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?
“don’t like GDPR”? What’s not to like? Best thing that came out of EU regulation in a long time. And as others have noted you seem to be misinformed about what it actually says…
I also can’t wrap my head around “not liking” GDPR
As a relevant example, seems like only citizens covered by GDPR will be able to request Reddit to remove all of their data from Reddit’s servers since comment deleting tools and scripts are being bypassed, with loads of comments and even entire profiles getting restored by Reddit admins
Can you explain where I’m misinformed? I can surely be misinformed about the workings of Lemmy. However, for GDPR you will not “win” it with a simple TOS or something like that.
If even Google can’t make their Workplace to follow rules in such a way that Workplace can be used according to the AVG rules in the Belgian (well, Flemish) schools, I’m pretty sure that just saying “it’s in the TOS” is not enough…
But again, no expert so I hope that I am wrong.
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You are missing the point. A TOS can’t fix it. If it can, they would have done so. And for GDPR, there is no difference between schools and genpop. A citizen is a citizen…
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Again, Facebook does not rely on their TOS. They rely on the fact that they obey to the Privacy Shield (see https://www.facebook.com/about/privacyshield). Lemmy instances do not, by default, obey to GDPR and or Privacy Shield.
Even more: (info from https://www.facebook.com/business/gdpr):
Transfers As is the case today, any transfers of personal data outside of the EEA (European Economic Area) must meet certain legal requirements. Facebook Inc. is certified under the Privacy Shield framework. Under this framework, we receive and process personal data from our advertisers in the EU. We do this in connection with certain products, including data file Custom Audiences, attribution checkup and certain offline conversion lift studies.(if the Privacy Shield is sufficient or not is a whole other discussion and not for this topic).
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Well… Apparently (I did some reading), the topic was about Google Workspace for Education. A solution only used by schools.
Nobody is currently “caring” about the normal Google Workspace. So yes and no.
IMO it’s pretty much the same case as email. With email you send data to some remote server which may or may not reside in the EU.
I’m not really sure what argument you can make that fediverse apps but not email break gdpr.
Or even something as simple as putting your email on a public website that may be visited by someone in the US.
You are correct. That’s why email is a big topic in GDPR: https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/
I’m not an expert in GDPR and will leave the technical side to those who are, but the fact that the EU actively present at the Fediverse with among others the @EU_Commission represented at their official Mastodon instance, I would be surprised if the GDPR was suddenly weaponised against it.
GDPR was written with the intention of empowering users over corporations. The Fediverse has the same goal.
IANAL, but he GDPR is quite reasonable and if Lemmy did the right thing © it would not be a problem I think. Transferring data to a jurisdiction, like for example the US, where people do not enjoy the same level of data protection comes with risks for any eu citizen. Therefore, it is important that any new user of Lemmy/ActivityPub is educated on what’s actually going on here and the consequences of posting on Lemmy for their personal data. Article 49, 1a) of the GDPR provides an exemption for the rule this posting is about if
the data subject has explicitly consented to the proposed transfer, after having been informed of the possible risks of such transfers for the data subject due to the absence of an adequacy decision and appropriate safeguards
Why can’t we have that? Add a step to the signup process that explains the basics of how a decentralised community works: even if you sign up to a German Lemmy instance, Lemmy is a global community, your data may be transferred to any place in the world and that means that you won’t be able to enjoy the rights and protection you may expect on a German server. Click the “accept the risks” button to continue. Go to this link if you ever change your mind to stop federation of your content and attempt to remove it from any place it has already been federated to.
Even cooler if we can somehow record the jurisdiction of instances and build mechanics that act on that information, e.g. during federation.
Although I would be curious about how GDPR deletion would work. Do all instances have to delete it, or is it just the hosting instance?
It’s only the instance on which you create your account that has your personal data, that data is not sent around.
Your comments are not included, it’s you willingly writing them, not some corporation spreading around your data without your knowledge nor consent, this is what the GDPR is about, data held by corporations that users cannot control in any way, or even have no knowledge about.
One important part of gdpr is that you can revoke consent and decide you don’t want something to be public anymore.
all personal data from EU users must remain in the EU
Create your account on a EU server, problem solved.
Lemmy (fediverse in general) doesn’t send account data away, and posts don’t qualify as personal data, when you publish something to the internet, it’s public by definition.
