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Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)

Nightmare on Lemmy "A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story"

This article will describe how lemmy instance admins can purge images from pict-rs (click here if you just want to know how).

This is (also) a horror story about accidentally uploading very sensitive data to Lemmy, and the (surprisingly) difficult task of deleting it.

Intro

tl;dr I (accidentally) uploaded a photo of my State-issued ID to Lemmy, and I couldn’t delete it.

Friends don’t let friends compose jerboa comments in bed before coffee (@theyshane)

A few weeks ago I woke up to my 06:00 AM alarm, snoozed my phone, rubbed my eyes, and started reading /c/worldnews (on Lemmy).

Still half-asleep, I was typing a comment when my thumb accidentally hit the “upload media” button. Up popped a gallery of images. I tried to click the back button, but I missed. I tapped on a photo. The photo that I tapped-on was a KYC selfie image (that I took the previous day for a service that has no business having such PII anyway).

That was all it took — two consecutive mis-taps while half-asleep in bed, and my dumb-ass just inadvertently uploaded a KYC selfie onto the public internet. And thanks to archaic State authentication systems, anyone with
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