Privacy drove me off reddit, I looked around for these answers but not sure where to come across them.
- Am I sharing my IP address/ location with my host instance?
- is there a log of my view history
- are there general privacy concerns that I am not thinking of?
I do not want to be in a position where a Government creates an instance, and allows them to monitor.
That is inaccurate, all that matters is that Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is gone. A provider has no obligation to delete any data/content if it doesn’t identify you personally. So, assuming your instance requires an email address (which some do, but not all, so clearly Lemmy allows to operate without it), or stuff like real name, phone number, etc (but I’m pretty sure no Lemmy instance requires that), all an admin would have to do to be in compliance would be to overwrite those PII fields with anonymous information, and they’d be in compliance. No records actually need to be deleted.
Source: I’m not a compliance expert, but I’m a software engineer who worked for some of the most major companies providing online services, at the time GDPR passed. They all spent many millions to align to GDPR because for some of them the liability would have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars, so they took it very seriously. Yet, of those that were soft-deleting records like that (with a Boolean), none of them stopped doing it. All of the efforts were around cleaning out the PII only.
They should though. The personal data laws that protect people (not businesses) should be updated to include all content a person creates on a platform. There is no reason a business should be allowed to continue to profit off of someone’s content after that person deletes their account.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but it’s not what the GDPR law is written to protect against, so it doesn’t have bearing on Lemmy’s GDPR compliance. Now, is it the right design for a privacy-minded solution, that’s another question, though.
That being said, hard deletes are always technically tedious. You can’t always make it do the correct thing at the model layer depending the use case, so the entire logic may need to be written to be resilient to missing records anywhere. If everything is a soft-delete, then it’s a whole class of crashes that can’t exist. So maybe the data model here is still right for a privacy-minded solution, and there should be a native feature that overwrites a variety of fields on those records that go beyond just the PII fields. That’d be nice.