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1. Michael Vogel (heluecht@pirati.ca)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 06:53:28 CEST Michael Vogel

   • Evan Prodromou

   @evan While writing about European privacy laws, I realised that any Fediverse research that uses personal data (even the public data) would have to be on a strict opt-in basis for European users.

   When you subscribe to a social network (Fediverse-based or otherwise), you always have to agree to its terms of use, which also have to tell you something about how your data will be used. If there is no mention of (academic) research, then no one is allowed to use my data for that. Data like "who interacts with whom" (the social graph) is declared as very sensitive data, so it can never be used for anything other than the intended purpose (communication) unless I explicitly agree.

   The fines are really high. Meta, for example, has had to pay fines of more than 2 billion euros in recent years, Amazon almost 800 million euros, and so on.

   • Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 08:29:28 CEST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @heluecht

     So, in my mind, "Would you share your Fediverse data with researchers?" implies that you have agency to share or not, and that you can consent or not.

     But I guess you're reading it a different way.

   • Michael Vogel (heluecht@pirati.ca)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 08:29:28 CEST Michael Vogel

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou
     @evan Thing is that while I could consent, this doesn't imply that my communication partner does also consent. And only if both are doing so, the data would be allowed to use (at least in Europe and at least as I understand the law)
   • Michael Vogel (heluecht@pirati.ca)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 08:41:49 CEST Michael Vogel

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou
     @evan As a German, I'm very careful with my data. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, they used the data from the population register, which included religious beliefs. This data was then used to deport and kill most of the Jewish population of the Netherlands. That's why I consider all data as potentially dangerous, especially data that contains religious and political beliefs.