

Ask HN: Who can see individual upvote data? - zaroth

This isn&#x27;t about HN, but even in general, what kind of protections do you expect with things like upvotes?<p>Do you consider whether your upvotes are tracked?<p>How often are upvotes tied to personalized ads in some way?<p>Could upvote history, or even derivative or aggregated data, be sold to third parties? Used internally? Subpoenaed by the courts?<p>Any links to worthwhile existing discussions on topic would be greatly appreciated.
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zaroth
14 upvotes, 0 comments, and for some reason, totally missing from the 'Ask'
page. My strangest 'Ask HN' ever...

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seiji
On this site, you can see every story somebody has submitted or upvoted by
going to their profile. The comments someone up/downvotes isn't available
publicly, but I assume it's kept on the backend.

I think the noise in a simple upvote action is too much for any legal meaning
though. You can't tell if somebody upvoted for agreement or humor (poe's law)
or upvoted out of friendship (voting rings) with no cares at all.

On Facebook, we know their upvotes ("likes" they say) are used for tracking
and manipulating everything you do — informing your news, tracking you across
the webternet, logging your interests. But, there too, the upvote is
ambiguous. If you upvote "X died" does it mean you like that they died or you
you're showing compassion?

Now, with Slashdot moderation, user upvote could be more useful assuming the
user isn't lying, but nothing supports slashdot-like moderation anywhere else.
Ain't nobody got time for quantized sentiment decisions.

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zaroth
I wonder if we'll ever see these sites offered a forwarding service - you
choose a submission and pay a fee and you get a randomly generated forwarding
address which lets you send an email to the people who up voted that story
(without learning their email address)

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seiji
That's what a facebook like is, isn't it? A way to get the user to indirectly
opt in to future marketing materials. When it started, nobody realized that's
what would happen.

