I have been working on Lemvotes, a tool to check who voted on a Lemmy post. In this blog post, I will describe how it works and the ethics of such a tool.
Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on?
I didn’t have time to reply earlier, but I was thinking the same thing, except with the extra step of replacing the username with a unique user identifier randomly generated at signup by the user’s instance and kept secret.
I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.
I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.
What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.
I didn’t have time to reply earlier, but I was thinking the same thing, except with the extra step of replacing the username with a unique user identifier randomly generated at signup by the user’s instance and kept secret.
I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.
What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.
I was thinking of a variable-length hash, but if we use a fixed length (which I acknowledge the term “salt” does imply), then I agree.