This sounded like an ominous privacy warning lol!
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Your actual browsing of lemmy is moderately private, provided you trust your server.
But nothing else is. By design, it's pretty easy for anyone who wants to track activity on any federated platform to do so. They're extremely open.
provided you trust your server.
You shouldn't.
especially if you run it yourself. If you don't have a loaded sawed off sitting near your server rack in case the machine spirit within grows too strong, you aren't servering correctly.
Makes me think of this classic:
Hits home. I have a friend in sales, he got a connecter door lock the other day. There's no way any of these get to my door in this life
I've been considering adding a wireless door lock to my place, but my home automation platform is entirely self hosted and doesn't reach out to the net for basically anything.
My home automation consists only of (self-hosted and fully local) Home Assistant and some smart outlets I've flashed with ESPHome open-source firmware. I found some Nanoleaf Matter/Thread smart bulbs a few days ago on clearance, but even though I got them super cheap I'm debating on whether to return them because i'm not sure if I can trust them without being able to flash an open-source firmware.
with matter devices, you can possibly do some fun networking, and block them from reaching the outside world completely. then you just need to trust your firewall
I'm running HA too, but I'm rocking zigbee stuff with a bit of zwave for outside stuff. Works so well (when I properly program it anyway 🤣)!
It's funny to me that we trust RF enough for garage doors but not front door locks.
I like the SwitchBot Lock because it sits over the existing thumbturn rather than completely replacing the lock. It still looks like a normal lock from outside, unless you get a keypad of course. I got one with a keypad so my dog sitter can come check on my dog and take her out while I'm at work.
It's not internet enabled by default. You can buy a wifi gateway from SwitchBot, but instead I have mine connected to Home Assistant using Bluetooth via a Bluetooth proxy.
How do i somehow fit all three of these?
Optimism, realism, and pessimism.
Also known as "3 of the 4 stages of employment"
Stage four is a DNS problem.
Your actual browsing of lemmy is moderately private, provided you trust your server.
Not exactly. Many of the big instances have Cloudflare (or similar) sitting between you and the server, providing the HTTPS layer while watching everything you read and write on Lemmy. In cryptography circles, we call this a man-in-the-middle.
Your instance (sh.itjust.works) is one such instance, by the way, as is lemmy.world.
That applies to most of the internet, and Cloudflare has a long track record of not abusing that position, though.
Cloudflare has a long track record of not abusing that position, though.
Well, Cloudflare is not all that old, and we can't see what they do with our data, so I would say it has a medium-length record of not getting caught abusing that position. But that's not the point.
The point is that most Lemmy users' actual browsing is in fact not private between them and their server. Many instances have a big network service corporation like Cloudflare watching everything read or written by every user, so that info is available to anyone with sufficient access or influence there, like employees and governments.
That applies to most of the internet,
Not exactly, but it does apply to a great many of the biggest web sites, so we could say it applies to much of the internet's traffic.
And that's part of the problem. Cloudflare is in a position to watch much of what people do on the web, across many unrelated sites and services (often including domain name lookups), and trivially identify them. This includes whatever political, religious, or NSFW posts they're reading on Lemmy, and who they are when they log in to their bank accounts.
In any case, I replied not to be pedantic, but just to let our community know that they shouldn't assume their reading habits on Lemmy are safely anonymized behind a made-up username, or confidential between them and their instance admins. If your instance uses a provider of DDOS protection or HTTPS acceleration, as many big instances do, then the walls have ears.
That's fine, and in principle I understand the threat, but I think there are plenty of security experts who choose to just use cloudflare because some of the services they provide genuinely require their scale and they have a pretty steady history of making very measured decisions about where they need to leverage their position to improve security.
There's never been any indication that they're collecting more than they need to or exploiting it beyond the scope of the service they provide, and several scenarios where they have refused to cooperate with governments trying to do invasive things. I absolutely think "moderately secure" still applies to traffic routed through cloudflare.
The whole point of Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is to decentralize, so everyone routing through a single service (Cloudflare) seems to go against that.
The point is to not be compelled to a central service. Choosing a provider that does a better job is perfectly fine.
Trains lol. Autists in da house. Represent!
It's a super useful place for finding new communities to subscribe to! I also heartily recommend !communities@ponder.cat
Your link isn't working for me but I see now that you already linked this community. Totally my bad, I apologise!
Interesting, which client are you using?
Sync. But it's working now, confusingly.
😄
Your screen name looks a bit wonky.