The answer is always yes for hosted services. The data has to be stored somewhere, and it is readable if not explicitly encrypted on your device before being send to the server. Some things like passwords are usually handled differently though, they are not readable by anyone.
That’s one of the reasons why picking an instance is a big deal. You trust that instance with moderation and handling of your data. If you’re not comfortable with any instance then you should look into hosting your own!
That begs the question, does admin has access all of our data?
Yes, of course… The data is on his server, he has access to his own server and everything that’s on it. This is true for any online service whatsoever, the only exception would be encrypted data.
If he wants, can he sell the data to some big corporation?
Not legally, unless the privacy policy is changed.
Do we disclose any information to outside parties?
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our site, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others rights, property, or safety.
Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network. Your public and followers-only posts are delivered to the servers where your followers reside, and direct messages are delivered to the servers of the recipients, in so far as those followers or recipients reside on a different server than this.
To be clear, the admins do not need to sell the information you share publicly, afaik it’s already freely and available in the open to anyone (as mentioned above in the privacy policy) and there is nothing stopping any outside party from scraping this data.
That begs the question, does admin has access all of our data? If he wants, can he sell the data to some big corporation?
The answer is always yes for hosted services. The data has to be stored somewhere, and it is readable if not explicitly encrypted on your device before being send to the server. Some things like passwords are usually handled differently though, they are not readable by anyone.
That’s one of the reasons why picking an instance is a big deal. You trust that instance with moderation and handling of your data. If you’re not comfortable with any instance then you should look into hosting your own!
Yes, of course… The data is on his server, he has access to his own server and everything that’s on it. This is true for any online service whatsoever, the only exception would be encrypted data.
Not legally, unless the privacy policy is changed.
This is my understanding without doing any research on Lemmy specifically and what, if any, differences there is compared to others.
Always assume that the answer is Yes. Regardless what you are using within the fediverse.
Again, Yes. Buti think they would be breaking their own privacy policy:
Looking at https://lemmy.world/legal and it refers to https://mastodon.world/about where general rules are clearly laid out that is also enforced afaik on lemmy.world. Them linking that page makes me assume that the same privacy policy that is used on mastodon.world also applies here, this can be seen at https://mastodon.world/privacy-policy
To be clear, the admins do not need to sell the information you share publicly, afaik it’s already freely and available in the open to anyone (as mentioned above in the privacy policy) and there is nothing stopping any outside party from scraping this data.
They do need to update https://lemmy.world/legal though asap to make things clear.