Ok, making people aware that they're not private, fine. That should be done, but only really because people are coming from Reddit and expecting them to be private.

if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight

I think if anyone tried to pick a fight with me over downvoting them, I'd just feel sorry for them for a second before blocking them. Not saying there aren't people like that, but they have to be very far and few between.

Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, , or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be

This seems extremely far fetched to me. If someone is going to dox you, it's going to be from your comments, not because you upvoted something. I just don't buy that. I can't even think of a hypothetical scenario where an up/downvote in isolation could be used to dox someone - feel free to propose one if you can

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

A hypothetical way to dox someone would be using the extra data available. Maybe they don't comment much about their particular interests, but they upvote stuff in location-specific communities, downvote people expressing a particular ideology, and anything else that would allow a (ridiculously dedicated) bad actor to work our a lot of personal info about them. Unlikely, but theoretically possible.

Also apparently Lemmy votes are marked as private but any software can choose to just ignore that request, which seems pretty open to abuse.