cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
And this is one thing that people don’t seem to understand about Lemmy et al. If you post messages (including DM’s) on any one host, that message will be duplicated to any federated hosts. In most cases the only encryption would be in transit, so all it takes is for one of those hosts to be in a jurisdiction where the local authorities can seize the data, hackers can infiltrate poorly secured server, etc
If you are worried about the privacy/security of your data, it’s not really any safer here then on Reddit or Facebook etc. It may be more resistant to corporate influence but at the same time a kind citizen running a node is less likely to have money to fight legal action and warrants.
Yes. You really should treat anything you post on Lemmy (or anywhere else that isn’t E2E Encrypted) as public.
This is also why Lemmy recommends against using Lemmy direct messages and recommends Matrix with E2EE instead.