It's a work in progress.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology
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In my opinion it's unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system. Even if the official codebase is updated to do complete deletion & overwrite, it's impossible to prevent some bad actor from federating in a fork that just ignores deletion requests.
Seems sensible to just not post anything that you don't want to be available for the lifetime of the internet.
This is how I treated Reddit too. And Twitter. And everything else. I have two modes; public and private. And private is private; strong encryption and local storage. Having some middle ground is a recipe for disaster.
In my opinion it’s unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system.
yeah like. this is just a byproduct of how federation works currently. i don't even know how you'd begin to design a federated system where some of these critiques can't be levied
Anything that is visible to another party can be hijacked - even a 1:1 communication does not guarantee that the other party doesn't capture the data and then spread it. The only things that are private are thoughts that you have which are not shared with others in any fashion. As soon as information is shared in any fashion, it is not private.
Past this point it's a matter of how private you think is reasonably private. You could design a system where users are in control of their own data through a series of public and private keys, ensuring that keys must be active to view content, but as stated above even in such a case and the user revoking keys does not stop other people from making copies of said data. This is akin to screenshotting an NFT. For all intents and purposes, a copy of the data as it existed at the time of copying is now publicly available.
Quibbling over the fact that you're the one who "truly owns" the data when it comes to something like social media feels like a mostly pointless endeavor because the outcome (data is available for others to view/consume/read/etc) is the same regardless of who "owns" it. Copyright law will apply to anything you produce, if it comes to legal problems (someone copies your artwork and sells it, for example) and having a system to prove you own it is primarily a formality to make it easier to prove ownership. Generally people aren't arguing through this lens, however, and are instead arguing through the privacy/security lens - that they don't want people stealing/selling their data, which lol, good luck. AI models are proof that no one in the world actually cares about this ownership if they reasonably think they can get away with using your data without any real incentive to not do so - interestingly copyright law and models being trained on corporate data such as movies are a vector by which the legality of this might actually stop or slow AI development and protect the end-users data.
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The illusion of Privacy is Mastodon (or social media in general)
There's a reason why when you go to "private mentions" on Mastodon, this appears:
While yes, we should be able to delete our content if we want, but it's a bit naive to think there could be true privacy in any decentralised social media platform.
There's a reason why one of the think people tell you when you come to the fediverse is not to share personal and sensible information.
The only decentralised social media that has some level of privacy is Matrix, and that's why it has it's own protocol and only federates within/between its own servers.
While yes, we should be able to delete our content if we want, but it’s a bit naive to think there could be true privacy in any decentralised social media platform.
Especially an email or "reddit" threaded conversation systems where quoting of messages is routine. Here I am, quoting you.
You are putting a billboard up in public, on a bulletin board in the center of the Internet, the assumption should be that anyone can photograph it.
Exactly.
That with the addition that the function of thread-like social media is being a place to discuss topic and share information/knowledge. So content needs to be kept even if the account that posted it exist no more. The contain remaining when the account gets deleted is a feature, because otherwise important information could be lost.
Content deletion should be an option, but the content remaining if you delete your account its a needed feature for this type of platform
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This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of digital privacy. You can never be guaranteed that data is deleted, just like you can never be guaranteed that someone has "forgotten" something. It doesn't matter what any entity claims they are doing under the hood, you have to assume they can't be trusted. That's not an expectation you can have, and not something privacy advocates are asking for.
I'm posting this comment publicly, and there's nothing stopping any random user (or non-user) from scraping this lemmy instance and archiving the data themselves. I know that when I post it. Same for reddit, raddle, any mastodon instance, etc. I can copy the text and usernames of everyone involved in that raddle thread and do whatever I want with it, there's nothing anyone can do to stop me.
To think otherwise reminds me of that first day on the internet kid meme. "I deleted my comments off of their servers, hah, they'll never get them now!"
What I can demand is: if I send a message directly to another party, I want to be able to verify that that party and ONLY that party can read the message (end-to-end encryption). I can also demand that they not require me to dox myself to them, that they not run weird js-based fingerprinting/port scanning processes on my system/network, and that I am allowed to connect to their services through a VPN should I so choose.
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If I wanted privacy, I wouldn't be browsing online.
That's a poor answer to be honest. Total privacy is an illusion, but having the tools to delete some of the traces if wanted should be there. I would argue that the EU law about the right to be forgotten might want a word with someone.
I escaped Reddit, but i hold anyone else to a standard too.
Lemmy, do better or it wont end well. https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/
i mean raddle is a site that has an anti doctor post pinned in the mental health community ... like c'mon I and many others need medicine to survive and you are encouraging anti-psychiatrist posting, Church of Scientology levels of anti-medicalist posting
Did anyone use reddit thinking it was private? With stuff like push shift and way back machine people shouldn't be posting stuff they aren't comfortable sharing anyways on a wide open message board.
Always weirded me out the people who'd treat their reddit accounts like Facebook.
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So, I was born in the late 90's - I don't know if they still have "computer literacy" as a core course in schools these days, but they did when I was going through K-12 (or, well K-9.. once you were in high school they assumed you knew the basics of how to use a computer, and had more advance courses).
One of the very first things we learned about the internet is that once you put something on the internet, there is no way to take it back. At the time, uploading pictures to the "cloud" and such wasn't really a thing so we learnt this by using email: Once you've sent an email to someone, you cannot "unsend" it. You can kindly ask the other party to delete the copy of the email without opening it, but you cannot guarantee that the email wasn't saved on another computer, or saved somewhere else along the route between your computer and the receiver's computer. Clicking the send button was taught to us as "etching your letter into stone".
