Piefed currently has anonymous — or more accurately, pseudonymous, voting.
which in my opinion is a great thing. I really think this feature is important.
However, while it works great to hide votes from casual users, the current system is trivially easy to correlate accounts to their voting profiles. Unless they adopt specific behaviours with large friction (ie. not voting on any post or comment you reply to, not voting on any community you participate in). And even then, timestamps of activity and general activity level will probably still be enough.
My question basically is, is there a plan to mitigate this? Possibly through optional features like voting profiles being ephemeral (like you get reassigned a new one every X weeks or posts).
Btw really appreciate you, piefed devs.
What is the benefit to private votes? When the process is opaque it will be easier to abuse by advertisers or bots and whatnot
Abuse goes both ways. Some people get “stalked” or exposed in a not-so-nice way, or they want a platform closer to absolute privacy to feel free. Or they don’t want anybody to be able to look up what sex fetish they partake in. The government to know which anti-government protests they upvote… Some people go on down-voting sprees, do brigading, have bot armies…
Anonymity and privacy can (and will) be abused. But there’s also many reasons to have (online) privacy.