Anyone can set up a website and share it with others
Not as simple as it used to be. Thanks to the abuse from ad, social media, and other tracking networks, now you need to comply with the cookie laws, personal information laws, data retention laws… and so on. It’s no longer as simple as setting up a website and just sharing it; just having an uncontrolled log, or lacking one, can land you in trouble. Allow random users add content (like comments) to the site, and you can get drowned before even realizing what’s happening.
Back in the day, you could set a site, have the webserver write whatever log, and not worry about it. Whether you used for access statistics, or forgot about it and deleted, nobody cared.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can’t log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can’t log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t think anyone is actually trying to enforce this for small-scale things like personal websites or lemmy instances.
Not as simple as it used to be. Thanks to the abuse from ad, social media, and other tracking networks, now you need to comply with the cookie laws, personal information laws, data retention laws… and so on. It’s no longer as simple as setting up a website and just sharing it; just having an uncontrolled log, or lacking one, can land you in trouble. Allow random users add content (like comments) to the site, and you can get drowned before even realizing what’s happening.
What is an “uncontrolled log”?
Back in the day, you could set a site, have the webserver write whatever log, and not worry about it. Whether you used for access statistics, or forgot about it and deleted, nobody cared.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can’t log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
It’s become much more complicated.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t think anyone is actually trying to enforce this for small-scale things like personal websites or lemmy instances.
Sometimes all it takes is a single disgruntled user reporting you to whatever overseeing organization, to have to deal with this stuff.