Privacy and Consent for Fediverse Developers: A Guide

skullgiver , 1 hour ago

Pretty funny to quote the GDPR consent description when the website shares your visit with Google without your consent (through Google Fonts), as well as various other third parties.

One important addition to the considerations: don’t join ActivityPub if you’re successful or popular. The way the community responded to BridgyFed showed that large parts of the Fediverse want it to stay their own little obscure corner away from most of the world, and that doesn’t even touch the whole Threads thing.

There are exceptions to this rule, like being a Cool Internet Company such as WordPress/Tumblr, where forced login prompts and ever shittier paid subscriptions are tolerated because these companies have a historical cool factor that other companies don’t have.

As for legal consent, make sure you know the legal obligations that come with consent if you run a product or service as a company or organisation. You may be required to tell end users what profile information you’ve shared with what servers when, that you’ve encrypted your database, and may be required to enforce deletion of PII on remote servers as the primary responsible party for protecting your users’ privacy when your users withdraw consent.

Or you can just ignore the law, which most of the Fediverse seems to do, including several government servers.