The Fediverse and privacy do not mix. Content is spread to other servers before you can hit the undo button. Lemmy is especially bad about deleting images.
I don’t care about “user uploaded their ID by accident” issue as much as I care about “troll posted videos of children being raped and they’re now all over my server” issues. The first is something that any willing server admin van resolve (by using the internal delete API), the latter is something that can land you in jail if you’re not careful.
This is the risk of using software versioned 0.x, I suppose.
There are other ways in which Lemmy can violate your privacy as well. There’s nothing to stop a server from including tracking pixels, for instance. It’s also trivial to send different tracking pixels for each federated server, thereby collecting not only your IP address but also which server you have an account for. This can also be wesponised through DMs if you want to know the IP address of a specific user.
Don’t use Lemmy if you value your privacy. It’s not designed to maintain it.
GDPR is really designed to target software controlled by a single entity, but this isn’t that. The instances are responsible for their content, full stop. There’s no way of forcing an instance to delete content, and even if there were, since the admins are running it, there’s nothing stopping them from removing such a feature.
There’s also nothing stopping admins from deleting content from their servers (it’s just a database, after all).
Well then, once the EU knows about Lemmy, it’ll be screwed. Again, you don’t get to make excuses when dealing with GDPR. The book will be thrown at you once you have EU citizen’s data, which lemmy obviously does. Saying “we made this application without it ever being possible to comply with GDPR” will only get you a bigger fine, or worse.
“Lemmy” (the software) doesn’t have any data. It all resides on servers owned by people other than Lemmy’s developers. They have the user data and would absolutely be subject to GDPR.
Again, no matter what Lemmy’s devs put in place, it doesn’t matter because the instance admins can do whatever they want.
Once they know about one server, they will know about most large instances. Since Lemmy doesn’t implement any GDPR features (i.e. cookie notices, a button for deletion, etc) every larger instance will get hit.
How would tracking pixels work via lemmy? I don’t see how you could gain individual ip addresses if the instance simply store the image in their cache.
Images embedded in messages and such aren’t cached by Lemmy.
This above is a proof of concept that I put up with as little logging as possible. I could add logging there, and I could make it a 1x1 invisible pixel, but I don’t for obvious reasons.
The Fediverse and privacy do not mix. Content is spread to other servers before you can hit the undo button. Lemmy is especially bad about deleting images.
I don’t care about “user uploaded their ID by accident” issue as much as I care about “troll posted videos of children being raped and they’re now all over my server” issues. The first is something that any willing server admin van resolve (by using the internal delete API), the latter is something that can land you in jail if you’re not careful.
This is the risk of using software versioned 0.x, I suppose.
There are other ways in which Lemmy can violate your privacy as well. There’s nothing to stop a server from including tracking pixels, for instance. It’s also trivial to send different tracking pixels for each federated server, thereby collecting not only your IP address but also which server you have an account for. This can also be wesponised through DMs if you want to know the IP address of a specific user.
Don’t use Lemmy if you value your privacy. It’s not designed to maintain it.
Except you don’t get to ignore GDPR by saying “don’t expect our site to be private”.
GDPR is really designed to target software controlled by a single entity, but this isn’t that. The instances are responsible for their content, full stop. There’s no way of forcing an instance to delete content, and even if there were, since the admins are running it, there’s nothing stopping them from removing such a feature.
There’s also nothing stopping admins from deleting content from their servers (it’s just a database, after all).
Well then, once the EU knows about Lemmy, it’ll be screwed. Again, you don’t get to make excuses when dealing with GDPR. The book will be thrown at you once you have EU citizen’s data, which lemmy obviously does. Saying “we made this application without it ever being possible to comply with GDPR” will only get you a bigger fine, or worse.
“Lemmy” (the software) doesn’t have any data. It all resides on servers owned by people other than Lemmy’s developers. They have the user data and would absolutely be subject to GDPR.
Again, no matter what Lemmy’s devs put in place, it doesn’t matter because the instance admins can do whatever they want.
Way to go being pedantic about it.
Once they know about one server, they will know about most large instances. Since Lemmy doesn’t implement any GDPR features (i.e. cookie notices, a button for deletion, etc) every larger instance will get hit.
Only those based in the EU.
How would tracking pixels work via lemmy? I don’t see how you could gain individual ip addresses if the instance simply store the image in their cache.
Images embedded in messages and such aren’t cached by Lemmy.
This above is a proof of concept that I put up with as little logging as possible. I could add logging there, and I could make it a 1x1 invisible pixel, but I don’t for obvious reasons.
Ah, interesting. I thought my instance cached images.
It probably does for posts (the default setting AFAIK), but not for markdown-embedded images.