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Reposting what I posted here a while ago.
Companies abiding by the GDPR are not required to delete your account or content at all, only Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Lemmy instances are unlikely to ask for info such as real name, phone number, postal address, etc; the only PII I can think of is the email that some (not all) instances request. Since it’s not a required field on all instances, I’m going to guess that the value of this field does not travel to other instances.
Therefore, if you invoked the GDPR to request your PII to be deleted, all that would need to happen is for the admin of your instance to overwrite the email field of your account with something random, and it would all be in compliance. Or they could also choose the delete your account, if they prefer.
Source: I’m a software engineer who was tasked at some point with aligning multi-billion-dollar businesses to the GDPR, who had hundreds of millions of dollars in liability if they did it wrong and therefore took it very seriously. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer, but we took our directions from them directly and across several companies, that’s what they all told us.
I'm not a law expert or anything like that, but as far as I understand it, personally identifiable information could potentially also apply to public comments or posts that contain personal information. For example, if I posted revenge-porn of you on lemmy (or any personal information), you would have the right to demand it being deleted.
Is that not a correct interpretation?
Yeah, there were different interpretations there from different counsels. It went from “well, they put it there and we don’t store it anywhere else, so nobody is preventing them from removing it, we don’t need to do anything”, with some “oh this field is actually durably stored somewhere else (such as an olap db or something), so either we need to scrub it there too when someone changes a value, or we can just add a ‘don’t share personal information in this field’ little label on the form”; to doing that kind of stuff on all fields.
Overall, the feeling was that we needed to do best effort depending on how likely it would be for a field to durably contain personal info, for it to smell a judge’s smell test that it was done in good faith, as is often the case in legal matters.