1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Announcing Online Presence Indicators
Those of us who moderate communities where literal hundreds and thousands of accounts join and wait for "the mods are asleep" . . . .
Those of us who have been unlucky enough to have been doxxed, and for whom this manner of telemetry broadcast will alert the people who want to rape and murder us that we are home -- or out of the house -- or asleep -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcast telemetry?
You overstate your case. Already, one can look at a user's recent posts and comments, note the timestamps of each, and figure out when he is usually active. There are tools that automate this and make a convenient heatmap-style plot.
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In college, I spent far too much time on Reddit. (I deleted that account.) Accordingly, a plot of my comments over time would have shown any interested person:
1. When I slept.
2. When I worked (gaps for the commute; low activity throughout the workday; high activity during lunch).
3. When I was in class (by complete silence at the same time every week).
4. When my semester started and ended; when final exams took place; when my school had breaks and vacation days.
Back then, a Reddit profile only showed the last 1000 comments. But it would not have taken much effort for someone with rudimentary programming skills to write code that periodically scraped my profile, saved my comments and posts in a database, and generated a long-term plot. (I had enemies, so I would not be surprised if someone had done just that.)
Knowing this, I acted as though anyone on Reddit knew what school I attended and what my major was, and I made sure that my other disclosures (interests, personal characteristics disclosed, writing style) added up could not give me away.
Comment by Frogging101 at 04/03/2021 at 21:33 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
True, one could scrape comments and posts and plot activity times based on that, but they could not know when you were reading but not posting or commenting, and it would not consistently have a granularity measured in minutes. Some people mostly lurk without posting or commenting; with presence indicators, this information could be broadcast without their knowledge.