I’d be really keen to host a lemmy instance but just wondering with GDPR and everything, if there is anything else to consider outside of the technical setup and provisioning of hardware?
Lemmy is storing users data so is there any requirement to do anything GDPR wise?
Hope this is the right place for this - But seen a lot of posts interested in hosting their own lemmy instance, and this is an extension of that
I’d put a legal blob in the Legal section clearly outlining the nature of the fediverse and making it clear to the user that really deleting stuff from Lemmy is near impossible because every instance has a copy of it. That you’ll happily comply and purge the user’s data upon request but that it will still be cached on every other server.
I’d be interested to see what lawyers have to say about it. Technically the data sharing is absolutely required by the protocol so it might be okay with the GDPR, but it’s also possible that as worded it can’t possibly be GDPR compliant. It was designed with big companies like Google, Meta and big advertisers in mind, and didn’t really account for decentralized services like the fediverse…
Actually I wonder if the end result would end up essentially being, you can only federate with other GDPR compliant instances that you trust will respect the GDPR and honor federated data delete requests.
The core of the issue is that just by the virtue of running, an instance collects a stupid amount of data. I was baffled at how many user accounts my instance had discovered mere hours after starting it up.
Edit: row counts after just a week of running my private instance with only 3 users:
The profiling potential is scary, so users should be really careful with basically every interaction on the Fediverse, including votes. I bet the feds are having a field day monitoring what’s going on on exploding-heads and lemmygrad.
I believe this is probably what will happen if this ever becomes a big issue. GDPR was never intended to be navigable for anything except giant proprietary blob tech companies.
IANAL but no, as instances do not share “personal data”. There is a misconception that GDPR deletion requests apply to all data created by a user, but to my understanding it only applies to “personal data” as defined here: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/what-personal-data_en
Interestingly, they’re clearly aware of the existence of the Fediverse: https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publications/techdispatch/2022-07-26-techdispatch-12022-federated-social-media-platforms_en
However, this duplication mechanism renders content deletion or rectification more difficult. In case of deletion by the user, the platforms with duplicates receive usually an automated deletion request and must be trusted to comply and delete their duplicate.
Seems like sending the delete notice is all that’s required?
Seems like sending the delete notice is all that’s required?
Yes, but
and must be trusted to comply and delete their duplicate.
So because of that trust factor, if you really want to protect yourself and be 100% GDPR compliant, you’d probably want a legal contract with every instance to federate with ascertaining that they are GDPR compliant too to legally deflect blame if you’re unable to comply with a data delete request.
Under GDPR, any piece of potentially identifying information is considered personal data. I had GDPR training at work. Under the GDPR it’s not even possible to count unique visitors to your website because you’d have to keep track of some identifier even if just IP address and User-Agent, even if it’s entirely client side. You still have to get consent for this.
Even just community subscriptions is plenty of data to make a rather comprehensive profile of the user’s interests, and if you throw in votes it quickly becomes scary.
This is everything you upvoted:
The GDPR doesn’t apply only to services hosted in the EU, but any services handling the data of an EU citizen.
This is why some news outlets in the US just decided to block EU users all together, out of laziness.
IANAL, but the GDPR doesn’t cover pseudonymous data. Actually the GDPR encourages data processors (= services) to use pseudomization.
Personally identifiable information are IPs, email addresses, street address, name, date of birth, … Lemmy only collect IPs and email addresses. And these are not shared between instances.
Whether the service is hosted in the EU or not, as long as it serves EU users, lemmy should provide a way to delete emails and ip information in a self serving way. (maybe by deleting the account) In the mean time, instances admins have to fulfil requests to delete emails/ips of EU citizens from the database.
It’s not only IPs and emails though. Since users can put whatever they want in comments and posts, all of those must be treated as potential PII, and have to be included in subject access requests and deletion requests.
I’m gonna preface this: IANAL either.
There are also different legal bases for different kinds of data processing. For example, I’m pretty sure ensuring your site’s security counts as legitimate interest, and it’s pretty common that IP addresses are stored and processed as such. You don’t need to remove someone’s IP from your access logs just because they asked for it, because your interest in keeping your site secure for both yourself and everyone else outweighs their interest in the privacy of their data. Legitimate interest is the fuzziest of the six legal bases and it doesn’t help that advertisers have started attempting to qualify their BS as “legitimate interest” especially in consent forms (if they need your consent it’s not legitimate interest, it’s user consent, and they really should stop lying) but it still exists to keep things viable.
