Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Not really. It’s a side effect of federation. The information is propagated much further than one might initially think. Even if your instance doesn’t display upvotes, it doesn’t stop any other instance in the federation from doing so.
More like a side effect of sending data to third parties. Whether it’s email or messages, you can’t control what happens with that data on the other end unless you control both ends. But then you’re talking to yourself.