alright, so, you DID copy the relevant legalise, yes, but you quite obviously didn’t read it carefully enough.

everything in your quote says what i said, and disproves what you said.

that’s just a fact and is why you are being downvoted: you said something nonsensical.

here’s how:

For the purposes of this Regulation:

self explanatory; no issues here.

‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);

here’s our first issue: “natural person” is a legal term and means an actual, real life person.

a username (and therefore a user in general) is NOT a “natural person” in the eyes of the law.

your user account has no rights in the eyes of the law. you, the person reading, does. but those are two different things in law terms.

also “relating to an identified or identifiable natural person” does NOT mean “any data related to your user account”. it ONLY refers to data that can be used to identify you, the natural person.

i think this is where most of your confusion comes from:

if the data cannot be used to identify you, then it is not protected by the GDPR.

it’s that simple, really.

also important: this is about data, specifically.

so comments you make also are not covered by GDPR, because the GDPR only deals with systems data and personally identifiable information.

so your votes, for example, are NOT covered, because they can’t be used to identify a natural person.

in fact, nothing that the Fediverse platform sends anywhere falls under GDPR (afaik).

anything identifiable you put on the platform, you’ve put their yourself, and the GDPR doesn’t protect you from posting a picture of your own SSN. it doesn’t protect from doing dumb things, it only protects information you didn’t provide voluntarily.

an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier […]

here is where i think the rest of your confusion lies:

it’s ONLY personally identifiable data, if, you know, it can identify you (the natural person)!

in layman’s terms that means this law ONLY applies, if your username can be used to easily acquire your real name. and ONLY then.

your IP address is not enough to identify a natural person precisely.

if you haven’t put your real name in your account description (which this law also doesn’t protect against, since that is voluntary on the users part), there is no way to correlate your username with your real name.

therefore the law doesn’t apply here.

[…] or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

this part pretty much just says that healthcare data, religion related data, club memberships, etc., are also personally identifiable information and therefore sensitive data.

mostly this means that using aggregate data to uniquely identify an individual is illegal.

so, for example, if some company has your age, general area, your gender, and your address, then it would be trivial to uniquely identify you, therefore that combination of data is also protected and classified as “sensitive information” which has to be handled in specific ways by law. (the details here aren’t important for the discussion, but it’s things like only store it encrypted, only locally/with certified providers, etc.; just a bunch technical details)

it’s also important to note that there are TONS of exceptions to the GDPR (which has made lots of privacy advocates very grumpy), so even IF data is personally identifiable, it may still be legal to process that data, of it falls under one of those exceptions and is clearly laid out in the privacy statement on the website.

now, if you can explain exactly where I’m wrong I’ll gladly admit to my shortcomings, but just going “nuh-uh! you’re wrong!” without any explanation is just plain rude.

read the text you copied carefully.

look up the parts you aren’t sure about.

understand what it is you are copy/pasting.

and then make a judgement on what i said.

here’s a handy summary of the GDPR in easy to understand language for you.

please read that carefully before posting more comments about the GDPR…

cheers,

a tired IT drone.