Personally, I don’t care too much about my votes being public. I vote very thoughtfully and try to upvote posts and comments that add to the community and I downvote misinformation.

But, I think people should be able to choose. I do think there are many valid reason for them to be private.

Zero. Use this site with a VPN and assume any data you put on here is being harvested.

Zero. Upvotes are a show of appreciation and I don't see why anyone would want that to be private. When it comes to downvotes, if you wouldn't want someone to know you downvoted something, you can't stand by that decision and so shouldn't have downvoted in the first place. Public reactions (alongside the self moderation features) keeps the fediverse honest and prevents the hostile type of downvote spamming you see on other platforms like reddit.

zero, it’s on the internet, it:s not “private”

I wish my votes were even more public. If I’ve taken the time to downvote your bullshit/nonsense, I want you to know it was me. Same with upvotes.

On Lemmy? As others have said, they’re automatically federated and so anyone can see them.

On Piefed though? I have a user setting where I can choose whether my votes federate and I can override that default on a given post if I choose with a hot key. That’s how it should be. IMHO, more of y’all should use Piefed.

Not at all, and I believe that’s the point.

No idea. I don’t like public voting and only do it on rare occasions. I was doing it a lot to get rid of things from my feed but rimu put in a read button so now Im back to almost never doing it.

Data has to federate, so nothing is going to really be private like you mention. I think it’s unreasonable to expect anything otherwise. I don’t see a point to hiding votes because of this. If someone starts stalking or harassing their voters for some reason, have a reporting system and handle that.

They are not, it’s akin to shouting in the rain. Most people will be inside not getting wet, but there people that either like the rain, or get paid to stand in it

The lemmy vote viewer is quite limited but I suspect that there are are a few servers that have spun there own DB queries and charting:

Lemvotes shows votes. So, it’s not private.

They’re not private at all, I’ve never been under the illusion that they were.

I like it, have some guts, stand on business. If people want to downvote they should be willing to attach their name to it, internet points are fake anyway.

I thought there was a user search that showed you what they upvoted or downvoted on. To me that could be abused by a party like the US border agents, or ads to check what type of things you’ve marked as a yay or nay

Its like sitting near a window basically, people on the sidewalk are gonna have trouble seeing you with just their eyes (i mean like most sidewalks are quite far away to the window because of front yards) but anyone could get a camera with zoom lens and see your face.

not. at all. i consider anything i put here akin to standing on my nearest street corner during rush hour, shouting into the darkness

confused how anyone could think anything otherwise.

Me personally I would say that private votes are better if possible. But you should be able to filter when you’re logged in what you upvoted and downvoted. That’s how I would like it ideally.