blog! “No, ActivityPub votes aren't anonymous”
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#ActivityPub #fediverse #mastodon #privacy
@Edent Good writeup! To add: originating servers could orchestrate anonymous (on the poll author's side) voting by sending votes from a shadow account instead of the user's real account, moving the knowledge of who voted from the pollster's server to the answerer's. On the fediverse, identity is cheap anyway, so there's not much added potential for abuse. @rimu recently did just that in PieFed, in the context of link aggregator votes.
Huh. I was enjoying the fact that poll answers here did not go to some central data mining server to become part of an inferential profile to help algorithmically target ads… but I think I'm gonna treat all polls now is if they were completely open and therefore skip any that might be vaguely sensitive until this all gets worked out.