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How can an instance comply with GDPR if they're federated? (self.asklemmy)

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

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So if I understand GDPR correctly: If I want a service/business to remove all my personal data, they have to comply with it in a certain timespan or get in trouble with the law.

If I understand federation correctly: All posts get replicated on federated instances all over the fediverse.

My question: If I e.g. want lemmy.world to remove my data, all my posts etc are still up on lemmy.ml right? As they just have a copy of these posts?

Would I as a customer have to contact every single instance to get my data removed? Or how does GDPR compliance work with lemmy?

Or am I completely misunderstanding how GDPR works?

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[–] kromem 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The solution will be really simple and probably arrive in the next 12 months.

You just federate the removal requests too as part of the Lemmy API.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That feels potentially incomplete, because there's still the question of how to deal with an instance that refuses to honor federated removal requests, or which claims to but lies and secretly keeps a backup. If for example the legal/regulatory system was to decide that the original instance was responsible for ensuring user data is deleted even from federated servers, then the potential existence of such non-deleting servers would be a huge problem for the network as a whole.

[–] kromem 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As soon as the content moves to another server, it's their liability to comply.

If you scrape a website, the website removing a user's PII in response to a GDPR request is not contingent on you also deleting what you scraped.

Federation of removal requests would simply ease the flow of compliance for both hosts and users.

If certain hosts decide to ignore the requests and the GDPR, that's up to them.