Asklemmy

Yeah that really could end up being problematic!

Actually not sure how that’s going to go.. presumably it’ll work the same way search engines do cos it’s kinda like holding a copy of public data like they do…

Apologies and thank you for the clarification, I was reading an earlier draft of GDPR that had information on companies with fewer than 250 employees. Not sure how Lemmy instances fall under this though, do you know?

Businesses that are not engaged in processing of the personal data listed in Article 9 or Article 10 do not need to appoint a data protection officer (DPO or DPO as a Service) unless they are engaged in regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a “large scale”.

To the point of the person you're replying to, I think it may be treated the same as email. For example, if you send an email and it gets forwarded somewhere else, all the "custodian of your data" (lets say google in this example) can do is delete any copies they have on their server. Anything outside of that is outside their responsibility/capacity.

As soon as the content moves to another server, it's their liability to comply.

If you scrape a website, them removing a user's PII in response to a GDPR request is not contingent on you also deleting what you scraped.

Federation of removal requests would simply ease the flow of compliance for both hosts and users.

If certain hosts decide to ignore the requests and the GDPR, that's up to them.

Practically speaking, can they actually regulate it, beyond going after instance owners that are themselves based in the EU? I mean, they can pass laws, but given that instances are not large companies that might want to do business in Europe, I'm not sure what stops an instance owner not located within their jurisdiction from just ignoring them and not paying any levied fines or similar. They could require ISPs then block that instance or something I suppose but keeping up with an evolving list of tiny websites that don't necessarily advertise themselves much and so might slip under regulator's radar for awhile is probably much more difficult to block compared to a single corporate run site.

Not that I'm suggesting that Lemmy shouldn't make an effort to comply with regulations requiring people be able to delete their data, if anything, such a system if successful would make it harder for companies to take advantage of it by setting up servers to secretly collect what data they can, for example, I'm just questioning if it's really possible for a government to meaningfully enforce rules on some small group of random mostly volunteer people who may likely be operating from another country anyway.

And you know the first thing devs do when they start writing code? They look up laws drafted by non technical people to ensure they are fully in compliance. The priority of lemmy all this time has been GDPR compliance, the fact that the app looks and functions similar to reddit is an afterthought.