Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it’s visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.
- Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
- Deleted account usernames remain visible too
- Anything remains visible on federated servers!
- When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
Anything put on the internet is forever. No one should be publicly posting anything with the expectation that they have any control of it after it goes out. If it’s not held by the server, there’s the way back machine or even just folks taking screenshots.
deleted by creator
It’s the Internet Corrolary to Murphy’s Law: your embarrassing posts will be available online forever, but any useful information you want to find later will have been deleted when you next look for it.
The internet is forever, except that one thing you really want to find from years ago. That’s the rule.
I completely agree. I just don’t see how there can be any realistic expectation of privacy when publishing something publicly.
I appreciate the idea of laws establishing a right to be forgotten and I think there’s still some value in being able to take your data away from certain companies, but there’s no guarantee it wasn’t copied many times before the original location is taken down.
The Fediverse works like email. Once somebody hits send, there’s no real way to claw that back.
There’s a difference between “there’s no way to guarantee total privacy” and “the system is designed to guarantee no privacy”, though. Even the best of us fuck up and say something they shouldn’t on occasion, and plenty of people online were never given proper lessons or are too young to understand how serious revealing information is.
Whether is Lemmy, federated, corporate owned, or even your own private site - nothing you put on the internet is ever truly private. If you have a public profile someone can access it and copy it.
The only things I’ll say that I have an expectation of privacy is health related, everything else I fully expect someone else to read, copy, and multiply.
I think there should be, but I never expect there to be. Did people’s parents not teach them about putting things on the internet they didn’t want shared?
They used to, then social media became a thing and they stopped. Suddenly, it was normal to put your entire life up online for other people to see, and if you didn’t feel comfortable doing that you were the weird one.
My rule is, never post anything you wouldn’t mind the media tracing back to you IRL and then making the top story of the day in your country. Because, while rare, that does occasionally happen!
Probably because it became very profitable to let everyone do that 😔
So don’t live, basically.
Or you can just maintain anonymity as best as you reasonably can and hope no one goes out of their way to identify you or the account(s). Making a new account after awhile is a safe practice. The goal is to decrease the likelihood of undesirable things, not make them impossible.
Odd response, you can still “live” without documenting your activities. Were people not living pre-Facebook/Instagram?
…Are we talking posting things anonymously or posting things with your irl name and photo?
Exactly, when you put it out there it’s out there on every single platform there is. It doesn’t matter if you “delete it”, the moment you share it you have lost control over it entirely.
For the same reasons I never understood why people post on Facebook with their own full name and life story out there in the open either.
True but you should still be able to delete your account and your comments and username leave the service. Online privacy isn’t about completely disappearing, but making yourself so hard to track the average person won’t bother digging.
Which in turn decreases the likelihood of something happening. Like locking a door.
The saying “If somebody wants to get in they will.” is a terrible one when left as is.
Great points
I mean yes but it’s still bad practice to keep deleted content. It’ll be a bad look to people interested in switching to lemmy and more people is really what it needs right now
This is generally true, but at the same time, the Internet archive doesn’t archive every single page ever.