this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Usernames are not PII

What do you think an online identifier is then? And why would the GDPR only apply if there is money made? It specifically says in multiple places free services also count.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://www.ibm.com/topics/pii#:~:text=Personally%20identifiable%20information%20(PII)%20is,email%20address%20or%20phone%20number.

Usernames are not and never have been considered pii

The GDPR states it clearly that the company/entity has to be collecting pii or selling something to the person. Lemmy does neither of these.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

How is IBM authoritative on this subject? And even so, this article doesn't say that usernames are not PII, it even indirectly says it is indirect PII.

Here's another random company's page saying usernames are PII: https://www.keepersecurity.com/blog/2023/06/14/what-is-personally-identifiable-information-pii/

The GDPR says it clearly and explicitly that:

  • online identifiers such as usernames are PII
  • selling data or money transactions of any kind is not a requirement for the GDPR rules to apply
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Usernames that are used in an internal network are, because they're linked to pii, a public username is not pii.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

And where did you read that? If anything, public usernames are easier to correlate to form identities.