Comment on Telegram CEO Pavel Durov Arrested in France
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 months agoI’ll quote the definition from the GDPR:
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); 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 or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
Little of the information that instance share is not personal. Identifiable is also very broad. It’s enough that it would be possible for someone with the right tools and access to other information to identify you. EG Your ISP could be subpoenaed to reveal the customer behind a dynamic IP-address, making it a personal datum.
It’s an extremely broad definition. If it wasn’t, tracking cookies would not be a big deal unless you had the real name of someone connected to the cookie ID.
ultimately the web is the web and you can’t proxy the whole web. Clicking a link will still lead you somewhere else and if your browser pre-loads links then that’s up to you.
That’s exactly what my first reaction was. But the law sees it differently. No one is required to use an ad-blocker, VPN, or know anything about the internet. When you make a website or something, it is up to you to make sure that no one’s rights are violated. In fairness, if it was otherwise, tracking pixels would be fine.
We’re not at a point yet, where outgoing links must come with a warning, but it would be safer. Someone is always the first to lose a court over something. I noticed news media use rel=noreferrer. I think that’s the least one needs to do (“data minimization”).
Don’t expect me to defend the GDPR. It’s neoliberal/conservative bullshit; even an abandonment of enlightenment values. But it’s the law nevertheless and a lot of people on Lemmy positively love it.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The only PII contained in that post you wrote is your user name. My instance has no idea what IP address or whatnot you used, it gets sent “user posted message”, “user voted”, etc. messages by lemmy.world. It does not interact with you.
The information that your instance shares with the rest of the world is a) pseudonymous, unless you dox yourself no connection can be made between your handle and your actual person and b) said information transfer is part of the primary service of the platform. You wouldn’t be here if things wouldn’t get shared that way, hence, you consented.
Cookies are no issue. Tracking without consent is. Lemmy isn’t tracking you. You have an account with lemmy.world. You presumably have taken notice of its privacy policy. lemmy.world is run by a Dutch foundation, and yes they have a legal department… or at least lawyers. If you’re a EU citizen the GDPR applies, otherwise other stuff might apply, they’re spelling it all out.
…yes? You gave lemmy.world the right to log your IP when you signed up. They’re not retaining it longer than necessary because of the general GDPR provision of data frugality, but if a court order knocks on their door saying that they need your IP they can also be required to wait until you log in and then send that fresh IP directly to the authorities. Newsflash: The GDPR does not provide opsec against EU state actors. Off to the darknet with you if you care about that. It does provide opsec against ad networks, data brokers, etc… well at least in so far as it’s actually enforced.
The fuck are you on about.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think you have California law in mind here? I’ll boil down the GDPR’s definition of personal data for this particular case.
‘[P]ersonal data’ means any information relating to an identifiable natural person.
All the data that is associated with a user account relates to that user. All of it is personal data.
[A]n identifiable natural person is one who can be identified by reference to an identifier such as an online identifier
Now that I come to mention it, I think a static IP is a sufficient identifier in itself, without further recourse to ISP data.
Indeed, it’s heart-warming to see how the legal section grows every time I check. Which is a problem, because I’m pretty sure they need to give everyone the option to decline or accept every time they change it. Well, maybe in another couple months or years, it will be somewhat in compliance with EU regulations.
The IP was simply an example that came from the court case I linked earlier. Oh, but not in this particular fork. techdirt.com/…/german-court-fines-site-owner-shar…
The enlightenment bit was too much? I see where you’re coming from. Well, you probably don’t want to read my rant.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Yes and it’s identifiable. That’s why I mentioned your online handle. You also not just consented, you tasked lemmy.world with broadcasting it all over the place. Complaining about that is like complaining about an email provider sending an email to a recipient.
That has nothing to do with the data transfer lemmy instances are doing among each other. Which was what you complained about. Yes, it’s personal data, yes, you consented. No, the GDPR has no issues with that. I could’ve been more clear in the beginning, let me ask again:
Which personal data do lemmy instances exchange that you did not consent them to share. That is not necessary for them to share to function as federated social network. That, in fact, isn’t available via the web interface. Exactly one thing comes to mind: Votes are identifiable and not everyone knows about that but there’s also a discussion going on.
You know what? Why am I even talking to you. If you have something to complain about, contact your data protection officer.
Nope it already started at the neoliberal/conservative bits. Neoliberals would like to own all your data freely, privately, while conservatives would like the police to own all your data. Things like Chat Control come out of the neolib/conservative corner of the EU while data protection is a Pirate/Greens/EFA thing, with Socdems and Demsocs not minding it but not taking the initiative, either. Oh and there’s also some conservatives who are in favour because digital sovereignty and such.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Didn’t Meta try the same argument? I very much doubt this will work in court.
Under the GDPR, you need informed consent. That consent may only be for specific, limited purposes. A blanket permission for any broad purpose is not going to work. People know that their comments and posts will be read, so that’s fine. One should probably tell people that their posts will also be crawled and stored in various databases. That federation means that their personal data is actively sent to other instances and processed there, is not something your average person knows. To be legally above board, this should happen only under contract, with instances under the GDPR or equivalent, and only by informed consent.
Every once in a while, there are debates around federating with or blocking certain instances. In particular, federating with Meta’s Threads is a hot button issue. Clearly, a number of people explicitly do not consent to having their data sent to just anyone. I think they have the law on their side.
I’m not complaining. I’m explaining the law. You asked, remember?
I originally posted this with regard to embedding images. But it also shows you something else: Saying that something is simply the way the internet works just doesn’t hold up in court. In that case, the plaintiff could have configured their browser to not connect to google. But they explicitly don’t have to.
Good question. Why should it matter if the data is sent to other people, if those people could scrape the data just as easily. Common sense may be that it doesn’t matter. But you could equally well say: Why does it matter if I share copyrighted media, if people can already get pirated copies with ease?
Under what conditions, scraping is legal is mostly unanswered right now. But the legality of scraping does not directly affect the legality of data sharing for federation.
Oh, I see. These terms are always a bit fuzzy.
Suppose we regulated food on the same principles. Manufacturers would have to print exactly what ingredients went into the food and what was done with them. Maybe they are also required to assess the impact of some ingredients or steps in the recipe. Then people can form their opinions on whether that is healthy or not; causes cancer or whatever. Nothing is banned outright, it’s just a matter of informed consent whether you eat something or not. To me, this is a neoliberal or libertarian approach.
The GDPR goes a step further by giving you rights over certain data, turning it into something similar to intellectual property. The dogma that we should turn everything into private property and leave it to the individual, and then a miracle happens, is to me libertarian or neoliberal. Suggest a better word if you have one.