Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story) - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog (tech.michaelaltfield.net)

submitted 8 months ago by Lanky_Pomegranate530@midwest.social to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 39 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Bit of a red herring to put GDPR in the title when the article is about Lemmy missing key admin functions, and only tangentially how this runs afoul of GDPR.

TL;DR Lemmy hasn’t implemented image deletion for users or admins, so don’t upload your government ID.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 21 points 8 months ago

Bit of a red herring to put GDPR in the title when the article is about Lemmy missing key admin functions, and only tangentially how this runs afoul of GDPR.

I haven't read the GDPR, yet, but it's still a serious issue – GDPR or not. Imagine if Instagram did that. Everybody would seriously go bonkers and rightfully so.

System administrators often aren't software developers. Lemmy users need to trust Lemmy admins and Lemmy admins need to trust Lemmy developers. Maybe not letting users delete any uploaded media isn't outright illegal, maybe it is. I'm in the camp of it being definitively not cool.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Inflicting lawyers on an open source project is a great way to drive off the developers.

If I hear Lemmy has a GDPR problem I assume it’s lawyer BS only European instance admins have to worry about.

If I hear Lemmy has bugs in basic CRUD functionality, that’s a real issue.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

If I hear Lemmy has bugs in basic CRUD functionality, that’s a real issue.

Coincidentally I saw bug reports by that person and another person earlier that day (before the blog post was published), including one opened months ago with absolutely no reaction at all of even acknowledging that this is even an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3973

I've heard from time to time that Lemmy developers can be difficult to work with (I never worked with them, so I make it clear that this is hearsay) but I have the suspicion that there is some merit to that.

[-] Blaze@reddthat.com 5 points 8 months ago

Aren't the key admin functions missing leading to GDPR non compliance?

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[+] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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[-] morras@jlai.lu 12 points 8 months ago

No, Lemmy servers are not exempt from GDPR compliance. The household exemption (you are not subject to gdpr for private activities) only applies for purely personnal activities. As soon as a service is offered to someone else, the exemption is no more applicable.

That's one of the drawback about open-source projects, they are designed to fulfill a need (persistent storage & decentralised communication for Lemmy), and no one give a f*ck about legalities.

[+] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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[-] morras@jlai.lu 9 points 8 months ago

I’m not so sure about the GDPR status for the Fediverse, I don’t think there’s the law is prepared for “Jerry runs this for people, just for fun”. It’s very much “official organisation” or “money grabbing business” oriented. Someone should fund an actual lawyer to look into this and lay down the real requirements.

I'm working in the gdpr compiance field ;) Using a personnal device to monitor public space doesn't fall under the household exception, this solution even pre-dates the GDPR (https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-12/cp140175en.pdf).

(the case-law is about camera fixed on a private house, but the logic easily translates in a private server grabbing public data).

but when legal compliance comes up, everybody just sticks their fingers in their ears and pretends not to hear you.

Just as you did ^^

[-] bleistift2@feddit.de 24 points 8 months ago

I found it interesting how the maintainers reacted to these issues.

Would you mind if we set some of your priorities also? You're asking us to do free labor for you, that you're unwilling to do yourself. Do not put ultimatums and demands on people making FOSS, or I won't hesitate to block you from these repos.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4433#issuecomment-1939275302

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 16 points 8 months ago

Just another guy who thinks he’s Gods gift to open source because he found a bug, and thinks the volunteer developers fail to show proper gratitude by not dropping everything to work on your pet bug.

[-] Darrell_Winfield@lemmy.world 18 points 8 months ago

Interestingly, he was silent for 3 weeks after being assigned to the bug, then came back to post his blog post and nothing else. I've seen this blog post a few times today, looks like his self promoting strategy is working.

[-] bleistift2@feddit.de 8 points 8 months ago

I agree commenting that post under every issue was a dick move.

[-] bleistift2@feddit.de 9 points 8 months ago

To be fair, this is a bug that could be the end of lemmy. As soon as one malicious actor sues even a few instance admins, other will get scared and shut down their instances. As the reporter points out, this isn’t just a shiny feature that’s missing. Instance admins lack the ability to follow data protection requirements that their users have a right to. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

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[+] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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[-] Maalus@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

Except you don't get to ignore GDPR by saying "don't expect our site to be private".

[-] expr@programming.dev 5 points 8 months ago

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).

[-] Maalus@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] expr@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

"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.

[-] Maalus@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

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.

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[-] UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 3 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] MBM@lemmings.world 21 points 8 months ago

This post made my curious about the instance he's on, monero.town, and the first post I see is Covid antivax shit

[-] willya@lemmyf.uk 13 points 8 months ago

Yikes. Played it for shits and giggles and it leads off with saying the vaccines or even being around people who took the vaccine causes you to emit a Bluetooth MAC address lmfao.

[-] freamon@endlesstalk.org 20 points 8 months ago

I'm gonna find this guy's image ...

https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.jpeg ... nope
https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001.jpeg ... nope
https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002.jpeg ... nope
https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000003.jpeg ... nope

Mmm, I'm sure it won't take long. Just have to remember to do it all again for .jpg, .webp, and .png.

Anyway, I'll let you know when I get it.

[-] johntash@eviltoast.org 6 points 8 months ago

Its been a few hours, did you find it yet?

[-] freamon@endlesstalk.org 5 points 8 months ago

Not quite, no. I know what it isn't at least.

I'll keep going - I'm sure the article's author is someone who genuinely uploaded some confidential info and then became really involved with privacy/GDPR etc, and not someone who was always been really involved with privacy/GDPR issues and now has a story to fit.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Not that I hold the Lemmy devs in particular high regard, but unless OP is cutting them a check every month enough to pay their full time salaries, I really don't think that he should be expecting anything just because he faced an issue that was difficult, but (a) not specific to the developers but the admins of the instance and (b) ultimately solvable.

I also think that this is not a reason to justify a whole fork or even a fully adversarial position. Yeah, tooling for moderation and instance management is lacking, but these can be built on top of the existing codebase. If my fediverser tool does that for user authentication and account management, it could also be extended for content moderation and provide granular access for staff.

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[-] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I would actually consider using normal reddit a nightmare, lemmy like the rest of the fediverse softwares mostly just feels like a community theater play put on by people who really passionately care about what they are making but have zero budget and so long as you go into not expecting a blockbuster movie it is awesome.