“The SCOPE Act takes effect this Sunday, Sept. 1, and will require everyone to verify their age for social media.”
So how does this work with Lemmy? Is anyone in Texas just banned, is there some sort of third party ID service lined up…for every instance, lol.
But seriously, how does Lemmy (or the fediverse as a whole) comply? Is there some way it just doesn’t need to?
It doesn’t exactly ignore it, but in a sense GDPR doesn’t apply to Lemmy.
Long story short, GDPR is made to protect private information, and EVERYTHING in Lemmy is public so there is no private information to protect. It’s similar to things like pastebin or even public feed in Facebook, companies cannot be penalized for people willingly exposing their information publicly, but private information that is made public is a problem.
That is entirely incorrect. It is general data protection regulation, not privacy regulation.
You are given certain rights over data relating to you. For example: you may have it deleted. Have you googled the name of a person? At the bottom, you will find a notice that “some results may have been removed”. Under the GDPR, you can make search engines delete links relating to you; for example, links to unflattering news stories (once you are out of the public eye).
Sorry, forgot about answering here. Although the name is General data it is about personal data. I was going to reply with point by point why it either doesn’t apply to Lemmy or it follows GDPR, but I think it might be easier to answer directly your point about right to be forgotten.
First of all Lemmy allows you to delete your posts and user so it complies with it, but even if it didn’t GEPR has this to say:
Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary:
Paragraphs 1 and 2 are the right to be forgotten
for exercising the right of freedom of expression and information;
Which one could argue is public forum primary use
for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) in so far as the right referred to in paragraph 1 is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of the objectives of that processing;
Which again one could argue is part of the purpose of Lemmy as well.
I was going to reply with point by point why it either doesn’t apply to Lemmy or it follows GDPR
It does apply to lemmy and lemmy is not compliant. That is simply a fact as far as the courts have ruled so far.
Which one could argue is public forum primary use
One can argue a lot. But if such hand-wavy arguments work, then why do you think anyone ever has to pay fines or damages?
For this argument to work, you have to argue that erasing the precise personal data in question would infringe on someone else’s right to freedom of expression and information.
The original “right to be forgotten” was about links to media reports. The media reports themselves did not have to be deleted because of freedom of information, but google had to delete the links to them to make them harder to find. This is a narrow exception. Under EU law, data protection and these freedoms are both fundamental rights. They must be balanced. The GDPR dictates how. These exceptions will only apply where these freedoms are infringed in a big way.
At least, you have to do like reddit and anonymize the comments and posts. It could be argued that you actually may not even do more. Removing comments that someone else has replied to arguably makes their personal data incomplete. Reddit’s approach meets a lot of outspoken criticism on lemmy.
The problem is that the data is duplicated all over the federated instances. So, someone on your instance deletes their data, Other instances also delete their copies. What do you do if someone in the US refuses to delete and maybe gives you that argument about freedom of expression? That’s right. You pay damages to your user because you screwed it up.
