yes, requests to relays is sort of like a federated search. you could opt to poison data collection with erroneous queries but its far more efficient to run your own relay and have it stream events from others 

 Relays should be dump servers and don’t collect any data. Just transmit the notes 

 In an ideal world, in reality they could be a piece of very harmful code that tracks you. 

 True 

 Nostr was never been about privacy. Quit expecting it as default!

If anything, Nostr was designed for public exposure. 

 Of course it wasn’t ! It shouldn’t expose everything to the whole internet you know 

 "They" shouldn't expose..

We are talking about the relays you choose as a user 

 Sure! But how do you know what relay collects ? 

 Isn't that part of the fun? 🤔😜 

 🤷‍♂️ 

 You can apply whatever policy you want to yourself if it's your relay

Like leaking documents to wikileaks, if you push notes to other relays, you implicitly trust them with those notes