There's no way that isn't going to be abused. Some marketing or tracking agency will setup a fediverse server and just collect all data like this for free. Or worse, take advantage of a friendica instance to bombard it with requests for data collection purposes.
Tools do not have morality or ethics, only people do. Some people use tools in a morally and/or ethically questionable manner, either for profit or because it amuses them.
True, we perpetuate the unjust systems around us. Systems can be constructed to unfairly benefit some over others as well, like how capitalism unfairly benefits the wealthy.
...which is why design systems so that when using them we can account for the human element, right? Come on! We have centuries-spanning systems even industries built on that! Engineering, avionics, Yelp reviews...
Like, of course; tho any sort of "accounting" should IMO start from the base that the intent of this entire thing is to publicly share public information.
Yes, but as long as you don’t reveal your identity, they can’t do much to track you.
They don’t have access to your IP.
Of course, it you’re using the same username over multiple services, or reveal identifying information (which is much easier to analyse now due to AI) they will be able to track you.
Oh I didn't know that, that's good. Though I think the point still stands since it's not a guarantee instance admins will use it (unless it's a default).
This is nothing new. Fire up any ActivityPub server and you can see everything over the wire. As a Lemmy admin of my server of just me, I can also see it in the UI.
I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.