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
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.