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123

Mastodon thinks Lemmy’s privacy stinks. What say you? (raddle.me)

submitted 2 years ago by elbowmacaroni@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

219 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it's visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.

Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible

Deleted account usernames remain visible too

Anything remains visible on federated servers!

When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server

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[–] ffmike@beehaw.org 60 points 2 years ago (6 children)

In my opinion it's unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system. Even if the official codebase is updated to do complete deletion & overwrite, it's impossible to prevent some bad actor from federating in a fork that just ignores deletion requests.

Seems sensible to just not post anything that you don't want to be available for the lifetime of the internet.

[–] dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win 25 points 2 years ago

Just as it's impossible to stop scrapers from archiving data on traditional websites. "Deleted" data is probably in a database somewhere, being sold by someone. As you said, you lose some degree of control over your data as soon as you post it. Data is valuable, and if there is a will there is a way.

[–] yourgodlucifer@kbin.social 17 points 2 years ago

I don't expect my data to be fully deleted in a centralized system either. even if it was deleted from the central server someone might have made an archive of it

and reddit is definitely guilty of this since they were bringing back peoples deleted comments and accounts

[–] pkulak@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago

This is how I treated Reddit too. And Twitter. And everything else. I have two modes; public and private. And private is private; strong encryption and local storage. Having some middle ground is a recipe for disaster.

[–] CoffeeBot@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Exactly. Even a server to just go down one day. Theoretically it has a snapshot in time

[–] Maeve@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I was thinking about jfs.

[–] shipp@mastodon.coffee 3 points 2 years ago

@ffmike @elbowmacaroni advance ignoring deletion request technology like copy paste

[–] Zetaphor@zemmy.cc 2 points 2 years ago

You don't even have to modify the code in a fork, just take regular database backups