Fuck. I really don’t like this.
So many trauma and support subreddits get deeply personal and identifying posts and comments about horrific shit people (me included) lived through and were trying to cope with, which got deleted several hours after posting for privacy reasons.
If this content gets revived by reddit, it puts a lot of vulnerable people in danger as it this type of ‘content’ is often harvested by users of other platforms who share these stories with huge audiences.
Mine are back as well! WOW, talk about being a scummy company.
Someone mentioned invoking GDPR’s right to be forgotten. Although comments are not strictly personal information, it could still work. I think I’ll try it soon.
I think you should definitely try, but I don’t think it’ll work. According to this stackexchange question they could argue that deleting your comments would break the cohesiveness of the discussion and make the available information incomplete.
Art.17, 3a states that the right to be forgotten is not applicable if processing of the data is required to exercise freedom of information. So I don’t think posts or comments are affected by the GDPR as long as they don’t contain any information that would identify a user
So what you’re saying is, mass-edit all your comments to contain your full name right before requesting deletion.
@sensibilidades is probably right that they could just restore the previous state from a backup
In addition to that is a name not necessarily information that would identify you. There are many people out there that share the same name. It would require additional personal information, like address, phone number or something like that
Even if that would help deleting a users Reddit history I wouldn‘t exactly recommend posting putting that information on the internet
Reddits privacy policy itself states that you can use GDPR or California’s CCPA and has instructions for invoking it (basically just sending them an email). https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy
You‘re right, you can use the GDPR to delete personal data. But again, I don‘t think posts and comment are considered personal data and that they would not have to be removed since they are essential to understanding the discussion as a whole
The GDPR was never intended to be able to destroy information, just to protect the privacy of users. So as long as there‘s no information that could identify a user in their posts/comments (which no one should make publicly available anyways) then Reddit is under no obligation to delete the content you generated. They only have to disassociate it from your account, which they do by displaying the username as „deleted“
Right, but how would they handle the case where personally identifiable information could be in the text itself?
Someone could tell a very descriptive story with enough detail that you can figure out who it is, or maybe someone who knows enough of the story in real life could figure out exactly who it was that made the comment?
For example, someone makes a comment with a long story and in there they include something like, “I’m Karen and I work at the restaurant where that [insert some major news story here…]”. People make mistakes all the time and they might want to quickly delete that information.
Not only that, if you look at enough of someone’s comment history you can start figuring out a lot of information about that person. In one comment they might mention the city they live in, in another they might mention the name of the business they work at, somewhere else you figure out their gender, in some cases they may even post a picture of themselves.
Edit: fixed formatting where some text was hidden.
Hmm yeah that’s true… So really the question is who decides what “sufficiently anonymized” actually means. Or what counts as personal data and what does not. Probably only a court can answer these questions since the GDPR is not very precise in that regard
I guess the best way to find out is to request deletion of all data including comments and posts, and if they don’t comply then take them to court or file a complaint with your national Data Protection Authority
Would this be a GDPR violation? Serious question as I don’t know
My belief is that no, it wouldn’t - because the posts don’t contain identifiable information about people. I’m not an expert, though, and I’d love for someone to come and correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit: I just saw that @S4nvers gave a more detailed answer than me a bit lower down, essentially agreeing with me but quoting the relevant part of GDPR to explain why.
gdpr includes your tlright to be forgotten and your ownership of your own IP, including posts, and right to erase your own content.
https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/individuals/know-your-rights/right-erasure-articles-17-19-gdpr
USA has something similar in coppa
There’s no “may” about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.
So section 230 protects social media platforms regarding content users post.
If they reinstate a user deleted post who owns it?
Hoping this blows up in their faces as it’s a really shitty course of action to take.
I also don’t think GDPR looks to kindly at this.
It really doesn’t. Right to be forgotten from the Irish Data Protection Commission.
Legally, they are probably fine. They’ll delete your account and disassociate your comments from it if you ask and that likely has them covered.
Oh, that’s a really interesting take! I wonder if there’s even any precedent for this sort of thing…
That is really bad of Reddit.
I just deleted Apollo off my phone. I loved Apollo but I kept mindlessly opening it, I just can’t use Reddit anymore. I’m here now. I had a 17 year Reddit badge, but no more.
RIF user here, and I had to move it off my home screen (replaced with Jerboa for Lemmy) but I still can’t bring myself to delete it yet :(
Might as well wait until it dies on July 1st.
Yeah me too. I added a block in my pi-hole setup to the whole Reddit domain. That may get removed later for search results reasons… maybe.
Google, ChatGPT, and all those language models are going to have a very hard time with this. People will change their old comments to random nonsense, so search results will that use Reddit will become random nonsense.
This is why you use the edit THEN delete option in Power Delete Suite instead of just delete. All my restored comments will say “fuck you spez”.
Don’t they keep a history of edits that you made? I thought I read that somewhere yesterday in a discussion about what they maintain.
I think that’s the best solution to this damn
I sanitized all of my comments before I deleted them. They’re welcome to bring them back. it’s all just a protest message anyway. But for those who didn’t, this is really shitty.
Unedited messages were restored to my profile. You might want to check yours.
no profile to check-- i also deleted my account. but, like I said: I sanitized all of my comments first.
They are going into their database and restoring the original comments. No just un-deleting them. This is exactly why I left my account active.
they don’t retain comment edit history. they literally don’t possess this capability-- it’s a GDPR requirement.
it’s possible that some of your comments were missed when you tried to sanitize them. i ran into this issue myself and had to re-run the sanitization script a few times to get all of my comments.
This is turning into such a shit show. I can see some group deciding to do some form of attack on Reddit, just for shits and giggles.
When the api stops being freely accessed, loads of bots will stop. The only ones using Reddit will be ones they have created, and that will be interesting to see what rubbish they spout. I bet we will see one bot going on the rampage saying ‘Spaz is wonderful’.
It will be interesting to see how they deal with GDPR for us EU users.
This will make Reddit worse. Some people will start to edit their comments to make them nonsense. Trust will erode further. Search will slowly become nonfunctional.
From a users perspective, coming across a nonsensical thread (because comments have been edited), is much worse than see deleted comments. Not only does trust disappear people, but people become angry that the comments are outright random/bizarre/lies.I notice when I Google “[username] reddit” all of my deleted post are still there. It just has my username as “[deleted]” any images are also gone.
I only deleted everything yesterday though so it may just not have caught up?
deleted by creator
