Been just linked to this post, that claims that on Lenny:
- Messages are never deleted, only hidden, a GDPR violation
- Deleted usernames are also not deleted, only hidden, same thing
- Stuff remains on federated servers even if you delete it
- There’s no way to delete yourself from the network if you choose to do so
Gut feeling says none of this is true or is only half truths, but want to be sure before i invest myself heavily on this platform.
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Few things:
- Federated Protocol essentially offers something similar to Peer-To-Peer communication like Bit Torrent, only that it’s a server-to-server communication protocol. You could GDPR the Lemmy servers that are within the EU jurisdiction, but good luck enforcing that outside of EU.
- Anything you post in public is PUBLIC, this should be obvious and I honestly advise not to put your real name out there if you’re not going to be responsible with your posting or behavior.
- Services like Internet Archive exists, so your stuff are going to be saved forever whether you like to or not.
If you’re not comfortable with the non-compliance of GDPR on Lemmy Server, then I can suggest two things:
- Detach your real life identity from Lemmy and assume everything you do with that service/website is public.
- Find other platform that respects GDPR.
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GDPR compliance is not optional for entities that interact with European citizens, you don’t get to say “Oh well, that doesn’t work for me”. You MUST be GDPR compliant, or you WILL get fined, and the GDPR fines are no joke! Still checking and asking, but if this messages thing happens to really be a GDPR violation, every single instance admin that interacts with EU citizens (so, all of them) will be under threat of huge fines. That’d mean Lemmy would be a HUGE legal liability for instance creators, and pretty much a no-go.
The fact that this is for a feature that is also a potential huge waste of resources, as you’d keep deleted messages potentially indefinitely if the people with the accounts don’t delete them, makes me feel this was not well thought out.
As I said, it only within the CONFINE OF THE EU JURISDICTION. Your law have no power over the American citizen and we don’t have to comply with GDPR and neither does Lemmy that is hosted in USA do.
Lemmy was created to support federation of servers and the inherent problem with that is that it is incompatible with GDPR legal system, because while you can enforce GDPR on one server, you can’t guarantee enforcement of it on any other servers that retain your posts or threads, because they can retain a copy of your posts thereby defeating your “right to be forgotten.” So in that context, even if that one server comply with your GDPR request, is your government still going to punish that one server for something outside of their control? Lemmy, PeerTube, Mastodon, and so forth all have servers to tackle the crux of the problem in social media, The Network Effect. When you set up one server, you would notice that your one server have no content when you don’t have visitors or users using that server, so you have to connect to other servers to get the contents you want and so forth, the trade off is that you can’t control what goes on in that other server unless they’re kind enough to give you some of that measure of control which is no guarantee.
It doesn’t matter where the service is hosted, if it serves EU citizens it MUST comply with the GDPR, even if it’s hosted in USA, that’s why even the big companies like Google, Microsoft and all the others comply (or SAY they do, no one trusts FB on data deletion). So yes, they DO have power there.
Also, from what i understand you’re assuming federation means that everything is everywhere. That is not true. From what i see from Lemmy’s mechanisms (and from what my critical lack of caffeine allows me at the moment), if something is deleted on one instance it should get deleted on all as Lemmy sends the deletion request to other instances, and anything remaining from other places should be eventually deleted and flushed out of caches, that part shouldn’t be an issue there. So, the instance admins would be responsible only for the data of the users in their servers, not the others. And yes, they WOULD be responsible and legally liable if this is in fact a violation (still not sure, might be OK and not even a problem as “restriction of processing” from article 18, i guess i’ll continue searching tomorrow, it’s 2AM here and i’m done).
