You clearly put a lot of effort into writing this blog post, creating the header image and sharing it across dozens of Lemmy communities and Github issues. I only wish you would put even a fraction of this effort into actually resolving some of the mentioned issues. After all you are a programmer and many of them are relatively easy to resolve with a bit of time.
What you dont seem to realize is that Lemmy only has two fulltime developers (Dessalines and me). We are both working every day to fix bugs and implement new features in Lemmy, but there are only so many hours in a day. Whenever we resolve one issue, a new one gets reported so its impossible to resolve all of them. The repos for lemmy and lemmy-ui currently have 750 issues. So there is no other way but to strictly prioritize what we work on, and ignore things we dont have time for. Obviously people will disagree with the exact priorities, that is inevitable.
The only solution is to get more contributors who help work through the issue backlog. Or if you are not willing to do that, switch to a different platform which is backed by venture capital and can pay dozens of developers to work on it.
Did you read the article and the feedback that you’ve received from your other users?
Any FOSS platform has capacity issues. I run my own FOSS projects with zero grant funds and where I’m the only developer. I understand this issue.
What we’re talking about here is prioritization. My point is that you should not prioritize “new features” when existing features are a legal, moral, and grave financial risk to your community. And this isn’t just “my priority” – it’s clearly been shown that this is the desired priority of your community.
I bet your project doesnt have 50.000 monthly users so its not comparable at all. Out of all these users only you and one or two others care so much about GDPR (yet not enough to make actual contributions yourself). We really cant change our priorities for a single user out of thousands.
How exactly does Lemmy remain in compliance with laws regarding, for example, a user’s right to have all data associated with their account deleted (right to erasure, etc), or ensure that it is only kept for a time period reasonable while the user is actively using your services (data protection retention periods, etc)?
It’s not a big deal for me, just strange to think Lemmy of all places would be built to be so anti user’s data rights. The user is ultimately the one that decides what is done with their information/property, after all.
Why is federation bad? It’s the only way to decentralize without having everyone scattered across millions of sites.
The days prior to 2014 are gone and for the most part, the overwhelming majority of people don’t want to register across dozens of sites. Everyone naturally gravitates toward massive content silos where they can get everything in one place.
This is an argument for having everyone decentralized rather then together in massive content silos.
Yes, if everyone is together it is much easier for misinformation to spread
If a Russian content farm was to try and get a message out would it be easier if they made one post seen by millions or thousands of posts seen by a few thousand people
Even Lemmy mods know federation is a bad thing because their answer to preventing the above is defederating
GDPR does not depend on business size, there are just a few stricter requirements when you have more than 250 employees. But most of the GDPR still applies to my knowledge.
Uhuh, suuureeeee. Tell that to any number of fines that has yearly been issued by my country’s GDPR oversight agency on ordinary citizens.
GDPR only applies when people file reports and when there are lawsuits. There’s literally no shortage of articles of people fined for GDPR violations, all people need to do is search for them.
When someone files the inevitable court case, please let me know. I have some admin behavior bullshit I will be willing to personally get in contact with the lawyers about that I think could help it.
If you think that your company can simply ignore the introduction of the GDPR and continue as before, well, think again. Any company that is found not to be complying with regulations of GDPR can be penalized with heavy fines, or a company may have to suspend or stop processing personal data. In fact, many companies are not yet ready for GDPR because they figure this legislation will not influence their company.
DPR compliance is as important for companies with less than 250 employees as it is for large multi-national corporations. Consequently, many companies have chosen to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) to address to the GDPR requirements or appoint a consultancy company to get their GDPR preparations started before delegating the role to an existing employee. For further information about this option, please refer to our article “Do Small Companies Need to Appoint a DPO under GDPR?”
Not sure how you think individual people can get fined under the GDPR but companies with less than 250 employees can’t. This is just about the only exemption:
Article 30 of GDPR is about a data inventory record and provides one potential exception for Organisations with less than 250 employees. This is a limited exemption which states that Organisations with less than 250 employees may be exempt from maintaining a data Inventory or record of processing activities. This Exemption is a minor exemption and only applies for Organisations with less than 250 employees in certain circumstances where there is no processing that is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, the processing is only occasional, excludes special categories of personal data and personal data related to criminal convictions. The Full text of Article 30 is below. This limited exemption should in no means be interpreted by Organisations with less than 250 employees as an authorisation to ignore overall GDPR Compliance.
Doesn’t matter. Lemmy instances are technically “entities” so the law applies to them. You don’t have to be a business, just “anything that processes EU citizen’s personal data”.
GDPR applies regardless of any “business”. It applies to any entity processing personal data.
Which is incredibly broad by the way. IP addresses and email addresses are personal data too. Same goes for “account data” in a broad sense. So Lemmy does collect personal data, and has to be compliant with the GDPR.
Of course, for a fine there needs to be an investigation and the entity has to not comply with GDPR requests after a warning. And you’re absolutely right that devs can’t be sued for this, but the sysadmin running the instance can be. But that would only happen after GDPR noncompliance.
… At this point, you realize you are just grasping at straws, right? And ones you are seriously misunderstanding, given your previous less than 250 employees statement.
It’s not much, but I would advice you to read the second answer here, law.stackexchange.com/…/do-web-applications-as-ho… , and seriously think about whether a site with many more users and much more personal data, specially those receiving revenue streams in the form of donations and with a team made up of more than one person team.lemmy.world , would be more or less likely to be accountable to the GDPR under a court of law than a personal blog.
Lemmy is not a singular software or website, every instance on its own need to ensure compliance with their respective laws where they are domiciled.
