I’d be really keen to host a lemmy instance but just wondering with GDPR and everything, if there is anything else to consider outside of the technical setup and provisioning of hardware?
Lemmy is storing users data so is there any requirement to do anything GDPR wise?
Hope this is the right place for this - But seen a lot of posts interested in hosting their own lemmy instance, and this is an extension of that
The GDPR doesn’t apply only to services hosted in the EU, but any services handling the data of an EU citizen.
This is why some news outlets in the US just decided to block EU users all together, out of laziness.
IANAL, but the GDPR doesn’t cover pseudonymous data. Actually the GDPR encourages data processors (= services) to use pseudomization.
Personally identifiable information are IPs, email addresses, street address, name, date of birth, … Lemmy only collect IPs and email addresses. And these are not shared between instances.
Whether the service is hosted in the EU or not, as long as it serves EU users, lemmy should provide a way to delete emails and ip information in a self serving way. (maybe by deleting the account) In the mean time, instances admins have to fulfil requests to delete emails/ips of EU citizens from the database.
I’m gonna preface this: IANAL either.
There are also different legal bases for different kinds of data processing. For example, I’m pretty sure ensuring your site’s security counts as legitimate interest, and it’s pretty common that IP addresses are stored and processed as such. You don’t need to remove someone’s IP from your access logs just because they asked for it, because your interest in keeping your site secure for both yourself and everyone else outweighs their interest in the privacy of their data. Legitimate interest is the fuzziest of the six legal bases and it doesn’t help that advertisers have started attempting to qualify their BS as “legitimate interest” especially in consent forms (if they need your consent it’s not legitimate interest, it’s user consent, and they really should stop lying) but it still exists to keep things viable.
As a rule of thumb, if you’re storing data to provide a service you need to export or delete that data upon request, and if you’re doing anything over what’s strictly necessary for providing your service you need to ask the user about it. And you’re right, this applies to anyone whose instance is used by EU citizens.
Also, pseudonymous data still counts as personal data as long as the pseudonym can be linked back to personally identifiable information. You need to sever this link to comply with a deletion request.
It’s not only IPs and emails though. Since users can put whatever they want in comments and posts, all of those must be treated as potential PII, and have to be included in subject access requests and deletion requests.