Title says it. Apparently lemmy devs are not concerned with such worldly matters as privacy, or respecting international privacy laws.
GDPR is for companies/corporations to “respect” user’s requests about their data.
Lemmy (ActivityPub, actually) isnt a company.
What you are saying is the equivalent of saying that the concept of writing is in direct violation of GDPR.
What you probably can do is request that an instance remove your content… And then do the same for every single other instance of any platform that implements ActivityPub (and not all of them will even have data coming from you) and is federated with your instance. And the only ones that would really need to comply are those that are based or operating in the EU.
This is still the internet, not some magical place.
Use some of the most basic fundamental internet safety rules and don’t provide potentially compromising information for no reason whatsoever. Especially since this isnt a corporation such as Facebook or Google who require you do so in order to use their service.
You are slightly wrong. The GDPR applies to everyone dealing with personal data on the regular, which you always have to assume with open text boxes. There have been plenty rulings already imposing fines on individual, private citizens for their misconduct in violation of the gdpr.
While Lemmy as a system might be exempt, anyone running Lemmy for sure isn’t, as long as it regularly processes data of EU citizens, which it does.
As for the devs, the gdpr does require privacy by design. One could argue the Devs themselves aren’t running it at all, so their software doesn’t have to adhere to it, but individual instance hosts could still be hit with fines for running it as is.
thank you for the correction
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It’s on the server admin to ensure that all exchanged data is taken care of appropriately.
“It’s on the server admin to do the literally impossible.”
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No. I think we mostly want federating instances to respect delete requests. But only the instance actually contacted has any onus to delete on their own instance and maybe, maybe try to send requests to delete elsewhere.
There’s no way there’s an expectation that the originating instance has a legal requirement to remove it from anywhere else.
It is impossible. Flatly impossible. Because you cannot see if they’ve really deleted it or not. You can rely on a “data processing agreement” which, together with $50, will buy you a small cup of coffee at Starbucks.
I federate with you here from China. I will agree to anything you like. And I will just attach an array of 16×16TB hard drives to slurp up all the data you send me. How will you know this is happening?
You can’t. It is impossible for you to know until it’s too late and I’ve used it for whatever purpose profits me.
An individual server admin can only ensure the data’s existence or lack thereof on their own server. Anything else presumes (rather stupidly) that bad faith actors don’t exist.
There are some great replies here
I think it’s also worth putting in extra effort to educate users so they know early and not when they’re expecting otherwise. The system has a benefit, and it’ll be smoother if users aren’t surprised
Data deletion and public vote records are the two big things that come to mind
Lemmy lack of central control is a feature. But it can still be GDPR compliant. GDPR did not make useNet illegal. GDPR does not make peer-to-peer illegal.
As an EU citizen you can still write letters to the editor of newspapers, and those letters can be published in those newspapers of record. Sending a message to Lemmy is akin to publishing publicly and opinion piece in a newspaper.
Certainly you can use GDPR to talk to an lemmy admin to remove your data on the instance you registered and account on. But due to the nature of Lemmy, it’s architecture, you can’t go out and retract all of the newspapers that have been published. That’s a physical impossibility.
Even if you could somehow talk to every administrator of every instance, you can’t prove you were that user who posted that data.
seems weird this expectation of privacy on public sites built for public consumption of public content posted by people publicly.
i mean, i get wanting to control your data. the software i use allows for this ( the 'bins offer a user-level purge).
but privacy? seems weird
I mean, to have a Lemmy account you already decided to put your trust in total strangers with questionable security credentials.
but… im not using lemmy
Mastadon works the same way, all ActivityPub services work the same way.
By being Federated that means data is being sent to remote servers. Sometimes that data doesn’t always make it, like a delete request. So someone on their own home-server deletes their post, but on some remote server where that post they made is cached, it’s not deleted, because the delete request never federated. For example, say you made a post on your own box, which you clearly have, and you delete a post, but it doesn’t get deleted over on say, Lemmy.world. That’s not purposeful, that’s something the developers also trying to fix, so I think it’s disingenuous to say they don’t care.
This is literally a consequence of how federation works. It’s not a purposeful violation of GDPR.
sorry, i was just being snotty.
i know full well and am on the side of pointing out the futility of attempting privacy in a public space.
You may not be directly using it, but this is part and parcel of the entire point of federated social media. Other software will be accessing the pool.
That’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation, especially considering Lemmy is developed in and funded in part by the EU, and the “staying online forever” thing is a consequence of Federation (and one they’re working on remedying).
If you were worried about this sort of thing, perhaps you should have done your research about the platform before making an account so you could bitch about it here. You definitely don’t sound like the voice of reason when you couldn’t be arsed to figure this out before you made an account.
