this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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By that logic though all of Fediverse is illegal and should be shut down. There is significant work to be done there, not just by Facebook but by the Fediverse community on the whole.
It is absolutely not illegal. But it is subject to GDPR, so I could send a deletion request to the admin of an instance, and they would have to delete my content on their instance.
GDPR covers "Personally Identifying Information". If you sign up with an annoymous username I wonder if GDPR even applies.
In general, any data that can be used to tack you, such as IP number that is sent with the request, is identifiable information so an anonymous username is not enough in itself
The Fediverse doesn't require that anyone provide any personal information, though. Literally none. It's the user's responsibility to choose not to post any.
Certainly, but when you make a comment or post it gets transferred to all federated servers without your express consent and you currently can't permanently delete anything.
True but won't be hard to fix in the future.
"Illegal" is a harsh term, I'd rather say "legally naive". There's no TOS anywhere saying things like "you give us the right to publish the comments you enter" which would clarify things but if you were to take an ordinary instance to court, you'd probably be thrown out with reference to you implicitly agreeing to have your comments published by, well, writing and submitting them. Licenses are ruled by contracts and contracts don't necessarily need written form.
Meta is a whole another thing, though, because now we're not only talking publishing, but straight commercial exploitation of your content. There's no equability to be seen anywhere, meta doesn't contribute to the maintenance of your home instance, it straight-up leeches your content to put it next to ads. An implicit license doesn't suffice for that, a written one might not even (because no equability), that's why all the corps have TOS.
If you post a comment on a publicly accessable page, there is an expectation that what you've posted will also be public. That's implied consent and doesn't require signing a contract.
In fact, the EU generally takes the position that a Terms of Service agreement is pretty much worthless. Nobody actually reads those documents, so the terms in them cannot be enforced. A TOS clarifies what a company/organisation will do with user entered content, but in terms of what can legally be done with the data the TOS doesn't apply.
truth hits hard...
Your comments and posts are PII. It doesn't apply, at all.