As a rule of thumb, if you’re storing data to provide a service you need to export or delete that data upon request, and if you’re doing anything over what’s strictly necessary for providing your service you need to ask the user about it. And you’re right, this applies to anyone whose instance is used by EU citizens.
Also, pseudonymous data still counts as personal data as long as the pseudonym can be linked back to personally identifiable information. You need to sever this link to comply with a deletion request.
I believe this is probably what will happen if this ever becomes a big issue. GDPR was never intended to be navigable for anything except giant proprietary blob tech companies.
As I said in another comment, the GDPR protects people. And the GDPR only applies to personnaly identifiable data (IPs, email addresses, street address, legal name, date of birh…) Lemmy only collect emails and IPs, and do not share them between instances. So it’s very easy to comply to the GDPR as long as you don’t do anything shady.
The EU has a marketing issue. They tried to pass legislation to prevent companies to collect data. But instead, company displayed a popup, kept collecting data, and blamed it on the EU. Everytime I see a popup, I blame ruthless data collection.
Actually, Lemmy is most likely violatiing the California Consumer Privacy Act, which, as opposed to the GPDR, gives the right to update/delete any data generated by the user, not only personally identifiable information.
You don’t see a lot of chatter about the CCPA, I wonder why.
Probably because it’s wholly unrealistic
I plan to implement a systemd timer that truly drops data from the database that was marked as “deleted” after around 30 days. I also have a note up that says to contact me if a copy of stored data has to be requested, etc.
This is already implemented in lemmy 0.18.1 for comments and posts!
Lemmy is storing users data
The only “personal data” that you are storing would be their email, perhaps IP addresses. As long as you are not altering your instance, placing third-party analytics or ads, you are good.
The main issue would be thay users can post personally identifiable information themselves.
For example, I can say that my social security number is 1234 and that would be personal data if it was true.
I’m not a lawyer, but i think i remember something that the gpdr rights cannot be just waived.
Since the user can just delete their own posts, it shouldn’t be a problem, but what do I know.
Everybody is talking about the GPDR, but the GPDR when hosting in the EU, should be the least if your concerns. As I said elsewhere:
- Lemmy is not doing tracking/personalized-ads.
- Lemmy is only collecting IPs and email addresses as personally identifiable information. It’s not sharing them. So it makes GDPR compliance easy.
The real issue is Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market which is a nightmare if you want to host lemmy legally. Realistically, the government don’t care about a few copyright infrigement by some guy/gal hosting a lemmy instance in their garage.
But, if you want to follow the law to the letter, the EU doesn’t have any fair use. So theorically, you need to allow users to only post creative commons images, with attribution. Or do some copyright checks on the content posted on your instance. Here is an EU video on how to comply with the directive, it’s a nightmare.
Intersting you bring that up copyright. I was looking at Peertube just earlier today and I was wondering how on earth some of the larger instances are dealing with copyright. There is no way they can watch every second of content that gets uploaded
I think you’re right though. Unless you get lucky/unlucky, its highly unlikely your instance is ever going to be used by many people, and therefore for most it’ll probably be a grey area.
If it did however, you need to not only “administer” that instance, both from a front and backend point of view, but there are also things like copyright to deal with.
First of all, I’m not a lawyer or a legal consultant, just a instance admin that wants to make sure that his instance complies.
Lemmy does not store any PII (birthdates, legal names, addresses,securitynumbers). But users are able to share whatever they want. And that can be a problem.
Check out my instances legal page: https://Laguna.chat/legal
In the future I want to make sure that my instances content can only be shared by GDPR respecting instances.
I am assuming this would be non commercial. I think in that case you probably would be exempted from GDPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation#Exemptions
If you’re self hosting (i.e. running it for yourself, your family members and maybe some friends), your use would fall under GDPR’s household exemption
does not apply to … the processing of personal data by an individual in the course of a purely personal or household activity
Thats Article (2)(2)a.
Of course, if you’re taking money or making it available to the general public it’s a different matter.