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So you can’t make an account on this platform if you don’t agree with how it operates? By that logic no criticism of the platform by its users is possible, which is a great way to ensure it never gets better.
Edit: Let me make this clearer:
Saying in effect “yet you participate in lemmy” to dismiss the OP’s concerns is ridiculous. If this logic were taken to its endpoint, there would be no valid criticism of anything lemmy ever did.
Maybe that’s your goal, but I would rather not blindly defend lemmy because I like it. I’d rather make it better, and that starts with criticism.
I mean, yes?
If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.
Okay, since you clearly carefully read and completely agree and support eveything in the Lemmy TOS, please tell me where it says it will keep your comments forever.
I’m not saying that the terms can’t be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.
But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don’t get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don’t actually apply to you. If you don’t want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don’t use them.
You’ll find that in the ActivityPub specifications, actually, where delete messages are optional to implement.
The choice of how it implements ActivityPub’s optional components you’ll find in the Lemmy (or other Fediverse) source code.
So do we expect every user to read, understand, accept and agree with the specifications and source code of lemmy before they make an account, and having done so, never make any complaints about it?
This isn’t a difficult calculation - that person was effectively saying “yet you participate in lemmy” as a reason to dismiss any criticism. That should be on the face of it ridiculous. I don’t understand why anyone is taking their side except as a knee-jerk defense of their favourite platform.
Lemmy isn’t my favourite platform. Not even close. I’m not sure it’s even in my top ten.
What I am attacking is the rampant ignorance over a fundamental aspect of technology. A distributed system by its very nature has copies. Sometimes the copies last for a few milliseconds (think your router) and sometimes the copies last effectively forever (think the Internet Archive). And there is nothing you as the user can do to change this. There is also nothing that prevents someone from making the delete side of things not delete things. (Yes, this includes your router. How do you think “wiretaps” of modern digital communications systems work?)
In the case of ActivityPub this is even more egregious a level of ignorance. The entire point of federated software is to copy and spread content, so if you have even half a brain cell you’re going to have to know that there will be copies of everything you’ve ever posted on servers other than the one you posted it to. And yet we have stupid twats like the OP whining about the GDPR as if it is even slightly meaningful in a distributed system that crosses outside of EU’s jurisdiction.
Yeah, okay, see that’s a genuine, principled and material explanation with what’s wrong with the OP’s complaint, and I agree. The laws don’t make a lot of sense.
What I don’t agree with, and I think it should be at least as obvious as the point you just made, is that the response, “you can’t make this complaint because you made an account here” is just thoroughly bankrupt. Of course people can make criticisms of the platform whilst having an account here.
Also though, your explanation that it’s in the specs and source code seems like a tacit admission that it’s not in the TOS, so appealing to some supposedly informed agreement to those TOS is doubly wrong.
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It took this person 20 days to post this. They didn’t create their account to post it the same day or even the next day, ergo, they figured it out after the fact.
If they really had an issue with stuff like this, why pray-tel weren’t they already doing their due diligence to ensure that the service they were signing up for didn’t violate the GDPR in ways they didn’t like? That seems like a gross oversight by someone clearly incensed by it.
(Also, it continues to be questionable whether it’s actually breaking GDPR rules, and even in that regard, it would be individual server admins responsible for enforcing GDPR compliance.)
(Also, it continues to be questionable whether it’s actually breaking GDPR rules, and even in that regard, it would be individual server admins responsible for enforcing GDPR compliance.)
Wow I can’t believe you’re criticising the policy that you agreed to when you made your account. Sounds like you need to delete your account and take that kind of talk elsewhere.
You know, it’s clear you’re not arguing in good faith or taking what I’ve said in good faith, instead of choosing the most uncharitable interpretation you can to get a “gotcha,” so I think we’re done here.
Also, it’s not a “policy” it’s literally a byproduct of how federation works. Sorry you completely fail to understand the architecture of this service and how that influences how it works. All ActivityPub services suffer from the same issue.
Where’s the lie?
I don’t agree with that reasoning. It’s entirely possible for someone to be personally accepting of the Fediverse’s privacy issues, but make an intelligent, well informed, coherent critique of them.
Like perhaps the OP did? Seems like they had to personally accept the TOS, or at least tolerate it, but they also have a critique.
I also still don’t see how “yet you participate in lemmy” is a real answer.
I don’t think “yet you participate in Lemmy” is an especially good answer, either. The same reasoning applies.
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Thats why I stay as anonymous as possible.
always remember to throw in false information to throw others off your tail
completely unrelated, but I am a 45lb chihuahua with alopecia from Reno, Nevada.
Mods and admins can remove posts and they don’t stay on the server. If you delete it yourself, then it stays. Comments stay deleted, though and is replaced with a ‘deleted by creator’ message.
