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
This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of digital privacy. You can never be guaranteed that data is deleted, just like you can never be guaranteed that someone has “forgotten” something. It doesn’t matter what any entity claims they are doing under the hood, you have to assume they can’t be trusted. That’s not an expectation you can have, and not something privacy advocates are asking for.
I’m posting this comment publicly, and there’s nothing stopping any random user (or non-user) from scraping this lemmy instance and archiving the data themselves. I know that when I post it. Same for reddit, raddle, any mastodon instance, etc. I can copy the text and usernames of everyone involved in that raddle thread and do whatever I want with it, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me.
To think otherwise reminds me of that first day on the internet kid meme. “I deleted my comments off of their servers, hah, they’ll never get them now!”
What I can demand is: if I send a message directly to another party, I want to be able to verify that that party and ONLY that party can read the message (end-to-end encryption). I can also demand that they not require me to dox myself to them, that they not run weird js-based fingerprinting/port scanning processes on my system/network, and that I am allowed to connect to their services through a VPN should I so choose.
This is all true personal best practices, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad to ask for better retention policies from the services you use. What you’re talking about is true privacy and security; the critiques OP outlines are about reducing exposure when you are public. Will that reduction be verifiably perfect? No. But it’s still better than nothing, especially in cases where you’re just trying to protect from a specific threat, like someone you know irl seeing something that you regret posting.
Knowing that any information you share publicly can be stolen, I think the way Lemmy’s instances have the original comment after you deleted it could help counteract people manipulating what you said after you deleted it, such as making a quote and editing “your” original post after it was deleted. But this could give a lot of power to the admins as well, as they could be the ones manipulating.