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
Actually that is exactly what the GDPR stipulates. In your example Facebook needs a data processing agreement that ensures that all rights of the data owners are secured and the GDPR is followed. Facebook is liable here, not Amazon - the user must explicitly NOT ask Amazon to delete as the user may not even know where the data went to/should not be bothered to write requests to a huge amount of different data processing locations.
But, @[email protected] added another interesting point: The Instance may or may not be seen as a single data processing entity that does not voluntarily hands over data to other instances. That could indeed be a reasonable cause as e.g. data scrubbers are not within the sphere of influence of e.g. a service publicly displaying data. But as the whole network is build on interconnected nodes I wouldn’t count on it if that reasoning would fly in front of a court. It may. Or it may not.
The originating instance definitely cannot be held responsible for failing to force a separate instance in another country to delete its cached copy of user data imo. I think what is more likely is that EU courts could force European Jimmy instances to only federate with GDPR-compliant instances.
This is incorrect if the data transfer was done voluntarily/planned. This also applies to EU data outside the EU - Meta has been fined a 1.2 billion euro for that.
And no, the definitive definition of the data transfer extent is a key point of the GDPR. Each and every data owner has the right to know where their data is stored exactly. So a “EU only” would not be enough - It is basically already mandatory as transfer to other countries is a major problem after Schrems 2.