Yes.

Just muddling around I've built queries that: (a) list all of my post & comments, everybody who voted on them, and their votes (b) tally how many times specific users have upvoted or downvoted me. (c) identifies the most prolific voters across the Fediverse and the communities they are voting in (d) identifies users with the same username or display name across all instances and correlates the activities across those accounts.

These are all for the sake of learning and are innocuos the way I'm using them. It is plain to see that someone with skills and an agenda could make more out of it than I have.

What about private messages? We should assume the person running the instance can read all private messages.

I think this is to be expected - some instances have downvotes disabled but that doesn't seem to be the rule of thumb.

There are quite a few questions about data retention, usage, retrieval, compliance and how it is shared which will need to be addressed as the platform grows.

Countdown for this to be monetised by someone.

I'm fine with it too. Don't think I'd be here if I wasn't okay with sharing these sort of things. If I wanted privacy for my upvotes or downvotes (why tho?), I'd do it anonymously.

And yeah, I upvoted the beans as well. Ate beans 90% of the time as a student. Still farting from it 20 years later.

I'd be really shocked if they recorded IP addresses as well.

ITT: we muddy the waters and people get scared because they don’t know how deep they are anymore despite standing in it

Good to know but I always assume everything is public on the internet.

I agree that this is a good fit for YSK, however, I think it's important to keep in mind that privacy isn't a main goal of the system. It's designed to distribute the cost and responsibility and be difficult to take down or influence as a whole network, but it does not appear to be designed to hide user activities.

In fact, I propose that we keep this information publicly listed so that users are under no illusion that their interaction with Lemmy is private. Transparency and communication prevents misunderstandings.