I’m not sure this is true. Like imagine someone posts their address in a Lemmy post - I’m pretty sure that counts as PII and they have the right to request its deletion.
HackerNews doesn’t do this though.
GDPR Art 4.(1) ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
Posts in Lemmy do qualify as personal data because posts contain the ideas and opinions of an identifiable natural person (by their user handle). Therefore the Lemmy instances are handling personal data and must comply with the GDPR.
Ideas and opinions are NOT identifiable information, unless you’re so smart to as openly writing your personal data on a public forum (something noone should ever do, it’s even bannable on reddit), your comments and posts do NOT contain and personally identifiable info, only your account does.
Personal data is not identifiable information. Personal data is information about an identifiable person. The identifiable information is your username (“online identifier”)
There is no way someone can link your username to who you are in person, unless it’s you who write it out.
Laws don’t protect people from themselves.
An individual’s social media ‘handle’ or username, which may seem anonymous or nonsensical, is still sufficient to identify them as it uniquely identifies that individual
And personal data goes really far. Even an IP-address is personal data. An e-mail address is personal data.
Thankfully, Lemmy instances do not transport this kind of information about their users to other instances!
Maybe not IP addresses, but every post and comment you make is your personal data.
Public posts and comments are, well, public (and there’s no expectation from users that their posts and comments would be private, considering the nature of what Lemmy is).
The only way to not transport public posts and comments to the rest of the internet (including but not limited to other Lemmy instances) would be to completely disconnect an instance from the internet 😅
GDPR does not distinguish between public or private data.
GDPR handles public data through propagation. If you download public data that is GDPR covered, the data you downloaded also becomes GDPR covered. You are required to follow all GDPR regulations while handling the downloaded data.
Remember, GDPR covers almost all “collected personal data”. It does not matter if the data was originally public, and how/where the data was collected. It’s all covered.
However, Lemmy instances may still be exempt from GDPR as they are non-commercial: https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-18/
IANAL as usual.
Posts and comments are not inherently personal data (although they might, of course, contain personal data).
A post of any sane length, though, likely is covered by copyright. Them being public is entirely irrelevant to that in terms of what others are entitled to do with them.
On the other hand, as you say, none of (gestures wildly) this works very well if people start leaning too heavily on that.
You’re confusing “private” with “personal”. My data can be public, but it’s still MY data and I have the right to decide what happens with it and if it should stay public. That’s what the GDPR says and that’s exactly what OP is referring to.
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Now if you want to change that, you’ll have to request a GDPR deletion from every instance you posted it to.
That’s the interesting point. Do I really have to do that or should I be able to rely on my instance owner that’s located in the EU to take care of that? I’m pretty sure none of us can answer this question. Decentralized services like the Fediverse are probably a new challange for GDPR experts.
I’m not supposing to have any answers either, but from a personal standpoint it seems rather selfish to even entertain the idea of making an instance owner do that. It’s not like these people are getting paid for a service (aside from donations, in some cases); they’re hosting in the spirit of the fediverse. Why would I pawn legal work off to them?
it seems rather selfish to even entertain the idea of making an instance owner do that.
I think you truly underestimate the GDPR, which is fine, because you don’t run a huge Lemmy instance. I just hope the admins of the big instances are taking it more seriously, otherwise this could indeed blow up in their faces one day.
You and I are not. But if a certain giant site that is currently making not the… euh… best decisions goes in to action with a large legal team…
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Sure, but I in the end it’s not their responsibility.
You guys sound so confident, it’s not even funny. GDPR is a huge topic and everyone who already had to deal with it even marginally knows that OP’s fear is absolutely plausible. The GDPR doesn’t give a shit about causing major inconviences or huge workload for platform admins. Ever heard about the GDPR nightmare letter?
You are able to edit and remove your posts on your Lemmy instance. Other Lemmy instances may or may not also reflect these changes, but 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.
That’s exactly how it works everywhere, it’s not a Lemmy specific thing. 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. It will be your own responsibility to manually request removal from other services which have copies of your post (like archvie.org etc).
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.
This. Federation doesn’t transfer private data of the user, just their public facing profile and posts. There is no expectation of them being private.
The admin of a site, not only fedi ones but any site, can only control what’s in their reach. A user could ask as per the GDPR to have their profile and history removed, but data not in the control of the admin is not their responsibility.
