existing obligation, Luigi Mangione will be remembered as a folk hero, Trump will one day be shown to be ALL through the Epstein files in all the worst ways (as will many Dems and they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law), and most Democratic leadership is 100% owned by the oligarchy too, as evidenced by things such as their support of Israeli genocide and how much more urgently they are fighting Mamdani than they are Trump in many cases.

I doubt it, since all it ostensibly does is summarize info the user has released freely. How that info is stored and retained exactly might be up for debate though.

Sadly you consented to all of it

What’s that utility that helps you delete your profile the right way?

Lemmy isn't monolithic. They'd have to hit every instance separately. The big ones like lemmy.world are a prime target though.