I was under the impression that it’s intentionally #1 so that other instances can still track malicious voting behavior (e.g. mass-downvoting posts in a community) of an anonymous account without knowing the real identity. But yeah I’m guessing we would need some clarification somewhere on the specifics; I tried looking for documentation on how the private voting works but couldn’t find any, and I didn’t feel like digging in the code or hitting the API just yet.
If the voting ID is static in any way, it’s still inevitably trivial to de-anonymize a user’s votes, but it would at least require a more heuristic approach (e.g. finding a thread that the user is in and checking to see if they have upvoted/downvotes any comments they’re replying to). As well, the instance tag (@piefed.ca for example) on the voting ID can narrow things down significantly when trying to figure out which user is voting.
I’m mainly just thinking about how these systems can be scraped for mass data collection by e.g. advertisers/big tech in the future. Upvotes and downvote behavior can really paint a detailed picture of someone when all data is combined.
How so? I feel it is an example of the effect because customers are drawn in with a low price and are surprised by a plethora of seemingly-sneaky fees, which take up a large portion of the total bill. Customers feel negatively about the long list of fees and the implication that they’ve been tricked, but they wouldn’t think twice if the fees were just included in the base price. It is against their best interest to be automatically and opaquely charged for all regular services (i.e. normal airlines) instead of being transparently given the option to forego those that they do not care about (i.e., fee-based airline).