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Accessible user info by instance owner? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by veeesix@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca

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Before joining Mastodon I remember reading about how instance owners could potentially have access to their user’s chats and messages. I don’t think I ever saw this about Lemmy, or at least never looked into that much. Is that also the case here? How much info is accessible by the owners here?

That said I love the service and am happy to be here lol

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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Basically, everything. There's no UI but it would trivial for me to go into the db and look at sent / received private messages.

Thats why lemmy has a warning on the dm page saying it's not secure and to use matrix.

[–] veeesix@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

What’s the extent of “everything”, like including logs of all user activity? I’m just trying to understand how the system works and how much of an investment of trust users require.

EDIT: An example that comes to mind is the ongoing copyright infringement news that the IP addresses of Reddit users discussing piracy should be given up to film studios. Do Lemmy users have any kind of protection when lawyers come knocking?

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

EDIT: An example that comes to mind is the ongoing copyright infringement news that the IP addresses of Reddit users discussing piracy should be given up to film studios. Do Lemmy users have any kind of protection when lawyers come knocking?

If provided with a court order, we could theoretically provide:

Email address
Record of all comments / posts made by the user
Incoming/outgoing DMs for the user
Voting activity made by that user
Communities subscribed to

(I think that's everything off the top of my head)

IP addresses are not logged in the db or linked to a user, but if the RCMP shows up with a warrant and says "We want all IP addresses that submitted a comment at 09:11:43am PST Jan 16 2024" then I'd be able to get that from the access logs. Access logs are only stored for 14 days and then purged, DB backups are taken daily and stored for 30 days.

[–] veeesix@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for going back and replying to my edit. I had trouble searching for an answer like that, so I really appreciate the response.

Do you happen to know any particular resources that discuss federated privacy?

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

I don't, sorry.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Lemmy is pretty light on activity logging, I'm not aware of anywhere that records user IPs. They also made some changes in a recent patch that moved user IDs from a get to a post variable, so I don't think there's a way to correlate hits in the access log with a particular user ID. (I haven't looked into this in a few months, so my info might be slightly wrong)

Basically what we can see is any content you post, even if it's a private DM (or one you received). We can also see all your voting data.