Granted, I really don’t know much about how all this works, but the thought occurred to me that Lemmy - as wonderfully open as it is, and without any kind of ‘disappearing messages’ or other privacy protecting functionality - is basically a smorgasbord for AI scrapers. Or am I (hopefully) wrong about this?
I believe the point is, once some data is publicly available, even if you try to delete it, you can never be sure all copies are truly gone. Like you said, maybe it lives on somebody’s hard drive, maybe some other user managed to scrape it for their own personal use, maybe they screenshotted the most compromising posts, etc. You can never be sure it’s gone.