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Warning: You cannot delete posts or comments on Lemmy. It stays up forever, and is in direct violation of GDPR and other national privacy laws. (programming.dev)

submitted 11 months ago by purple_mimosa@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Title says it. Apparently lemmy devs are not concerned with such worldly matters as privacy, or respecting international privacy laws.

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[-] Zak@lemmy.world 40 points 11 months ago

It gets worse: everything you post to Lemmy is sent to multiple other servers automatically. Those servers may be in jurisdictions that have very different privacy laws than the server you post from, or that hosts the community you're posting to. You have no legal agreement with those servers.

We're not done though. The ActivityPub standard makes delete optional, and other servers could be running anything, not just Lemmy. Some of them are probably running somebody's janky pet project that implements half of ActivityPub, poorly, on a jailbroken smart light bulb or something.

Lemmy should implement proper post deletion, possibly with a delay to allow moderators and admins to inspect deleted posts, but expect anything you share via ActivityPub to follow the once on the internet, always on the internet rule even more than in the past.

[-] roofuskit@lemmy.world 61 points 11 months ago

Delete buttons are just a placebo on the Internet anway. At least activitypub is honest about that.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 27 points 11 months ago

Almost like the entire platform is based on the idea that one server/owner can't be in charge of the data.

Don't get me wrong, not picking a fight, just what op said is kind of obvious to me. You're picking a social media that is democratized and is federated with everyone. The natural tradeoff is that your data is not housed on one server... Which obviously means it's not private.

Idk, the fediverse is a great place, but I would never post anything here I ever wanted to be private. It's not an accident, it's literally by design.

[-] russjr08@bitforged.space 2 points 11 months ago

Lemmy should implement proper post deletion, possibly with a delay to allow moderators and admins to inspect deleted posts, but expect anything you share via ActivityPub to follow the once on the internet, always on the internet rule even more than in the past.

How would this be done? Like you mentioned, anyone can run a modified instance of Lemmy that does not honor delete requests. I suppose you could put something that retrieves content from other servers as a pull operation instead of a push, but that's going to break Lemmy's ability to work with other ActivityPub applications (at the very least).

[-] Zak@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

How would this be done? Like you mentioned, anyone can run a modified instance of Lemmy that does not honor delete requests.

Delete currently renders posts invisible to most users. Delete should actually delete the post from the server.

It's impossible to ensure that the post is deleted from federated servers, web caches, clients that cache things, etc....

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There are no guarantees either way. Even if the delete was somehow enforceable in software, it can be defeated with a simple server backup/restore of any federated server.

I think federated servers should respect any user generated delete request, but as users we need to expect that they wont.