this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I've been in forums where upvotes were public. It's not something that I expect to be anonymous by design.
That being said. If something is public, it should be clear that is public (and available to everyone), if it's not it should be protected.
I think Lemmy should go one way or the other, or upvotes are public to everyone, or they are available only for you instance admins.
This is actually a very important point: Things being hidden from public view but yet not properly anonymous creates a mismatch of privacy expectation vs. reality. Votes may or may not terribly important information, but the user should be sovereign of their own data and to implement that in practice we can't rely on people reading the code, or a TOS, or something, it has to be there for everyone to see:
If things can be seen on the backend then they should be seen by the public, if they can't then they shouldn't (well, also, can't), as a general principle, not just for votes. One other big point is private messages, afaik they aren't currently end-to-end encrypted. Gets a bit more iffy because key storage but "only the instance admin of the recipient's instance can see messages" is low-hanging fruit.
Wouldn't it be pretty simple to just encrypt them with the user's password? Or rather, create a key that's generated from the password, so you don't have to store the actual password in cookies, and then just decrypt it on the client side?
There will probably be issues with handling password resets, but other than that it doesn't sound too hard to implement it, unless I'm missing something, since my knowledge of crypto isn't anywhere near good. Should be one AES call, the way I see it.
EDIT: Oh, I've forgotten that you also have to somehow encrypt the messages that you send to someone, so a asymmetrical encryption is required, and that would be way harder. Or, maybe just store a public key, and encrypt the private key with your password, which is loaded into local storage and decrypted with your password once you log in? Still, that's not as easy as I thought.
Tbh it would be trivial to just salt and hash the usernames (for keying the votes), no need to encrypt or involve the users password. The salting and hashing would be handled by the users home instance ( which presumably the user trusts ) so building a rainbow table would be non trivial for an attacker ( assuming the home instance keeps its salts secret ).
I like this idea. Easily solves the main issue with other instance admins getting access to it, while also being easy to implement.
Another option would be to aggregate votes per instance so programming.dev might only see "42 upvotes from lemmy.world", but not user details. I don't think that changes the inter-instance trust equation, at least not notably, and it even works in conjunction with non-aggregated upvotes and displaying everything publicly.