this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
741 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

60062 readers
3438 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Not sure I understand. How could there possibly be a solution? Isn't this an inherent problem with federation? You can't un-share information

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But you can delete your copy, ask others nicely to delete theirs, and refuse to accept more copies of the same thing.

I'm not sure if Lemmy supports any of this, but it seems pretty important for e.g. child porn.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How can you refuse to accept more copies of the same thing, when you deleted all the version it can compare itself to?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

When you get a deletion request, hash the bytes and store the hash.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

There could be a legally binding contract stating that any deletion request must be forwarded to all parties it was send to, and that upon receiving such a request the data must be deleted. I do not think this would be unreasonable to ask to servers, especially as this deletion receipt could be fully automated.

[–] Quacksalber 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Or there could be a delay of one minute before posts get federated, giving the user the option to quickly delete a comment or post.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That's a great idea :) Maybe you can submit a feature request for this on GitHub?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

That’s a great idea :) Maybe you can submit a feature request for this on GitHub?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

legally binding contract

Maybe, but consider that federated servers may be located in entirely different legal jurisdictions, so this might be hard to create, let alone enforce.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

When writing a contract you can just specify which legal system the parties agree to use - this is quite common.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I don't think it will ever come to a lawsuit, nobody would ever want that. Under the GDPR you must be able to delete content, and the server must communicate this to all federated servers. So in effect, there is already a legally binding agreement between all servers that this deletion request must be honored (for people physically in the eu), it's just not.

lemmy servers are already breaking the GDPR if they don't follow forwarded deletion requests from people in the eu. This would just effectively be an extension of this to data from all people.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The images aren't federated afaik. They live on your home instance. If somebody else views them, they're loaded directly from there.

However there's no link between the images and your account. You can't delete them yourself because Lemmy doesn't store the "delete token". They're effectively orphaned.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Not true, images are federated. Sometimes they are not copied if your instance has a lower image size limit than the instance the image came from (if the image is too large), but generally images are copied between instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I did check a few embedded images, and they still seemed to be served from the original. So I dunno. Maybe they're copied and still served from the original, which would be an odd thing to do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Aah the embedded ones in comments? Yes to my knowledge those aren't federated. But pictures posted as posts will be federated.