Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it’s visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.
- Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
- Deleted account usernames remain visible too
- Anything remains visible on federated servers!
- When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
I think this is a feature, well the media aspect anyway. Immutable media. The rest can be developed on.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977
It’s not like they’re doing it on purpose, there’s a lot of things being worked on, and this is one of them.
The same is true for raddle. They kid themselves if they think anyone can’t record anything in there forever.
Anyway it’s also inaccurate. Deleted accounts are purged from the DB, so they’re definitelly not visible anymore
Likewise you you edit your comment, it’s edited in the DB.
So what your saying is that it’s just like Reddit in that respect.
Yeah, I can live with that, as long as everyone knows that if they really want something deleted, edit over it first.
For a humbling experience just seach for your Reddit and Lenny IDs on a seach engine. You will get a list of everything you have posted. Also some account info. It is all public. What happens when deleted, depends on who has scraped the data and their retension. This is just how public forums are and that goes all the way back to Usenet and listservs.
This is assuming your local server is still federated. If your local gets defederated you currently have no control over any previously federated copies of your posts / comments / votes.
And it also assumes, no one made a screenshot or used the web archive, crawled it and stored it in their own DB or any other way of copying stuff. Of course!
If you post any thing publicly on the internet, there is no way to be 100% sure it can be ever deleted again.
That isn’t what I am speaking to, and the fact someone could make a copy or it is archived somewhere doesn’t make the statement that you can always remove your data from the platform true. And there is a difference between a potential copy and an original federated, indexed version.
People need to be aware of the persistence of data, but people also have to understand the technology they are using to make their own informed decisions on how they engage.
In my opinion it’s unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system. Even if the official codebase is updated to do complete deletion & overwrite, it’s impossible to prevent some bad actor from federating in a fork that just ignores deletion requests.
Seems sensible to just not post anything that you don’t want to be available for the lifetime of the internet.
In my opinion it’s unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system.
yeah like. this is just a byproduct of how federation works currently. i don’t even know how you’d begin to design a federated system where some of these critiques can’t be levied
Anything that is visible to another party can be hijacked - even a 1:1 communication does not guarantee that the other party doesn’t capture the data and then spread it. The only things that are private are thoughts that you have which are not shared with others in any fashion. As soon as information is shared in any fashion, it is not private.
Past this point it’s a matter of how private you think is reasonably private. You could design a system where users are in control of their own data through a series of public and private keys, ensuring that keys must be active to view content, but as stated above even in such a case and the user revoking keys does not stop other people from making copies of said data. This is akin to screenshotting an NFT. For all intents and purposes, a copy of the data as it existed at the time of copying is now publicly available.
Quibbling over the fact that you’re the one who “truly owns” the data when it comes to something like social media feels like a mostly pointless endeavor because the outcome (data is available for others to view/consume/read/etc) is the same regardless of who “owns” it. Copyright law will apply to anything you produce, if it comes to legal problems (someone copies your artwork and sells it, for example) and having a system to prove you own it is primarily a formality to make it easier to prove ownership. Generally people aren’t arguing through this lens, however, and are instead arguing through the privacy/security lens - that they don’t want people stealing/selling their data, which lol, good luck - AI models are proof that no one in the world actually cares about this ownership if they reasonably think they can get away with using your data without any real incentive to not do so - interestingly copyright law and models being trained on corporate data such as movies are a vector by which the legality of this might actually stop or slow AI development and protect the end-users data.
Just as it’s impossible to stop scrapers from archiving data on traditional websites. “Deleted” data is probably in a database somewhere, being sold by someone. As you said, you lose some degree of control over your data as soon as you post it. Data is valuable, and if there is a will there is a way.
Exactly. Even a server to just go down one day. Theoretically it has a snapshot in time
@ffmike @elbowmacaroni advance ignoring deletion request technology like copy paste
I think an option for full data deletion would be nice for those who want it, otherwise people should also expect others recording their data, which can be published later on.
Parts of it may actually be required under EU law. GDPR requires that anyone holding data on EU citizens comply with certain things, including a request to delete certain kinds of data. The EU has shown themselves willing to go after sizeable corporations for violations; most Lemmy instance operators are much smaller. This should probably be addressed before people find themselves on the wrong end of lawsuits.
Thing is, Lemmy is easily compliant with the EU’s laws on this, because the laws state that the EU citizen merely needs to request the data be deleted. It says nothing about them having direct access to the lever to do it.
A basic Python script can be used purge the database after a written request and everything’s kosher.
I don’t understand why posts are held in reserve, rather than outright deleted. That’s a design decision that doesn’t totally make sense to me. I can see holding on to it for a period of time - 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, what have you - so that users can undelete things, but just hiding it from end users and calling it deleted seems pointless to me.
It’s not like anyone is trying to sell it to 3rd parties for model training. And while I could see a use case in academic research, the delete button seems like an implied revocation of a license to show or distribute the content, at least in the absence of a proper ToS.
And it just makes more noise for admins and mods.
I don’t think GDPR necessarily applies here, but I am not a lawyer. Quoting https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/:
Article 3.1 states that the GDPR applies to organizations that are based in the EU even if the data are being stored or used outside of the EU. Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions are met: the organization offers goods or services to people in the EU, or the organization monitors their online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)
I’m not sure just what the definition of an organization is, so perhaps any server hosted within the EU is covered by the GDPR, but for servers outside of the EU that don’t have ads (which seems like all servers currently), I don’t think this would count. The example on the linked site about “goods and services” includes stuff like looking for ads tailored at European countries, so I suspect that simply serving traffic from Europe isn’t enough.
The website also mentions the GDPR applies to “professional or commercial activity”. There’s also apparently an exception for under 250 employees. I don’t even know how that works when something is entirely managed by volunteers like this currently is.
At any rate, I suspect we’re a long way off from having to worry about the GDPR.
The GDPR itself doesn’t use the term organisation, it refers to data controllers and data processors.
A “data controller” refers to a person, company, or other body which decides the purposes and methods of processing personal data.
A “data processor” refers to a person, company, or other body which processes personal data on behalf of a data controller.
As someone from within the EU working in data the fediverse is absolutely not a long way off having to consider this, GDPR impacts even the smallest businesses or voluntary groups - it’s just how we handle data.
To make it easier to grasp GDPR is about your rights over your data, those don’t change depending on who is processing it, nor does the processors obligation, however what would be considered appropriate safeguards would scale with the size and intent of your organisation - it would be silly for my local shop to have a data protection officer.
I suppose the question would become who is the controller, is it the person who provides the software or the person who provides the servers? Typically it’s the servers.
Gdpr applies to servers within the EU, or for servers with EU clients. You can demand that they delete and stop transmitting data.
But you accept to transmit data all over the world, in the end that data could end up somewhere outside of the EU without any direct EU customers. Then all bounds are gone.
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Do worry about GDPR in conforming to deletion requests, but only your own data, not anything you transmitted.
GDPR likely doesn’t apply to public facing forums in the way you’re thinking, if you post actual personal data (which has a strict definition) yes it’s murkier, but in general just posting on a public facing forum is extremely unlikely to qualify under right to be forgotten under GDPR.
Notably, GDPR is extremely unclear about this specific circumstance, and will likely fall to practicality. The user can make requests for their data to be deleted, those should in general be followed no matter who’s server it’s on, but they have to be given to each server by the user. Following the deletion requests is generally advisable, but again, it’s highly unlikely GDPR applies here. Feel free to get a GDPR lawyer to actually weigh in though.
