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by Spivak 150 days ago
It's not about the access, it's about the completeness. Imagine this paradigm takes off (I hope it does!), everyone has their own PDS and finally owns their data. Social apps link into their PDS to publish and share data exactly as they're supposed to.

Well now someone's PDS is a truly complete record of their social activity neatly organized for anyone that's interested. It's not a security issue, after all the data was still public before, but the barrier to entry is now zero. It's so low that you can just go to stalker.io, put in their handle, and it will analyze their profile and will print out a scary accurate timeline of their activity and location leveraging AI's geoguesser skill.
3 comments
__MatrixMan__ 150 days ago
If that's your threat model, then I think the way forward is to maintain separate identities. There are trade-offs there also of course: fragment yourself too much and the people who trust you will now only trust a portion of what you have to say... unless you have the time and energy to rebuild that trust multiple times.

Of course that's the same with the web we have today, the only difference is that you get control over which data goes with which identity rather than having that decision made for you by the platform boundaries.

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dameis 150 days ago
That is how it works, but people shouldn't be posting their location or sensitive information publicly if they don't want it exposed like that. That's basic opsec. Private data is currently being worked on for ATProto and will hopefully begin existing in 2026.
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dzaima 150 days ago
> people shouldn't be posting their location or sensitive information publicly if they don't want it exposed like that

They shouldn't, but they still could: accidentally paste in the wrong browser tab; have been stupid when they were 12 years old; have gotten drunk; or a number of other things.

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jrm4 149 days ago
The completeness AND the reliability!

Consider that a muddy, "oh a bunch of different servers downloaded this guys history, but it's different on one from the other" could be ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE SAFER from a surveillance perspective.

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