What's the best practice for using Lemmy/Reddit/social media in regard to privacy? Create new accounts often?

It doesn't take a genius to realize that a long-running account on any platform can easily be used to build a profile of someone.

Since many discussions on Lemmy and other platforms can often cause someone to write about their job, family, hobbies, where they live (city/community), etc., there's a lot of concern about non-private post history being used against someone.

Other than using fake names, throwaway emails, etc. are there any other best practices for handling this?

Should we be creating new accounts/profiles every once in a while?

Wigglehard, (edited )

Don’t ever show your face, don’t give out job or home address or where you work, don’t post photos where you reflect back, don’t fall for thirst traps and give out your photo to supposed hot N sexy babes, also vpn and tell ppl you live in Texas when you really live in Vermont to fuck with doxxers

PopOfAfrica,

Use privacy respecting FOSS software.

That means, Linux, Modified android OSs, using browsers like Tor Librewolf.

Always use a VPN, and only use anonymous accounts.

That means no Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or any of the other data vultures.

Quereller,

This is a very important topic, which I have thought a lot since I started with Reddit years ago. Personally, I try to be mindful what I post and only say things I also would say in RL. But it is clear that one get a very good idea about the personality of someone from all the posts (and likes). For me I decided that sometimes you need to stand to your values and world views. Even if this might be negative for you.

withersailor,

There is no privacy online. Enough incentive your history across accounts, instances, usernames can be combined.

Think about risks instead. Who is going to use your post against you? How much effort are they going to go to? What’s your risk?

If you’re hiding from the a government, best not to be online. If what you post will get you killed, don’t post it.

Showroom7561,

I think the concern (for anyone) is that with enough post history, just about anyone would be able to identify you AND would have knowledge of just about every aspect of your life.

This goes beyond what Amazon or Google might do, since they're just concerned about monetizing.

Nobody can anticipate all risks, especially if it comes out of the blue from an ex-employer, ex-partner, political opponent, neighbor, friend or ex-friend, etc.

Since many of us are new to Lemmy, and have an opportunity to blunt this kind of profile building right from the start, I was hoping that there may be some strategies we could use right away.

withersailor,

Nobody can anticipate all risks

Then stick to “don’t be online” as you no matter what you do, you can’t anticipate how that will expose you later.

Showroom7561,

Right. You can't anticipate how historical posts can affect you later, but are there strategies to limit this exposure?

I haven't done this (yet), but I know some people will create numerous profiles and limit certain topics/subreddits/lemmy communities to specific profiles. That way, if profile A never discusses work or family, but only gardening, there's almost no chance that someone targeting that profile could do much harm.

I guess, this would be the same as having multiple email addresses or alias/forwarding email addresses... to limit what information someone could possibly get from you, even if they had access to all email related to that single account.

withersailor,

I’d say no. Your fooling yourself if you think you can. The best you can do is make it harder, but that is only true compared to computing power. Problems that were hard, are now possible because computing power has increased.

Any one profile could give enough to out you. A textual analysis can tie separate text posted by different accounts to the same person. (Varying degrees of accuracy for this. If anyone would do parse all Lemmy comments to do this is separate issue.)

In short, don’t post anything that might compromise you. But how fruitful are conversations if you’re always hiding anything that might out you? Stick to only non personal stuff? Information about local shops, movies, etc etc can all narrow down your location. But even with that, narrowing down to a town with 50 people in it, is different to a town with 1 million people.

It isn’t only what you post. Someone else can also out you. Someone who knows you, or someone that you don’t know. Your PC can be hacked, etc etc. The options go on and on.

Define what your risk is. Define who your adversaries are. Then plan how to operate with acceptable risk tolerance.

Semmelstulle,
Semmelstulle avatar

Well I guess it is like with every other social media. I think the most private you can be while using social media is using it in your browser only. There you can make use of strict content blocking and manipulate websites to work around login walls. For posting stuff I always recommend to strip out any metadata from files beforehand and really only include in your posts what's necessary.
The threadiverse and fediverse only differ in being mostly public, scraping stuff would be easy. From what I believe, trashing and creating accounts all the time will not only cost you lots of convenience but would also make you gain almost no extra privacy.

Showroom7561,

For posting stuff I always recommend to strip out any metadata from files

Yeah, I do this when posting photos, and it's a good reminder.

I guess my concerns are less about browser/server snooping, but more about what data is publicly accessible from someone's post history.

I've heard of some people creating accounts for certain topics, rather than one account for everything. This would compartmentalize any posts and limit them only to a narrow range of topics. Do you think there's value in doing that?

glacier,
@glacier@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Lemmy isn't a private messenger and it's safe to assume that anything you post on a site like Lemmy or Reddit could be seen or saved by anyone. On reddit you can edit older posts into gibberish and then delete them, on Lemmy you cannot fully delete posts from all instances so you have to be very careful. Making a new account every once in a while may help depending on your threat model

Showroom7561,

On reddit you can edit older posts into gibberish and then delete them

Speaking of which, when I get my data export from Reddit, I do plan to edit my posts - is there a plugin or script that can do this automatically. I'm not going back to edit thousands of posts over the last 13+ years, which is something I did with Facebook and that took weeks! LOL

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