this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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So just to clarify this point:
If I delete a comment on beehaw.org, it doesn't get deleted when accessed from another Lemmy instance that federates with Beehaw?
When you delete it your instance tells others that it was deleted, but it cannot force them to follow through.
Which is indeed a problem as it makes it impossible for any admin to host in the EU or for EU citizens, in theory. GDPR §7 makes it very clear that complete deletion of all personal data (and yes,a Lemmy comment is personal data) must be facilitated by the original data collection point.
From what I understand instance 1 has to delete data if requested, but instance 2 has no obligation to unless requested. Just like data remains archived in sites like internet archive or other private archives. Just like it works on reddit or any other site currently.
Yes and no. The Web achieve and other data scrubbers are seen differently here as the data collection is done involuntarily. E g. your website will get crawled by the Web Achieve if you want it or not and it is doing it by using the same method a intended user does.
This cannot be applied to a federated instance where content is voluntarily transfered via the Federation interface. This makes the first data collection operator liable for securing the rights of the data owner and to get a processing agreement with the data processing operator that it transfers data to.
it can't make it impossible. If facebook sold data to amazon, so now amazon has a copy, and then facebook's user asks their data to be deleted, facebook can't just march into amazon's servers and delete the data themselves. The best they can do is send a formal notice to amazon requesting it be deleted, which sounds like what lemmy does. At this point it's up to the federated server if they comply with the law...
Actually that is exactly what the GDPR stipulates. In your example Facebook needs a data processing agreement that ensures that all rights of the data owners are secured and the GDPR is followed. Facebook is liable here, not Amazon - the user must explicitly NOT ask Amazon to delete as the user may not even know where the data went to/should not be bothered to write requests to a huge amount of different data processing locations.
But, @hikaru755@feddit.de added another interesting point: The Instance may or may not be seen as a single data processing entity that does not voluntarily hands over data to other instances. That could indeed be a reasonable cause as e.g. data scrubbers are not within the sphere of influence of e.g. a service publicly displaying data. But as the whole network is build on interconnected nodes I wouldn't count on it if that reasoning would fly in front of a court. It may. Or it may not.
It cowld defederate any non-compliant instances.
It could, but actually policing it would be difficult. I don’t think there is any “yeah I’ll do that” response and even if there is an instance could say it will delete it and still do nothing.
You could defederate with instances running versions that don't delete federated posts. Removing compatipility with older protocol implementations is not unheard of.
while this is certainly feasible, it is just a compliance checkmark of "doing your best". It wouldn't actually prevent someone attempting to persist that data. For example, I just need to maintain an insert-only copy of my deletion-compliant lemmy instance DB, and none of the deletions would be reflected on that.
I could then host that copy publicly on some unrelated lemmy instance, and without systematically de-federating from all other instances, you wouldn't know which one was retaining the data.