Bit of a red herring to put GDPR in the title when the article is about Lemmy missing key admin functions, and only tangentially how this runs afoul of GDPR.
TL;DR Lemmy hasn’t implemented image deletion for users or admins, so don’t upload your government ID.
Bit of a red herring to put GDPR in the title when the article is about Lemmy missing key admin functions, and only tangentially how this runs afoul of GDPR.
I haven’t read the GDPR, yet, but it’s still a serious issue – GDPR or not. Imagine if Instagram did that. Everybody would seriously go bonkers and rightfully so.
System administrators often aren’t software developers. Lemmy users need to trust Lemmy admins and Lemmy admins need to trust Lemmy developers. Maybe not letting users delete any uploaded media isn’t outright illegal, maybe it is. I’m in the camp of it being definitively not cool.
Inflicting lawyers on an open source project is a great way to drive off the developers.
If I hear Lemmy has a GDPR problem I assume it’s lawyer BS only European instance admins have to worry about.
If I hear Lemmy has bugs in basic CRUD functionality, that’s a real issue.
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Yet GDPR requires if you operate anywhere but allow European citizens to register, you have to be GDPR compliant as well, or risk being blocked by an entire continent.
You can get fined by the entire continent. And you would need to pay up in that case, if living in the US for instance. The laws aren’t toothless, otherwise everyone would be abusing them, instead go to any US news site in Europe, and they’ll tell you they can’t serve content to you for legal reasons.
Oh for sure they will try to fine, but being another sovereignty they have no authority to force a payment.
Yeaaaah no. Look it up, you still have to pay up. It’s insanely good for EU citizens. Look at the top fines - Meta, Google, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook, with fines being tens of milions of dollars. The US works with the EU and you still get fined.
The laws aren’t toothless, otherwise everyone would be abusing them,
Have you heard of such small indie developers such as Google, Amazon or Facebook?
The exact same ones who have millions in fines racked up and are paying them? Yes, I have heard of those.
If I hear Lemmy has bugs in basic CRUD functionality, that’s a real issue.
Coincidentally I saw bug reports by that person and another person earlier that day (before the blog post was published), including one opened months ago with absolutely no reaction at all of even acknowledging that this is even an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3973
I’ve heard from time to time that Lemmy developers can be difficult to work with (I never worked with them, so I make it clear that this is hearsay) but I have the suspicion that there is some merit to that.
Aren’t the key admin functions missing leading to GDPR non compliance?
Yeah, but talking about GDPR is burying the lede.
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No, Lemmy servers are not exempt from GDPR compliance. The household exemption (you are not subject to gdpr for private activities) only applies for purely personnal activities. As soon as a service is offered to someone else, the exemption is no more applicable.
That’s one of the drawback about open-source projects, they are designed to fulfill a need (persistent storage & decentralised communication for Lemmy), and no one give a f*ck about legalities.
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I’m not so sure about the GDPR status for the Fediverse, I don’t think there’s the law is prepared for “Jerry runs this for people, just for fun”. It’s very much “official organisation” or “money grabbing business” oriented. Someone should fund an actual lawyer to look into this and lay down the real requirements.
I’m working in the gdpr compiance field ;) Using a personnal device to monitor public space doesn’t fall under the household exception, this solution even pre-dates the GDPR (https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-12/cp140175en.pdf).
(the case-law is about camera fixed on a private house, but the logic easily translates in a private server grabbing public data).
but when legal compliance comes up, everybody just sticks their fingers in their ears and pretends not to hear you.
Just as you did ^^
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Article 3 GDPR is straightforward, gdpr will apply.
The real question is how any kind of authority could enforce it ? Almost no chance that any law enforcement/regulator will bother a single-user instance purely on the ground of gdpr…
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I found it interesting how the maintainers reacted to these issues.
Would you mind if we set some of your priorities also? You’re asking us to do free labor for you, that you’re unwilling to do yourself. Do not put ultimatums and demands on people making FOSS, or I won’t hesitate to block you from these repos.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4433#issuecomment-1939275302
Just another guy who thinks he’s Gods gift to open source because he found a bug, and thinks the volunteer developers fail to show proper gratitude by not dropping everything to work on your pet bug.
Interestingly, he was silent for 3 weeks after being assigned to the bug, then came back to post his blog post and nothing else. I’ve seen this blog post a few times today, looks like his self promoting strategy is working.
I agree commenting that post under every issue was a dick move.
