I think they vastly underestimate how many things Meta tracks besides ad tracking. They’re likely tracking how long you look at a given post in your feed and will use that to rank similar posts higher. They know your location, what wifi network you’re on and will use that to make assumptions based on others on the same network and/or in the same location. They know what times you’re browsing at and can correlate that with what’s trending in the area at those times, etc.

I have no doubt that their algorithm is biased towards all that crap, but these kinds of investigations need to be more informed in order for them to be useful.

Yup. I remember it from when Atlanta hosted the Olympic games some time in the '90s. Despicable.

Didn’t something similar happen in Turkey with Erdogan a few years back? Pretty sure he was accused of being behind it himself too; don’t know what the final verdict was though.

I think it’s a pretty common accusation, just like when a politician is attacked, someone will invariably suggest that they staged it in order to get more support.

I don’t think anyone should fear for their lives because of their opinions regardless of how stupid they are.

Edit: It’s pretty fucked up that this is somehow controversial…

Did you read the article? She’s not saying that she didn’t know that measles are dangerous, she’s saying that she thinks people would vaccinate more and sooner if they knew the potential delayed effects of measles. Her son died 4 years after catching it and he wasn’t vaccinated at 2 because he was on a delayed vaccination program (it doesn’t say why). It’s a super tragic story really and it doesn’t seem like she’s anti-vax or anything like it, quite the opposite.

Literally no one but you has used the word “federated” in his thread of comments… You responded to the original comment about git being decentralized by saying “it’s still 1 centralized server that has the code”. I corrected you, because that’s not how git works, and now I’m not sure what the fuck you’re on about…

Edit: Screenshot, in case you forget.

You’d still have a complete copy of the current HEAD, you’d just be missing a bunch of history depending on the depth at which you cloned.

It’s really not. In your example, the meme would be decentralized — not “the internet”. Also, I think you’re confusing “git” with services offering “git and more” such as GitHub, GitLab, etc.

No, that’s not quite how git works. Everyone who’s cloned the repo has a complete copy of the code — at least at the time they cloned/checked it out. If GitHub, Gitlab, BitBucket or whatever goes away, you can keep working without it, provided that people know how to use a remote from another machine. Git really is decentralized even if people tend to use it in a centralized fashion.

Edit: Spelling.

Yes, either that or “I haven’t thought this through well enough that I can explain it in writing, so please let me fumble through an oral explanation and—in all likelihood—waste your time”.

Or, “I’m dyslectic and would prefer to talk rather than write”, which is fair enough, I think.

It’s voluntarily broadcasting it, because YOU told it to broadcast it.

Yes, and that’s not the issue as I’ve been saying the entire time. The issue is that you have a right to know where it’s broadcast — both in the past and in the present. That’s what I’ve been saying the entire time. And the privacy policy needs to specify exactly what data is sent and where to. The privacy policy you cited did neither, it just stated that it was sent out.

I am interested in discussion but I prefer to discuss things based on facts rather than feelings.

Email isn’t exempt from the GDPR. If an email provider is doing anything with your email except for delivering it to the intended recipient, then you have a right to know under the GDPR. Plenty of hefty fines have been handed out over failing to sufficiently inform about such things: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ (look for e.g. art. 12 violations). Even something as simple as SMTP logs contain PII according to the GDPR and should be handled as such.

You voluntarily sending an email, with whatever content you decide to put there, to a recipient of your choosing, is in absolutely no way the same as clicking a vote button and involuntarily having your vote and username broadcast to whoever cares to listen without your prior knowledge and consent. Yes, emails travel through a bunch of MTAs underway — that’s a prerequisite for email to work. And no, broadcasting Lemmy votes along with usernames is in no way a prerequisite for voting to work.

It doesn’t matter if you post your +1 via lemmy or via email.

It absolutely does. When sending an email, you fill in the recipient and decide where your data goes, but when you press ‘upvote’ on Lemmy, you don’t have a say in who that information is broadcast to — especially not in its current form. And it’s on whoever runs the Lemmy server to comply with the GDPR and make data processors known. It really doesn’t matter how similar you think it is to email, the GDPR treats it differently and that’s the reality you have to accept.

Your argument could easily be extended to every piece of information floating across the internet. No one is forcing anyone to upload an image to Facebook, but Meta is still responsible for documenting who handles the image and for what purposes, they can’t just say, “you uploaded it, we let 3rd parties have their way with it”.

And I’ve also worked with the GDPR, both as a developer implementing systems to accommodate requests for data insight and erasure, and implementing controls to make sure data was being handled correctly and e.g. not stored for longer than allowed, and I’ve worked with it from a security perspective in order to protect the personal data of about a couple of million people, and finally I’ve worked with it in management to implement safe and GDPR compliant data handling strategies in a couple of companies.

Still not a good example because I’m still in control of what I choose to send and whether or not I choose to send it at all. I can’t choose whether or not Lemmy broadcasts my username in conjunction with my votes to whoever may be listening, but I can choose not to send an email to a mailing list stating who I am and how I vote on Lemmy posts.

Organizations handling EU citizens’ data are required to abide by the GDPR and I can assure you that Gmail and others do that, they were among the first scrutinized when the GDPR went into effect. Just because I can send any data via email, doesn’t mean that email providers can do whatever they want with the data. If an email provider processes the contents of your email in order to do targeted advertising, then they have to very clearly state that in their privacy policy.

This isn’t specifically aimed at you, @cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me, but more of a general observation. Lots of people in this thread appear to be unfamiliar with the GDPR and how it works, and that’s completely fair — especially if you’re not from Europa and/or haven’t worked with it. I just wish they would actually check how it works instead of making assumptions. This is a good start: https://gdpr.eu/data-privacy/

Problem is that it’s not historical. If a server was defederated yesterday, it doesn’t appear in that list. And again, GDPR takes this stuff seriously, and “look at the bottom” is not sufficient. It needs to specify what data goes where.

I don’t think email is a good example because you’re in complete control of who you send an email to. However, I’m not in control of who Lemmy sends my voting data to (because I don’t control who a given instance is federated with), but GDPR grants me the right to know that.

if you want data deleted, you can do that, but you’ll have to send that request to every server you (or your instance on your behalf) sent it to.

According to the GDPR an “organization” has to specify exactly who processes the user’s data (i.e. every instance in a federation — past and present), and everyone that processes that data must make it easy to make data/deletion requests, to that’s hopefully baked into Lemmy from the get-go because otherwise someone is going to find themselves in the middle of a GDPR nightmare sooner rather than later. It’s not enough to say in the privacy policy that “user data spreads to federated instances” or something to that effect.

And given that usernames are connected to the votes, I’m pretty sure that it does not comply with the GDPR to just say that it “will place this interaction in the user’s outbox and immediately deliver it on the user’s behalf to all”.

Edit: Added link.

Good find, albeit a bit horrifying.

I wonder what the GDPR implications of this is. As far as I understand, even free, privately run services are required to abide by GDPR and offer data insight and deletion. They’re also required to state clearly what happens to user data.

Edit: Apparently people have varying takes and feelings on what the GDPR does and does not say, so I urge you to please read the summary of GDPR data privacy here: https://gdpr.eu/data-privacy/ as well as the summary of what constitutes personal data here: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ It’s easier to have a good and fruitful discussion if we talk about what the GDPR actually says.

I can’t just spin up a website and automatically get that info from other websites, but I can spin up a lemmy instance and get that info from everyone it’s federated with.