This article will describe how lemmy instance admins can purge images from pict-rs.
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story) |
This is (also) a horror story about accidentally uploading very sensitive data to Lemmy, and the (surprisingly) difficult task of deleting it.
That’s pretty unfortunate for the blog author, can imagine making that kind of mistake early in the morning will really wake you up.
The blog doesn’t mention specifically whether the author had uploaded using a Lemmy app or the webui AFAICT - if he used an app, there are some that actually store the auth/delete token returned by image uploads, and provide a section within the app where you can manage/delete (purge) images you’ve previously uploaded to Lemmy
Hi, unfortunate author here 😅
The issue happened in Jerboa. I opened a few tickets in the Jerboa app’s GitHub to address this:
- jerboa #1361: UI for deleting uploaded files
- jerboa #1362: Setting to hide "upload media" button
- jerboa #1363: Add "confirm upload" step to UX
Can you please tell us which Lemmy client apps you use that store the delete token and have a UI to delete uploaded images?
Boost does, under settings, general, uploaded images. Here is mine:
I can delete them there (or forfeit the ability to do so)
Very nice. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Boost is available on F-Droid.
Yeah. It uses google ad-mob, or if you purchase it needs the google play store app to verify that and deactivate ad-mob.
A way to purchase it without going through gplay would fix this, and probably means it could be published on fdroid in a premium-only version at least. I’ve been meaning to ask @[email protected] about the feasibility of that for a while now. It’s bothered me for years now, but I simply couldn’t find an alternative so far (neither back on reddit in the days).
In the future, please use cross post instead and not click bait titles into different communities.
On a more related note, do you have knowledge if the image was federated outwards? I’m fairly sure I’ve subscribed to that community, so there may be an off chance I have received a copy of the image as part of federation. Is there any way to scour other instances to find images that is federated out and needs to be removed?
Fortunately, in my case, my image was “orphaned” and never actually attached to a post or comment, so it wouldn’t have federated.
If the image has already federated then that’s a whole next level problem :(