I saw a comment somewhere saying the title and had links but I lost the comment now. One of the links was going to raddle.me which is a Reddit like site
The political views of the main devs are controversial but it doesnโt really matter since Lemmy is free and open source. No one owns or runs it. Only lemmy.ml specifically is run by the devs.
Look at my other comment with the link. Itโs saying that even if you delete your account the only thing that happens is that you canโt access it anymore but every comment and data is still in the database
I mean, we can absolutely want that. And data farming is bad. Just objectively. Having a conversation in a public area irl isn't consent to being recorded (not that it is always illegal to do so). And Why should it be on the internet? If the delete option doesn't actually delete anything, it should clearly reflect that. I have no idea why you would argue against user control of their data.
You can fight for a better implementation, sure. Of course I would not be against that! I just personally fail to see the real issue with the way things are now on a public platform.
Some companies have to enforce retention policies for business and/or legal reasons, which means they actually have to delete your data if they say they will.
Some sites only "soft" delete things because it's simply easier and cheaper.
Regardless, I can't reiterate what you said enough:
Itโs why they say everything is permanent on the internet.
Nobody should ever once in their life assume that data they post online will be discarded, ever. Maybe it will, but never assume it will. Even if you run the server yourself and delete the data files on your server and send the hard disks into the sun, if the data was ever accessed, you should treat it as if it's been captured and retained somewhere.
Okay but you're commenting on a public forum, and didn't give anyone your name or any other PII when you signed up? Why are you worried about not being able to delete the things you're posting anonymously anyway?
I never said I was worried. Itโs just the general idea when actual companies usually have a data deletion policy in place. Having a data retention policy in place is usually a good look
If you don't want it there don't post it. The internet is scraped and copied and backed up. You can ask for it to be deleted but the company likely doesn't own every copy.
Spez, reddit's ceo, used to mod r/jailbait. Did it matter to the users? It didn't. Why should this be any different?
Also, this is a public platform as much as reddit is. Reddit's TOS is horrible and yet people stayed. Lemmy is not worse than reddit in terms of privacy. I had to use a script/program before deleting my reddit accounts because reddit won't delete what's in there.
According to the current readme: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy#features you will be able to delete all your post with account deletion. This also align with the warning text before deleting your account.
Also most instance are hosted by community members, and are community funded. I think most instance don't have the interest, or even the means to sell your data.
However, by the nature of OSS, everyone can modify the code when they start a instance (however, as per AGPL, they need to release the source code of modification, but I am sure there are people out there sneaky enough that can modify the code without other noticing). So theoretically, the admins can track you. Also by nature of the federation, your data will also be present on other instances that is federated with yours, but what they got should mostly be public informations (namely information of your post). And they don't necessarily need to delete that info after you deleted your account.
That being said, the privacy aspect of these small community-funded federated service should be order of magnitude better than most other social media site, where their entire business model is to spy on you and sell your data.