Lemmy

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Lemmy (and the fediverse) and GDPR: a clusterfuck waiting to happen? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

your instance admin does not have any authority or responsibility to ensure that your previously public posts get deleted anywhere else in the world other than the instance they run.

Please back up this claim. I'm sure not even the best GDPR consultants out there could answer this question with confidence at this point in time.

For example, if you write a public blog post on some public blog service, and later delete it, then it won’t be the responsibility of the blog service owner to remove your post from elsewhere on the internet.

This is a completely different thing. We're talking about the automatic replication that happens between the different Lemmy instances, not about someone copying your comment and posting it somewhere else.

Again, I think you guys are handling OP's topic way to leasurely. The GDPR is a beast with teeth and it's going to bite your ass if you don't take it seriously enough.