Mods and admins can remove posts but they do stay only if they’re “removed”. But if they’re “purged”, then they’re deleted from the server.
I noticed a lot of clients like sync try and hide that fact. Poorly
I don’t know where this myth came from, but you don’t have a right to erase your public posts from there internet under GDPR. See, for example, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/32361/does-a-user-have-the-right-to-request-their-forum-posts-deleted
If anything, you might have such rights under copyright law, if your posts cover the threshold for copyright. In that case, you can ask server admins to delete them, and they will have to comply. But the request has to reach them (if they’re defederated, the delete button won’t teach them, and you’ll have to contact them separately).
It gets worse: everything you post to Lemmy is sent to multiple other servers automatically. Those servers may be in jurisdictions that have very different privacy laws than the server you post from, or that hosts the community you’re posting to. You have no legal agreement with those servers.
We’re not done though. The ActivityPub standard makes delete optional, and other servers could be running anything, not just Lemmy. Some of them are probably running somebody’s janky pet project that implements half of ActivityPub, poorly, on a jailbroken smart light bulb or something.
Lemmy should implement proper post deletion, possibly with a delay to allow moderators and admins to inspect deleted posts, but expect anything you share via ActivityPub to follow the once on the internet, always on the internet rule even more than in the past.
Delete buttons are just a placebo on the Internet anway. At least activitypub is honest about that.
Almost like the entire platform is based on the idea that one server/owner can’t be in charge of the data.
Don’t get me wrong, not picking a fight, just what op said is kind of obvious to me. You’re picking a social media that is democratized and is federated with everyone. The natural tradeoff is that your data is not housed on one server… Which obviously means it’s not private.
Idk, the fediverse is a great place, but I would never post anything here I ever wanted to be private. It’s not an accident, it’s literally by design.
Lemmy should implement proper post deletion, possibly with a delay to allow moderators and admins to inspect deleted posts, but expect anything you share via ActivityPub to follow the once on the internet, always on the internet rule even more than in the past.
How would this be done? Like you mentioned, anyone can run a modified instance of Lemmy that does not honor delete requests. I suppose you could put something that retrieves content from other servers as a pull operation instead of a push, but that’s going to break Lemmy’s ability to work with other ActivityPub applications (at the very least).
There are no guarantees either way. Even if the delete was somehow enforceable in software, it can be defeated with a simple server backup/restore of any federated server.
I think federated servers should respect any user generated delete request, but as users we need to expect that they wont.
How would this be done? Like you mentioned, anyone can run a modified instance of Lemmy that does not honor delete requests.
Delete currently renders posts invisible to most users. Delete should actually delete the post from the server.
It’s impossible to ensure that the post is deleted from federated servers, web caches, clients that cache things, etc…
Very bad indeed! This is the beginning of the end for lemmy.
Ps for those who don’t know, copying a deleted comment makes it appear in your pastbin
Remind me again how things can be deleted from the internet?
/thread
Exactly, this is not specific to Lemmy as it applies to the whole internet.
Also, Lemmy is not a website : it would be somewhat like saying the language Python doesn’t obey GDPR !
To my knowledge, these privacy laws prevent corporations from holding onto your data after you have requested to delete it. Lemmy is not a corporation, and there is no single entity that holds onto all of your data. That’s just a tradeoff of being decentralized.
It’s been a problem for a while. Considering major social media companies have already gotten massive fines from the EU for violating the GDPR, maybe the lemmy devs will put more effort in setting up a deletion system once the EU sends them a fine for breaking the law?
They can’t fine the “lemmy devs” (nor any other Fediverse devs). They can fine the operators of servers, and even there only those operating servers in the legal jurisdiction of the EU (which is checks notes the EU).
In this case, the “lemmy devs” and the operators of lemmy.ml are the same people and it’s hosted within EU.
But - that’s still a far cry from getting any kind of GDPR violation report going, much less getting it through the process to actual fines.
People like to bring up GDPR violations as a some kind of super-moderator tool, but it isn’t that easy and it definitely isn’t automated.You are missing
theseveral points.- Lemmy is software.
lemmy.mlis a server. The devs of Lemmy can’t be fined unless specifically the server they operate (lemmy.ml, recall) is doing something against the GDPR. - There is more than Lemmy in this picture. You’re on kbin. There’s dozens of other servers based on ActivityPub out there, all of which can be breaking the GDPR. This non-problem is not related to Lemmy. It’s the foundational architecture of ActivityPub. (And HTTP, incidentally. And XMPP. And and and and… Literally every distributed protocol ever made or that ever will be made has this non-problem.
- The things people are complaining about here may not actually even be covered by GDPR.
Yeah. That’s what I said
Yeah, sorry, man. All the ignorance was blurring together and your post was caught unjustly in the fringe.
- Lemmy is software.