Consider it from the perspective of a traditional site, if someone takes a screenshot of something you post and puts it up somewhere else the originating site has no means to control that or to remove the data from a third party location. The same issue has been fought since the dawn of the internet, people trying to erase past events that have spread far and wide. There are even proffesional services available to try and scrub such things, but in the end if all they can do is send takedown requests to another jurisdiction it’s going to be an impossible task.
ITT: People that don’t undertand the difference between “personal” and “private”. My posts and comments are my personal data, even if they’re public, and I have the right to decide what happens with it and if it should stay public. That’s what the GDPR says and that’s exactly what OP is referring to.
Personal data according to gdpr is data that can identify you or be tied to you as an individual. Such things are e-mail addresses, phone numbers, names and so on. Posts and comments does not necessarily fulfill this. If you post your name, yes, but this comment that I’m making now would not be classified as personal data.
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.
It doesn’t work like that, think of your instance being a proxy to the fediverse
Is it? I read somewhere that data effectively gets “copied” to the different instances? But that might be wrong info :p
the entire content of that community is going to be copied to the feddit.de server
That’s not true. The text is being copied, the media is not. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can put tracking pixels on Lemmy posts at any time to log user data. Regardless of the instance used to read it.
OK, remove the media from my “everything” statement. The rest is still lots of personal data that is being copied to foreign instances.
Then it should be the responsibility of the EU people to avoid joining the fediverse. I do not see a practical way to align with GDPR. The effort is non-trivial and the rewards are extremely minimal.
From your perspective, what should be the way out?
Then it should be the responsibility of the EU people to avoid joining the fediverse.
The instances are providing their services in the EU, so it’s legally up to them to comply with the GDPR.
From your perspective, what should be the way out?
Honestly, no idea. I’m not even sure if Lemmy in its current shape violates the GDPR in the first place, but if I were the admin of a large feddit instance in the EU I would make sure to get advise from a GDPR consultant.
But when a lemmy.world user subscribes to a feddit.de community, the entire community will be copied to the lemmy.world server, or am I wrong?
sure, but no personal data like email/ IP
I think you, being an admin of a huge Lemmy instance, would be well advised to educate yourself on the difference between “public” and “personal” when it comes to GDPR compliance. All the data I create here is my personal data, no matter if it’s my IP, my mail address, posts, comments or votes and the GDPR says that it’s my right to decide what happens with my data and if it should stay public. The fact that I post something publicly doesn’t make my data non-personal.
I think you, being an admin of a huge Lemmy instance, would be well advised to educate yourself on the difference between “public” and “personal” when it comes to GDPR compliance.
I’m quite well advised, maybe I`m using wrong terms as EN is not my native language.
OP said
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.
and says that’s a GDPR nightmare (and he’s right according to my understanding of the GDPR).
You said:
sure, but no personal data like email/ IP
Which implies that email addresses and IPs were the only personal data that’s relevant in terms of the GDPR, which is simply not true.
I think decentralized services like the Fediverse are a new challenge for the GDPR and that OP is absolutely right in expecting this to blow up one day.
Again, please stay educated and up to date about this whole topic. We don’t want you to get into trouble for providing something beautiful.
The content of comments and post can also contain personal data.
You are indeed wrong. The email and IP addresses and passwords for example don’t get copied. I’m not well versed enough about how it works to go into more detail.
You are indeed wrong. The email and IP addresses and passwords for example don’t get copied.
I never said that IP addresses and passwords were getting copied.
The thing that no one seems to understand here is that all my posts, comments and votes and everything are my personal data. My data can be public, but it’s still MY data and I have the right to decide what happens with it and if it should stay public. That’s what the GDPR says and that’s exactly what OP is referring to.
If what you say is true, then… Email is illegal in the EU. EMAIL.
Yeah, no, GDPR, although well intentioned against large corporate entities that have all the power in centralized system, is a relic in the context of federated technology. It is both completely unenforceable, and also not really relevant.
If what you say is true, then… Email is illegal in the EU. EMAIL.
No, but there are actually certain things you need to take into consideration when it comes to GDPR and email.
What the GDPR says:
Data erasure is a large part of the GDPR. It is one of the six data protection principles: Article 5(e) states that personal data can be stored for “no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed.” Data erasure is also one of the personal rights protected by the GDPR in Article 17, the famous “right to be forgotten.” “The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay.” There are some exceptions to this latter requirement, such as the public interest. But generally speaking, you have an obligation to erase personal data you no longer need.
