So, I’m kinda new to this Lemmy thingy and the fediverse. I like the fediverse from a technological standpoint. However, I think that, if we gain more and more traction, Lemmy (and by extend the entire fediverse) is a GDPR clusterfuck waiting to happen. With big and expensive repercussions…
Why? Well, according to GDPR, all personal data from EU users must remain in the EU. And personal data goes really far. Even an IP-address is personal data. An e-mail address is personal data. I don’t think there is jurisprudence regarding usernames, so that might be up for discussion.
Since the entire goal of the fediverse is “transporting” all data to all servers inside the ActivityPub/fediverse world, the data of a EU member will be transported all over the place. Resulting in a giant GDPR breach. And I have no idea who will be held responsible… The people hosting an instance? The developers of Lemmy? The developers of ActivityPub?
Large corporations are getting hefty fines for GDPR breaches. And since Lemmy is growing, Lemmy might be “in the spotlights” in the upcoming years.
I don’t like GDPR, and I’m all for the technological setup of the fediverse. However, I definitely can see a “competitor” (that is currently very large but loosing ground quickly) having a clear eye out to eliminate the competition…
What do y’all thing about this?
I’m not sure this is true. Like imagine someone posts their address in a Lemmy post - I’m pretty sure that counts as PII and they have the right to request its deletion.
As you write it you can also delete it.
It’s still you willingly doing it, not the server spreading your data without your consent, this last case is where GDPR applies.
But it’s a very stupid thing to do, never post your personal data in comments.
If you delete your account are your comments deleted? That’s really where the potential problem lies.
No, comments are not deleted, they just appear as from [deleted] user.
There are some apps that can delete comments, not sure it’s actually worth the effort, reddit has backups, some people said their stuff was restored.
If you’re set on deleting your stuff, I believe it’s better to overwrite comments with gibberish instead of just deleting them, apps can do that.
HackerNews doesn’t do this though.
Even if you send a GDPR request? They might not delete your comments by default, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it when faced with a legal request.