The EU doesn’t have global jurisdiction, if an instance developer or admin has no EU presence then they could just ignore them.
Sure. Lemmy does have such a presence though.
“Lemmy” is a piece of software. A piece of software can’t violate the GDPR, it’s just a blob of data. You need to be running a server to do something that would break the GDPR. Those server-running admins are the ones that need to be concerned about their EU presence.
Maybe some of the people developing Lemmy are in that category and might get in trouble, but it will be because they’re running servers not because they’re developing Lemmy. If they get arrested or whatever it has no effect on Lemmy-the-software.
Sure, but EU data protection laws may require EU based Lemmy instances to block instances that dont honour deletion requests.
This is why mastodon was built GDPR compliant by design.
All your posts on the fediverse are effectively a public blog of your thoughts that will be scraped and stored in servers you have no control over.
If you care about privacy, which I understand, you probably want to leave quickly.
Here’s a rundown from someone who got fed up with the fediverse and kinda rage quit: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/07/04/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-nightmare/
Another example of this is that it’s not just about lemmy. One way in which lemmy actually federated well worth microblogs like mastodon is that users can be followed from mastodon etc.
So any number of servers running a number of open source easy to run platforms could be taking up everything you specifically post.
Thank you for posting that link. I’m not fed up (completely?) yet I suppose but it was eye-opening. I’ll have to be a lot more careful about posting, possibly not post again.
If you care about privacy, which I understand, you probably want to leave quickly.
Just because you care about privacy it doesn’t mean that you have to stay indoors all the time. You can still hang around on the town square you just have to be conscious about what you do where.
A big part of caring about privacy is understanding how the platforms you use work and using them accordingly. With proprietary platforms this is often opaque and the rules can change. Open platforms are transparent and you can actually understand them - if you make the effort.
It’s not like deleting your comments or posts off of Reddit would magically remove them from all the various Reddit archives that exist around the Internet, either. Reddit only controls what happens on Reddit, and that problem is now generalized across the whole Fediverse.
Reddit still has to ensure what is deleted on their end, is actually deleted (which they don’t, as we saw during the whole protest thing with delted comments being restored)
The fact that archive websites exist doesn’t change that. A request under gdpr to such a site would have to result in deletion as well.
Sure someone who doesn’t host or specifically target EU citizens can ignore it at their leisure, but I doubt every Lemmy instance is hosted somewhere in non EU areas.
You’re misunderstanding my point, I think. A Lemmy instance within the EU can theoretically be fully compliant with EU laws and delete whatever they’re told to delete, but it’s not going to make a difference because non-EU Lemmy instances can retain that data. Likewise, Reddit can delete whatever the EU tells it to delete, but that won’t make a difference either because of those archives outside of Reddit;s control.
I’m not saying anything about what’s legal, just about what happens. When you post something in public, be it on Lemmy or on Reddit, that public post is not going to easily “go away” when you try to delete it regardless of whether your instance is following EU law. Arguing “but it should go away” isn’t going to make a difference, it isn’t going to go away. It’s important to understand this when making use of a forum like the Fediverse or Reddit.
Yes, and my point is, that the person running an instance has to comply with the gdpr if they are within the EU.
It doesn’t matter if data has already been propagated somewhere else. On that instance, data needs to be able to be fully deleted. For the matter of deletion, it is irrelevant where the data might have been pushed or mirrrored to, that is a seperate issue, which still needs to be dealt with. But one cannot argue that deleting is pointless or needn’t be implemented, just because “public” data is already mirrored elsewhere. The people running “elsewhere” have their own compliance to deal with.
that is a seperate issue, which still needs to be dealt with.
And my point is that expecting this to be “dealt with” is unrealistic. It’s going to continue existing on servers that are outside of your control and outside of the EU’s reach. No matter how hard the EU legislates or how hard you believe it should be possible to delete that data, it’s just not going to happen. Not without turning the world into a police state dystopia in the process, at any rate.
I’m not saying “don’t implement post deletion.” Go ahead and do that if it makes you feel better. But making you feel better is all that it’s really going to accomplish, in the grand scheme of things. If you’re concerned about stuff you post “sticking around” even after you want it gone, nothing is going to actually solve that. The only option is to not post that stuff in the first place.
There already is federation of deletion. It’s not even something that needs to be implemented.
I have less of a defeatist attitude about privacy. Same way I don’t think absitence is the only true way of contraconception. Privacy, yes, even if public spaces is possible. It’s not easy, it won’t just happen, but it is achievable. Needs a lot of work from a lot of people, but it is doable.
I don’t expect you to change your mind on that.
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That difference doesn’t make a difference to the point I was explaining. It doesn’t matter how or why those public posts are being replicated into archives from which deletion will be difficult or impossible. All that matters is that it is getting replicated.
there’s a delete button
