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?
Lemmy was created before GDPR.
Volunteers probably have not implemented GDPR and may not, or might.
GDPR was made in 2016. Lemmy is 4 years old
And you know the first thing devs do when they start writing code? They look up laws drafted by non technical people to ensure they are fully in compliance. The priority of lemmy all this time has been GDPR compliance, the fact that the app looks and functions similar to reddit is an afterthought.
It’s not like the devs care about laws since one of the main motivations of creating Lemmy was to create a space where pirated media could be shared. That’s why [email protected] exists
Dessaline said that multiple times in the past before Lemmy gained such traction. He’s also the dev of TorrentCSV
1 contributor’s opinion and the existence of one community does not an argument make.
the devs don’t care about laws, if you want to put it so broadly, because the devs aren’t the ones who would get in trouble here, anyway. instance owners would likely catch the most trouble, especially because you can also add your own gdpr compliance if you want to.
also most devs aren’t facebook. most devs don’t really care too much about tracking users. the commercial sector on the other hand…
But the devs are also instance owners.
Not all of them are! I could contribute to the code base right now and I don’t have an instance.
Lemmy.ml is and Lemmygrad.ml was
My point still stands.
Lemmy is based on stuff that’s a lot older I think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
Many countries had laws regarding personal data long before GDPR, which is basically EU countries agreeing on the lowest acceptable common minimal.
At least in french law it’s still the 70’s that you can access your personal data and get them deleted on request, at the time of phpBB forum, you had to fill a form informing the data-protection authority that you were collecting some user data.
I don’t know enough how lemmy works internally, but I believe that activity pub includes a synchronization aspect, if you erase a post it will get erased from other instance’s cache too. Moreover, one has to check the definition of personal data. An e-mail address or an IP address + timestamp are personal data. But is an internet nickname an unique identifier ?