Crossgeposted von: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/140646
ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse (including Mastodon – same caveats as the first two times, will be used interchangeably, deal with it) is not private. It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable. To function, the network relies upon the good faith participation of thousands of independently owned and operated servers, but a bad actor simply has to behave not in good faith and there is absolutely no mechanism to stop them or to get around this. Worse, whatever legal protections are in place around personal data are either non-applicable or would be stunningly hard to enforce.
In other news, people posting a picture onto a lamppost loose all means of preventing people from seeing it there.
Also the picture cannot be taken off and replicates itself and appears on hundreds of other lampposts around the world. I don’t think that’s intuitive for most people, who’re used to being able to delete stuff - as most personal content isn’t automatically mirrored by hundreds of other.
The lesson is the same: You are posting to a public forum, so you are effectively handing over your rights to your content to the internet. Do not expect the internet to suddenly agree to give it all back to you and erase all traces of it; see the Barbara Streisand effect.
You are right, when it is about you posting your content online.
When it comes to posting other people’s content or online bullying, this is a problem.