“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?
You have the right to request a copy of all your personal data from whoever controls it. Apparently that feature is still missing from lemmy.
That quote is from here: https://lemmy.world/post/1060627
I think I agree with pretty much everything they wrote. From what I understand, the apostrophes indicate that this is not official jargon. You can’t prevent web-scraping with any reasonable effort, so you don’t have to. The internet already exists. It’s too late to stop it now; better focus on stopping future progress.
Mind that there is nothing involuntary about federation. It’s not like web-scraping in that respect. You can just turn it off. You are left with something like an old school forum or reddit. No problem.
If you take the view that context is a necessary part of your personal data, then merely avoiding quotes is probably not enough. Practically, the way reddit is doing things seems to be fine.
But what if someone wants to participate in a community on a different instance? At least, the texts and their context, along with the username and home instance, need to be revealed.
Taking a mental step back, it’s probably premature to worry about technological implementations. Sending data around does not have to be a violation. Compliance will require partly better information, and partly different administration. The legal aspects should be worked out before the necessary tools for the administrators are implemented.
There are also a lot of regulation for the backend, that instance owners have to comply with but which won’t be noticed by users. Documenting the data processing, who has access, possibly make data impact assessments, maybe notify the local data protection office, … There’s also more from the DSA, like releasing transparency reports on moderation twice a year, making regular backups and testing those, … I’m not quite sure what all is demanded by the DSA. Oh, and by german law there also needs to be a (physical) address that can be served legal papers.
I’m thinking about the issue of web-scraping, in particular. Some say that it’s almost always illegal. The European Commission, for one, disagrees.
I pulled this from google: https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2024/05/eu-regulator-adopts-restrictive-gdpr-position-on-data-scraping-impacting-ai-technologies
Web-scraping is in some ways related. You could also get (almost all of) the data through scraping. If it’s not legal to scrape lemmy without permission, then it’s probably not legal to spin up your own instance and get the data that way. It depends on your purpose, of course.
That’s also why I find the whole issue a little silly. Someone outside Europe could just scrape the data from the web interface and not worry about the GDPR. You’d have to put all of Europe behind a firewall to make it make sense. That’s a prime example of why I say the people in charge of the GDPR have no idea of the technology they are regulating.
Such regulation inherently favors big players. The cost of creating a compliant service/app/etc is fairly constant, regardless of the size of the user base.
Besides, the GDPR inherently favors elites. Has anyone ever tracked your private jet on twitter? Or chased after you to get paparazzi pictures? Some people’s personal data is worth a lot more than that of others. Most people will never have to worry about scrubbing unflattering media stories from search engines, or have the money to hire professionals to do it right.
Tell me what you hope the GDPR will achieve and I’ll tell you if there is any chance. I’d write what the fundamental problems are, but time is short.