legal ramifications of self-hosting
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Are there any legal considerations to think about before self-hosting your own services like a XMPP server, Matrix server, and/or Invidious and offering them to the public? Does one need to talk to a lawyer about something like this before jumping into it?
Obviously checking with a lawyer is always a good idea, because different countries have different laws and you are not always aware of every law.
That being said, if a user of your service is brought into question by the law enforcement agencies, you will be required to provide all the information you have. You should always comply with any proper court order. So, the less you log the better off you will be. Again, a lawyer will tell you if in your country you are compelled by law to log any specific information.
For an XMPP server or a Matrix server, I cannot see how you could get into any legal issue. For Invidious, I guess Google could create troubles, if they wanted to. As GNUser pointed out, you would have to comply with the law where your server is and it is not only better to store as few logs as possible for that reason but also because collecting user data is bad.
Thanks for the comments. Magic Banana, can you elaborate on your reason for saying that about a XMPP or Matrix server. Cheers.
I suspect he means that as an XMPP provider you are only allowing people to communicate through your server, but they are the ones responsible for whatever they say, who they communicate with, etc. You don't have the option (if they do things correctly) to keep any chat logs, or store any files they might choose to share. Besides, you are not interfering with any particular company that could sue you.
Invidious or PeerTube for example you would be interfering with Google and/or hosting things yourself, which could be a little more complicated.
That being said, we do need more Invidious (or CloudTube) instances, since the most of the ones running right now are unusable... No search, no access to channels, no feeds, nothing. If you do go ahead and provide one, take a look at snopyta, which is the only fully working instance right now. I am sure the owner will be happy to help you prepare things properly.
Thanks for the clarification. I had wondered whether XMPP servers stored chat logs in some capacity.
> I had wondered whether XMPP servers stored chat logs in some capacity.
They can, and in order to support some features (like syncing messages across devices that are not always on line) they must. If you host an XMPP server and want to support such features, encourage your users to use end-to-end encryption. That way the messages stored on your server will be encrypted, so that you (or someone who hypothetically took control of your server) cannot read them.
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