this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
162 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
37724 readers
566 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The more important part for privacy: Mail address is optional, and IP addresses are not stored in the database. A correctly configured instance (at least for EU legislation) also will not log IP addresses in the web server - with that you can have profiles that can't be tied to an actual human, and you don't have location and movement data.
The data deletion is pretty much a nice to have - it's on the level of the Exchange feature to recall Emails: Sure, you can ask nicely, but outside of your own server pretty much nobody will care. Lemmy is federated over multiple jurisdictions, so even with full deletion implemented there'll almost certainly be instances which will ignore the deletion request - and it will be completely legal for them to do so. More important is education about what you publish, and a basic understanding of the technical and legal realities you'll have to deal with if you later decide you want that information gone.
I already had that discussion with my 6 year old when she wanted to publish some videos - and she understood the problems quite well.
Lemmy also seems to federate your matrix_user_id, that is clear personal data. It does not matter how the data gets to the federated server, this is still user data within the scope of the GDPR. It does not matter that that server does not have an agreement with the user, the instance that would ignore a GPDR related deletion request would be in direct violation of the GDPR. Maybe it can do that without consequences, though.
I completely understand that making Lemmy fully GPDR compliant will probably be impossible, however I don't like the approach of "we will not succeed, so we don't make any attempt". Instances should actually delete data when that is requested, or instance hosts can get fined. For now, Lemmy has bigger issues to solve, but eventually they should do at least a best effort attempt to respect user data.
I had a look into the wording of the gdpr (more specifically the Data protection act as it is implemented in the UK) it seems to refer to organisations. I think most, if not all, instances are not hosted by organisations. (Just some group or individual hosting it on personal or rented hardware). Laws such as this are designed with centralization in mind, and kind of don't make sense in the context of decentralisation.
Yea these laws are super difficult in a distributed network and I think that you would not be responsible if you made an attempt to say to the other instances that this data is now deleted. But at the moment, when you delete a message on an instance, it just flips a boolean and says the message is deleted. (mods can purge comments though, so then it is actually deleted).
And you would probably be fine as an individual, but I can see larger Lemmy instances get large enough that these kinds of rules will apply to them. I have seen a few cases where small associations got fined for violating the GDPR, that would be a waste of money that was donated for hosting the instance.