What it means for email: Many of us never delete emails. There are plenty of good reasons: We may need to refer to them someday as a record of our activities or even for possible litigation. But the more data you keep, the greater your liability if there’s a data breach. Moreover, the erasure of unneeded personal data is now required under European law. Because of the GDPR, you should periodically review your organization’s email retention policy with the goal of reducing the amount of data your employees store in their mailboxes. The regulation requires you to be able to show that you have a policy in place that balances your legitimate business interests against your data protection obligations under the GDPR.
https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/
I still don’t see a reason why Lemmy shouldn’t be affected by the GDPR and why it’s probably not compliant in its current state.
The last paragraph you quoted is in reference to individual responsability and how they access the data. It’s equivalent to saying “don’t look at at this Fediverse post: you are GDPR compliant!”. This only helps you in litigation. We both know that says nothing of where the data can exist. And this is true for any federated system, including email.
It’s also completely asinine. Suddenly we need to burn snail mail after reading it? Why receive any mail at all if everything is a giant piece of liability? There’s a social contract in communication: a certain assumption that if you give someone a piece of informtion, you are doing just that: giving, not lending. “Lending information” upsets the social structure. GDPR has to be tempered in reality, and this starts even before the fediverse.
Like I said, GDPR is imperfect. It was written in the context of and solves a problem created by centralized institutions and large beaurocracies. It is also completely unenforceable in a decentralized system. It hardly seems relevant anyway.
Realisticalpy speaking, those tempered interpretations are probably already existant, and there is already enough precedent for this to be a nothing burger.
This whole thread is full of interpretations and gut feelings. Literally no one here backs up their claims with any kind of evidence.
Neil Brown did quite a good write-up on the legal standing of the Fediverse late last year: https://decoded.legal/blog/2022/11/notes-on-operating-fediverse-services-mastodon-pleroma-etc-from-an-english-law-point-of-view
There’s a section part way down about GDPR, but the answer is “it depends”
Thanks! The info actually makes sense. Also, do note that every EU country has their own specific implementation of the GDPR law with very small differences. So this is written according to the UK implementation, but the BE implementation might be just a bit different.
All complicated stuff…
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I second this. Personal data doesn’t have to be kept within the boundaries of the EU, but cross-borders transfers has to comply with art. 45, art. 49 (art. 49-1,a. might be useful to back the TOS) and the Schrems ruling of the CJUE.
I don’t see much troubles for the fediverse, here.
Edit. Missing word.
I don’t think a TOS will hold up. GDPR (and the implementation per country) is a law. You can’t bypass a law with a TOS, I think.
However, I’m definitely not a GDPR expert…
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FWIW Hacker News just says it doesn’t apply to them as it doesn’t count as a service for just a discussion board.
But I think the right of deletion is a bigger issue than where email addresses are stored.
Kbin.social and feddit.de are hosted in Germany. That’s why I signed up there.
What do y’all thing about this?
This is why I won’t ever run any web service with public registration.
The people hosting an instance are responsible for the informed consent. So if you federate with anyone you need to make sure to inform your individual users about all of your peers, what data they process, and who’s the contact for that peer.
This is of course impossible.
If anyone ever sues you, they probably effortlessly win the lawsuit.
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.
Not all data is transferred to other servers. That’s the point where I think you are wrong.
You mention email and IP addresses as examples of personal data covered by GDPR, but that data is not transferred to other instances, only the instance where you registered holds that data. So you would only need to care about the instance where you registered to be GDPR-compliant.Ok, agree. There seems to be a bit of a discussion on if my posts are personal data, but if we say that those are public, then that is covered. Now there is just a simple question I have… What if I, as a EU citizen, knowingly subscribe to a non-EU, non-GDPR friendly instance and/or service. Is that ok? Should that instance then suddenly become GDPR friendly?
I don’t think I can answer that :-)
I think the GDPR applies to any company providing services to an EU citizen, regardless of where it is. So I guess that means yes to your question? Does it mean you can force foreign companies into becoming compliant by using their services unless the actively block EU citizens from using their services?
I guess that if you started using that service knowing that it was non-compliant, we could say you were implicitly giving up that right, but I don’t think that is something you can do individually given that it’s a right affecting all EU citizens.
But, honestly, now I am talking about things very out of my area of expertise :-)Thanks for your ideas. I think you are right, it sounds right, but also way out of my knowledge area.
