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Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story) - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog
(tech.michaelaltfield.net)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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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.