Lemmy and GDPR - What is the current state?

NewBrainWhoThis@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 76 points –

As the Fediverse grows more and more, rules and regulations become more important. For example, is Lemmy GDPR compliant? If not, are admins aware of the possible consequence? What does this mean for the growth of Lemmy?

Edit: The question "is Lemmy GDPR compliant" should mean, does the software stack provide admins with means to be GDPR compliant.

Edit2: Similar discussion with many interesting opinions on lemmy.ml by /u/infamousbelgian@waste-of.space--> https://lemmy.ml/post/1409164

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Lemmy is GDPR compliant, as far as I know.

Admins can entirely purge you off their instance, should you ask them to, and other servers do not store any personal details that GDPR would require be deletable. By most interpretations.

It can be argued that previously federated data that is now out of reach and as such cannot be deleted, could constitute a breach of GDPR.

Personal data posted by the user also falls into this, so they might have to force deleting on any instance hosted by organizations. Individuals or small teams running instances which don't take money don't need to comply to GDPR.

Individuals or small teams running instances which don’t take money don’t need to comply to GDPR.

Are you sure about that? So if I hosted a website that shows your name and address, you could do nothing to make me take it down because I'm not an organisation or company?

Other servers do store personal data. Any post or comment made by a user is personal data as it contains the thoughts/ideas of that user.

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;

That's one interpretation. One I illuded to.

But you can also argue that if the person who made the comment is unidentifiable, there is no "natural person" to make the data GDPR related.

Well that depends on the comment, doesn't it? As far as I understand it, if I posted personal information about you, such as your name, home address, etc, in a comment, you could demand from the admin to remove that comment as it would contain personal information you don't want in the open.

Yeah, but I imagine that could be handled via email. The tricky thing is to verify that the email is coming from the account in question, but that could be done by posting or commenting a specific phrase.

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