this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
153 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37746 readers
239 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There is a federated system of deletion, it just doesn't have guarantees to work. The problem is that it's a distributed system among untrusted actors. Usually the only way to have a distributed, secure, untrusted system is to use a blockchain. In the absence of a blockchain or equivalent, we keep the "distributed" and "untrusted" but concede the "secure".

This doesn't just go for deletions. It also means submissions or edits might not affect other servers. Malicious servers could also change all your posts to say "I'm an ugly moron" and those could get propagated to other servers.