Because of this, I've always (or at least, as far as I can remember) made sure that anything I put on the internet, or even "put into digital form" (such as even writing something in a file on your computer - you can recover deleted files from a hard drive unless you really put in the effort to actually erase it... there is a huge difference between erasing a file, and marking it as "deleted") is something that I'm okay being tied with me forever. I'm sure if you looked hard enough, you could find me participating on message boards as a young teenager - and to that I just say "Oh well". Is some of it probably very cringe-inducing and embarrassing? I have no doubt.
(This is also why you should take extreme caution when talking about say, your friend, on the internet - if you post something about them on the internet, you're condemning them to this same exact thing)
Now funnily enough, as far as I understand the ActivityPub protocol, it is for all intents and purposes the exact same as email in this regard. Once you've sent something, there are no "take backs". All you can do is kindly ask others to delete their copy, and that comes with zero guarantees. If I had a mastodon server, and someone deletes their toot - I could take down my server and my server would never receive that delete request. Or, just simply change the source code of the Mastodon instance on my server to straight up ignore deletion requests.
Would it be nice for Lemmy to have a way to actually delete your content? Sure. But that's not technically feasible, and personally (as controversial as it may seem) I would rather Lemmy not try to give you the false sense that everything was completely gone forever. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to delete your account off a Lemmy instance, but it shouldn't come with an option that says "Check here to remove your data/media from all federated instances" because Lemmy/no one can promise that, and I really hate it when software (or really anyone/anything) attempts to make a promise in bad-faith knowing that they can't possibly ever uphold it.
Anyone who thinks Reddit is "better" than Lemmy in this regard probably doesn't realize that Reddit is making a claim they can't keep. The most obvious example of this is all of these subreddits that have gone dark? You can bring up most of their posts on the Wayback Machine or Google Cache. That would be the case regardless of whether they were set to private, or even if they were just straight up "deleted".
We really should not be setting the belief for people that there exists a way to completely nuke a piece of data off the internet, because you cannot make a guarantee of that being the case.
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I’m at a loss. You’re saying that things that you said publicly are private? Or you’re saying that they become private because you delete your account? Assume you dox someone. I need to find out if that happened. As an admin I’d be able to see that
- you
- publicly posted
- their data
I would need to be able to provide this to authorities if they provided needed legal documentation. Why do you think that privacy dictates you should be able to commit a crime, and get away with it by deleting your account?
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I understand the impulse but the way some people get so hung up on trying to make a way to permanently and universally delete posts made on public facing social media and framing it as a "privacy" issue feels kinda like saying something you regret on mic at a town hall and being mad that you can't permanently delete the memory of it from the minds of everyone present, and claiming that they violated your privacy by remembering it
it's an interesting idea, but it doesn't vibe with the reality of the laws in the EU which has "right to be forgotten" rules
The "right to be forgotten" rules are, with all due respect to the EU regulators, pretty shortsighted.
I think the initial "right to be forgotten" lawsuit that Google faced from that Spanish guy-- where he claimed bankruptcy years prior. People( potential lenders?) kept finding that information online through google searches. He sued to have Google remove those sites from the index. He won and the Spanish Judge told Google they had to remove those results from searches.
But it didn't change that the information was still on each site. Those sites, the ones that actually held the information didn't get sued, just Google.
It also opened the door for oppressive governments covering up human rights abuses or hide other information they dont want widely available.
Google appealed and won: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49808208
I also want to point out that this Spanish guy's situation is very different from "posting publicly on social media". He was getting written about by others and the courts eventually said "no, this can stand. This information should remain available". So I imagine, public statements made by an individual certainly wouldn't qualify to be forgotten.
At the end of the day, to me, this is a technical decision not a privacy one.
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I think this is a great point. I would say its much less of a privacy issue and more of a technical issue.
I think deletions should propagate across all instances and there should be a level of trust between federated servers that they will make those deletions as requested. If only because we'd have a mismatch and orphan comments lingering in perpetuity and we could end up with wildly inconsistent data across the fediverse.
That's a non issue. You just cannot expect to be able to delete anything you post on the internet. Even the great reddit with the awesome deletion feature cannot help you. You might be able to delete your comment there, but there is https://www.unddit.com/ https://archive.is/ https://web.archive.org/ and many others, where your comment will still be available.
Eh. Often times I want to delete it particularly on reddit or some other place. Just so that it doesn't hang on my profile
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Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
This is a negative behavior by Lemmy, in my opinion. Deleted comments should be purged after some time. Tildes does the same thing - I think with 30 days?
Deleted account usernames remain visible too
These should be replaced with some random string of characters or something like DeleteUser or something.
Anything remains visible on federated servers!
This is just a concession of federation.
When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
This is an issue, too, in my opinion.
Honestly, this is definitely something that can be added - and in fact it might even be beneficial to server costs. Alongside optional deletion of cached data from other instances maybe a year or two after the data arrived.
People need to remember that Lemmy is an alpha software - we haven't even reached the big 1.0 release
I wasn't planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.
Opposite to Instagram or Facebook, on Lemmy or Mastodon you can create an anonymous account. Yes it will be logged (normal public internet), but you won't be treacable. The UI doesn't have any tracking scripts, and many instances don't require an email even to sign up. Use the Tor browser to spoof your IP.
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