I was thinking about this recently… By going to a federated system, one that essentially copies all of your content from one instance to another, when you delete a comment, does that comment get deleted on every instance? Is that even possible?
I was thinking about this recently… By going to a federated system, one that essentially copies all of your content from one instance to another, when you delete a comment, does that comment get deleted on every instance? Is that even possible?
Besides the technical considerations others have posted: who exactly owns what you post? If you send a letter to someone, is it you or the receiver who owns the letter? If you post something publicly, is it you or the collective public that owns that post now?
Thinking about this via copyright is not very helpful as small text are rarely complex enough to fall under copyright. However most large social media force you to sign over the copyright of anything you post to them anyways.
And the law IANAL does not consider public texts to be “personal data”. This is reserved to you real name, address, email, IP etc. Stuff that can be used to identify you, but not more.
From what I recall copyright applies to any original composed media at the point of its creation. There are fair use exemptions in the US for things like critique and parody but not for replication and redistribution. That all said, I would think logically that the public posting of a private message would potentially fall under a violation if someone really pushed it, but it gets fuzzy. A public statement no longer has any reasonable expectation that it be constrained to any particular person so I think at that point the horse left the stable.
An area that I find interesting in a legally dubious sense is the space of revenge porn sites. If the person posting it was also the one filming it, with consent at the time I would think that technically they own the rights to it to do as they will, but that’s not the case according to plenty of places with laws against it.
Not a lawyer by any means, but I tend to make them nuts when talking to them just with all the ‘what if’ corner scenarios my mind cooks up.