To be fair, this is a bug that could be the end of lemmy. As soon as one malicious actor sues even a few instance admins, other will get scared and shut down their instances. As the reporter points out, this isn’t just a shiny feature that’s missing. Instance admins lack the ability to follow data protection requirements that their users have a right to. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.
To be fair, this is a bug that could be the end of lemmy.
Then the reporter should have acted like it was, indeed, that important. Like, putting money or a PR into it.
Just “someone, sometime, somewhere, might sue” does not suffice to fix things. Just like with physical products in the real world, if someone, somewhere, sometime, might sue, then you designate money, time and staff into your project to pre-corect the things to minimize the chance of that happening, or to buy whatever auditing / maintenance needed to check for issues.
And, correctly enough, the devs are not saying “we won’t fix this”. They are saying, “fix this requires people to pour $X time and $y money into it. Care to chime in?”
Unfortunately, the world of free software users is full of “couch coaches”.
The lemmy devs are communist, isn’t doing free labor their whole thing?
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Except you don’t get to ignore GDPR by saying “don’t expect our site to be private”.
GDPR is really designed to target software controlled by a single entity, but this isn’t that. The instances are responsible for their content, full stop. There’s no way of forcing an instance to delete content, and even if there were, since the admins are running it, there’s nothing stopping them from removing such a feature.
There’s also nothing stopping admins from deleting content from their servers (it’s just a database, after all).
Well then, once the EU knows about Lemmy, it’ll be screwed. Again, you don’t get to make excuses when dealing with GDPR. The book will be thrown at you once you have EU citizen’s data, which lemmy obviously does. Saying “we made this application without it ever being possible to comply with GDPR” will only get you a bigger fine, or worse.
“Lemmy” (the software) doesn’t have any data. It all resides on servers owned by people other than Lemmy’s developers. They have the user data and would absolutely be subject to GDPR.
Again, no matter what Lemmy’s devs put in place, it doesn’t matter because the instance admins can do whatever they want.
Way to go being pedantic about it.
Once they know about one server, they will know about most large instances. Since Lemmy doesn’t implement any GDPR features (i.e. cookie notices, a button for deletion, etc) every larger instance will get hit.
Only those based in the EU.
How would tracking pixels work via lemmy? I don’t see how you could gain individual ip addresses if the instance simply store the image in their cache.
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Ah, interesting. I thought my instance cached images.
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This post made my curious about the instance he’s on, monero.town, and the first post I see is Covid antivax removed
Yikes. Played it for removeds and giggles and it leads off with saying the vaccines or even being around people who took the vaccine causes you to emit a Bluetooth MAC address lmfao.
I’m gonna find this guy’s image …
https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.jpeg … nope
https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001.jpeg … nope
https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002.jpeg … nope
https://monero.town/pictrs/image/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000003.jpeg … nopeMmm, I’m sure it won’t take long. Just have to remember to do it all again for .jpg, .webp, and .png.
Anyway, I’ll let you know when I get it.
Its been a few hours, did you find it yet?
Not quite, no. I know what it isn’t at least.
I’ll keep going - I’m sure the article’s author is someone who genuinely uploaded some confidential info and then became really involved with privacy/GDPR etc, and not someone who was always been really involved with privacy/GDPR issues and now has a story to fit.
Not that I hold the Lemmy devs in particular high regard, but unless OP is cutting them a check every month enough to pay their full time salaries, I really don’t think that he should be expecting anything just because he faced an issue that was difficult, but (a) not specific to the developers but the admins of the instance and (b) ultimately solvable.
I also think that this is not a reason to justify a whole fork or even a fully adversarial position. Yeah, tooling for moderation and instance management is lacking, but these can be built on top of the existing codebase. If my fediverser tool does that for user authentication and account management, it could also be extended for content moderation and provide granular access for staff.
a check every month enough to pay their full time salaries
I would usually agree because often FOSS projects are used commercially but I don’t think this standard doesn’t apply here because the Lemmy instances are also non-commercial projects.
Lemmy instances are also non-commercial projects.
So why should they be expecting commercial-level support?
So why should they be expecting commercial-level support?
“Users should be able to delete stuff they uploaded” is only something for commercial services?
“You get what you pay for”.
“You get what you pay for”
“Open source respects your privacy! Lolnope, jk!”
Well, the bare minimum you need to do, is refuse traffic from the EU then. The devs don’t want to do that, but they also don’t want to implement the changes which is illegal and carried huge fines (yes, they can fine you in the US too)
The “huge fines” are proportional to the revenue of the company and there are plenty of legal steps that need to be taken before someone with a big stick gets involved.
