@lemmy Hi I am planning on joining Lemmy however I was reading about some privacy issues with the platform. I am going to share some of them and what do you think about it?
--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
@notanonymous26 you know that public accessible web sites are regularly backed up by various web crawlers for search, AI training and etc. The Internet Archive for e.g. backs up and archives public content on the Internet.
There is no “delete” on the public web, once it’s out there, it’s never going away.
The fact that other copies might be out there (assuming a crawler archived the particular page while a post was up) isn’t a reason not to remove the copies you can control.
@KelsonV well, Lemmy is open source so you are free to run your own instance that deletes whatever you want from your own DB. But once it’s out there, you can’t necessarily un-publish information on the internet…
@lemmy @notanonymous26
By that logic, there’s no point in ever deleting anything online, so why even bother with hiding them? Just leave everything up there forever, whether the person who wrote it still wants it to be there or not.
Also, not everyone has the time, programming skills and resources to just fork a project, never mind run their own server. That’s not a constructive approach to a “this feature ought to work better” discussion.