But if instance A is domiciled in the EU, and the content mirrored to instance B in Zimbabwe, where no right to be forgotten exists, then a user of instance A can’t invoke any laws beyond what the local admin can control.
That’s amazing for high availability of content - it’s essentially mirrored in perpetuity - but a nightmare for privacy advocates. AFAIK there haven’t been any court cases related to deletion requests, so that’s still virgin territory.
Instances located in Zimbabwe still have to comply with the GDPR, as the law applies to any entity that processes EU citizen’s personal data, regardless of where this happens. Instance B would also have to comply with a deletion request, or whatever EU member state the citizen is from will impose a fine and seize assets if necessary.
This is the stupidest claim GDPR makes. It’s completely unenforceable and it’s attempting to enforce EU law in countries outside of the EU, which goes completely against any norms in international relations.
I don’t see how it could be enforced without this. If you are operating internationally, comply or block your service from regions you cannot legally operate in.
Personally I don’t think Lemmy should comply. It’s an ad free community service with zero PII obligation besides an email and whatever IP you choose to connect from. No one has to be on Lemmy for any common social obligations.
If you are operating internationally, comply or block your service from regions you cannot legally operate in.
Couple of problems with this. First, it’s putting the onus on a company that does not operate in Europe to figure out what European law is and to try to comply with it. Why should they have to do that? If you’re not operating in an area, you should not have to ever give any consideration whatsoever to the laws of that area.
The second is that, unless I’m misinformed, the EU claims its law applies to any EU citizen, regardless of location. Which means if a Dutch person moves to Australia and uses Australian companies’ services, the EU says “hey, Australian company, you gotta do what this Dutch person says with their data”. Which is utterly ridiculous.
It absolutely is enforceable, and the EU has already enforced it several times.
The EU can of course try to seize assets, but in many cases they have signed a treaty with other countries stating they have the right to enforce the GDPR within their borders. Think a bit in the sense of an extradition treaty. For the US, this is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for example.
This means the EU absolutely can, will and has the means to enforce the GDPR abroad.
I’m a developer of a Lemmy client. When you upload an image to a Lemmy instance, the instance returns a “delete token”. Later, you can ask the instance to delete the image attached to the delete token. So as long as you keep hold of the delete token for a specific image, you’re able to delete it later.
Lemmy-ui (the official frontend) will give you the option to delete an image again shortly after uploading it. However, it’s not possible to remove the image after actually creating the post, as the delete token associated with that post isn’t remembered anywhere on the Lemmy backend.
As for other Lemmy clients, YMMV. The client I work on (Mlem) deletes images if you remove them from a post before posting it, but has the same pitfall as Lemmy-ui in that it won’t delete the image if you’ve already created the post.
It would be possible to locally save the delete tokens of every image you upload, so that you can request that they be removed later. I don’t know of any clients that can do this yet, though (if someone knows of one, feel free to mention it).
as the delete token isn’t stored anywhere on the backend.
Backend of the app or the lemmy server? if it is not stored on the lemmy server then there will be no way to delete it even if the app stores the token.
Also using a singular token that never expires to modify user content sounds like a bad idea. image operations like upload and delete should probably tied to the user credentials.
Backend of the app or the lemmy server? if it is not stored on the lemmy server then there will be no way to delete it even if the app stores the token.
Apologies, I worded that badly. Lemmy uses an image hosting service called pictrs to manage the images you upload, which is largely separated from the rest of the Lemmy backend. Pictrs of course stores the delete tokens matching each image, but Lemmy doesn’t associate those tokens with the posts or comments they originated from as far as I know.
I can delete photos. Just give me the url of the photo you need killed and I’ll happily delete it for you. But also, don’t (accidentally) upload a nude.
Assuming it’s not a joke that flew over my head, how could any individual instance remove the images once replicated? Is the removal from the original instance cascaded?
That’s not true, images are also copied over. This is also for efficiency reasons and to spread the load of the image out to the servers. Sometimes you’ll see images not being copied to your own instance, but that might be because your instance has a lower image size limit than the instance it was uploaded to originally.
There’s no technical reason you can’t delete an image that’s been replicated. There’s an API to replicate the data, there can also be apis to delete the replicas (and apparently there are?)
PSA for admins and mods: GDPR fines can go up to 20 million euros per case. To give you an idea, Meta has been fined over 2.5 billion euros in recent years. If you think that's bad, the real worry is Germany's NetzDG.
The issue doesn’t seem to be the Fediverse itself, rather the fact that images uploaded to Lemmy are handled in a separate program that isn’t linked to it in a way you can delete from by just deleting posts. The images aren’t marked as owned by you, so can’t be deleted again. You’d need some way of storing those image deletion tokens against your account, so you can manage them yourself and be able to delete them again.
And this would have to include images that you uploaded and didn’t make a post about. As far as I can tell they’re just left there on the server forever. Not even sure if it tells you which user uploaded it, although it might log by IP address. I haven’t looked too deeply into the code but there’s potential for abuse there.
let’s say I have a website that hosts user generated content like a forum or something. Some other person just hosts a mirror of my website that is not under my control. If some user requests me to delete his data, I can do that. i cannot delete the data from the mirror site.
Nothing else is happening in the fediverse. The only difference is, that in the fediverse the license and technology is set up to encourage mirroring content.
While being compliant with GDPR depends on the instance that pulls your data (which is the premise), the Fediverse isn’t in any way close to being private if you can’t delete your own data everywhere.
Yikes. Played it for shits and giggles and it leads off with saying the vaccines or even being around people who took the vaccine causes you to emit a Bluetooth MAC address lmfao.
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