Also, this is not an issue for the developers, but for the admins.
The fines are only proportional for big corporations. Organizations without revenue can still be fined:
Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher: (a) the basic principles for processing, […] pursuant to Articles […] 7 […];
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/
In this case, the processing of data hinges upon the data subject’s consent, which is detailed in article 7.
Also, this is not an issue for the developers, but for the admins.
Imagine a car manufacturer building cars without brakes and then saying ‘This isn’t a problem for the engineers, but for the retailers’. Of course the developers can’t be sued for this. But that’s not the point! The point is that this bug or missing feature or whatever you want to call it jeopardizes the admins upon which this whole ecosystem hinges. I can’t believe that that’s in the devs’ best interests.
They are also proportional to the size of the leak. Small businesses get some leeway, but the approach that devs have had so far is “we don’t care” when it was brought up.
It’s an issue for both. If a software you run can get you fined in both the US and the EU, then devs need to adapt or nobody will be using it. Right now, lemmy is too small for big wigs to notice. It takes one disgruntled user to report the breaches though, and everything can change veeeery quickly.
then devs need to adapt or nobody will be using it.
Or the people that want to use it can hire other developers to add the missing functionality, or develop themselves, or implement some tedious-but-functional process that satisfies the legal requirements, etc, etc.
My point is:
- No developer from an open source project should feel responsible for how the software is being used by others
- No open source developer should feel pressured into working on something just because someone needs it.
If people don’t like the Lemmy devs and want to use something else that fulfills their needs, fine. But this “I opened a bunch of issues on Github and I demand the developers to work on them ASAP” is really not the way to go.
Your point is “don’t make our devs do things that are essential for using it in Europe”
I wasn’t talking about some issues on github, I was talking about GDPR. If lemmy is to be used in any way, it can’t behave like some student project thrown together from random bits. Legal is part of that. And there is a lot of it to go through. I get it, it’s not fun at all to code that and they’d rather do some cool new feature instead. But it needs to be done, even if nobody wants to do it. Or, at least people could simply accept the risk of it going really bad.
But it needs to be done, even if nobody wants to do it.
Nobody wants to do it for free. Show some actual support to the developers, let’s help them find a way to let work on something without worrying about how they will keep a roof over their heads, and I can bet that things will start being prioritized accordingly.
If you want any open source project to be more than “a student project thrown together”, then we need to treat the people working on it as professionals. And how well are these professionals being treated by this “community”, if is not able to collectively pay for one FT developer and where the “CTO” of Mastodon GmbH makes less than what an intern can get at Facebook?
And since I’m feeling like a rant is brewing inside me, allow me to vent a little: when I mean “developers”, it doesn’t need to be the Lemmy team exactly. As I said in the top comment, my fediverser project already added an “admin” backend that could be used by staff and moderation. it wouldn’t be difficult at all to turn it into a center dashboard for moderation, and it could even be made to have a granular permission system. From the reasonable amount of people that expressed interest, how many do you think actually opened up their wallets to help? Zero
Back in July when Reddit revealed its true colors, I thought people finally understood the importance of paying for the products they use, so I took the opportunity to pledge 20% of Communick’s profits to the Fediverse projects that I offer. I thought it would be a win-win-win situation: I could acquire customers, users would have expert help to figure out their issues and hopefully even help steering the direction of the project, and developers would have some form of income while not having to deal with a barrage of requests from the non-technical mob. How well do you think that went? Let me tell you: The handful of paying customers that I have are amazing, but they are simply not enough for me to even the server bills.
It frustrates me to no end when I think of how “anti-capitalistic” people here claim to be, yet I can bet that if we got only the the North American users who have bought an iPhone to pay $1/month, we would probably be able to fund all of the leading fediverse projects and kill Big Tech.
There, rant over.
Yeaaah, except I don’t care about this platform enough to invest money into it. It has huge flaws, no people, etc. The fact of the matter is though, and I keep repeating this, once it gets noticed, it will be hit by fines. And by that time, it will be a huge scandal, with both admins and devs wishing they actually coded the “uninteresting” parts of the app.
I would actually consider using normal reddit a nightmare, lemmy like the rest of the fediverse softwares mostly just feels like a community theater play put on by people who really passionately care about what they are making but have zero budget and so long as you go into not expecting a blockbuster movie it is awesome.
Do uploaded images get federated? If they do, this is a pointless losing battle
Yes
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