this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Mastodon thinks Lemmy’s privacy stinks. What say you? (raddle.me)
submitted 1 year ago by elbowmacaroni@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
279 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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
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[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] pterodactyl@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] static@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

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.

--
Do worry about GDPR in conforming to deletion requests, but only your own data, not anything you transmitted.