"We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this privacy notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). No purpose in this notice will require us keeping your personal information for longer than the period of time in which users have an account with us.
When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible."
That’s actually very boilerplate and tame compared to what Lemmy actually does with your data…
I admit that seemed scary at first but Lenny responded https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977
They make a good point that why would this matter when we are posting on a public forum that is cached by Google, among others.
I don’t like personal private information retained. It seems they do federate deletion based on this response.
Thanks for commenting this though! I had never considered or read about it before
There are a few good points in that response and a few I don’t. They also concede a couple points, and complain about somebody who reposted that article (but not the original author I linked, thankfully).
To address your question: For example, sure, maybe Google does cache data but…
- It’s probably better to have data in two places deleted from one place (Lemmy) instead of neither place
- Google allows you to specifically request removal of caches anyway
- Canonizing deletion of data probably has legal and tech benefits. (I’m not a lawyer, but deletion after a reasonable retention rate probably will help server administrators more than it hurts them, and it certainly helps the users.)