I do this, too. I've noticed local companies who advertise heavily on local TV/radio often charge 2x as much as the competition who don't. And the aggressive advertisers are often arrogant and difficult to work with.

And it pisses me off when I see giant insurance companies spending millions on celebrity spokespeople and Superbowl ads. That represents a lot of denied claims.

Beyond all that: fuck reddit. Don't give money to spez.

Unfortunately, once you share something online it's moved beyond anyone's control. Even if the platform respects your wishes and does everything right, there's always 3rd party web crawlers, data harvesters, archival services, etc. They are always around, busily vacuuming up everything they can on the web. Few if any shared posts or comments will ever be truly deleted. Storage of text is cheap, and a lot of entities love hoarding data.

So, try to only post stuff you wouldn't mind your parents, coworkers, friends, etc. knowing about. Corporations and governments are moving more and more towards 100% surveillance and away from privacy and anonymity. It's a giant problem, and I hate it. But the only element of this you can control is your own behavior.

If you want to get away with something evil, hide it inside of something boring. That's what they're doing.

Appreciate the links. Thanks!

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I figured someone was on top of this and the reddit dipstick was just being overly dramatic as usual.

Right, but I think the difference here is lemmy allows users to embed these in their markdown text.

When it comes to posting on lemmy I'd also consider bringing up that old bromide: don't post anything you wouldn't want your mother to see.

At least for now, anyway.

random angry guy just hates lemmy for whatever reason

There is definitely some of that at play here. I am hoping some smarter cybersec folks without the anti-lemmy-rage-bias can weigh in on t.

I am not a cybersecurity expert. And these are good questions. The problem is certainly not unique to Lemmy.

However, my (limited) understanding of it the opposing opinion is. 1. This is bad for privacy (marketers and other bad actors use these to track down your IP and other metadata) and 2. It should have been thought of before now and already had some protections put into place.

Thanks. Not a fan of guilt by association of this type. The idea of FUD has been around for decades. It's not inherently crypto or inherently anything. It's just a useful acronym for a tactic some people use.