I just logged in and checked my reddit account, and all my deleted posts have come back.
I have already sent a GDPR request to Reddit and they refuse to comply.
I asked them to delete everything they have about me, including my account and they told me that I need to login into reddit and ask it from there which:
- I don’t have to since GDPR says that I can even do it verbally and I don’t even have to write to a specific email, I can just let any employee of that company that I want this and they should honor it.
- They straight up don’t even have the option to delete your data there, since I requested for the complete erasure of my data as that is also in my rights.
Reddit literally refuses to comply with GDPR rules and tonight after work I am going to lodge a formal complain about GDPR violations as I do have proof of this in my emails.
Fuck Reddit I hope it crashes and burns.
Mm mm sure does smell like EU legal action in here.
On a serious note, that is an absolute new low for Reddit and I’m sorry that you have to deal with it right now.
@Alkalyon @shindig1457 I deleted my reddit account today. It’s going to crash and burn and I’m here for it
I am going to lodge a formal complain about GDPR violations as I do have proof of this in my emails.
This is the way.
They are supposed to verify that the person requesting deletion or another right under GDPR is the same as the person whose data it is, or that at least the requester is authorized to act for the person whose data it is.
Personally, I’d file the complaint with the Irish government. They seem to have a habit of going after big social media companies like Meta for GDPR violations.
How much could they get fined for this?
Can a non European make use of this. Or do I have to be in Europe to make and register a complaint. I assume there is nothing I can do here but I might as well ask.
For companies, GDPR applies to people in European Economic Area whose data is used by companies, or companies that have an office in EEA or another stable arrangement in EEA and process personal data of people located anywhere.
GDPR applies to people in European Economic Area whose data is used by companies,
I am in Greece. I am protected by GDPR.
yes
If this checks out, they may be in disrespect of a bunch of privacy laws including GDPR.
Looks like it checks out. https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144
Damn with screenshots and everything. Reddit might be screwd
And you really don’t want to screw around with GDPR:
- Non-compliance with an order by the supervisory authority as referred to in Article 58(2) shall, in accordance with paragraph 2 of this Article, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679#d1e6226-1-1
4% feels really low, I wish the EU set it to like 25%
Now, that depends. Does the GPDR require a formal process to request to be deleted? They could claim that any activity that doesn’t come in through that formal process doesn’t count.
Sounds like all you EU Redditors that had your comments restored need to use that account deletion page.
Holy shit! They restored my comments that I deleted the other day. What a crock of shit. Fuck u/spez.
This is wild. What the hell
They’re really scraping the barrel now.
But the main thing we can do is move quality content here.
WTF!!! Thx for raising awareness. This is crossing a line.
I guess next step would be not to delete posts but to edit them.Another user said they restore edited content too. They blanket restore anyone’s content which looks like it’s deleted by a script.
I can’t go on and manually delete twelve years of comments, I don’t think anyone can.
This will only be resolved if enough people take them to court and reddit is forced to add a complete data deletion option for all users.
How are they even distinguishing between protest deletions and content that was genuinely deleted for a different reason?
Why would they care either way? The only goal is to keep content on the site so the lemming users keep doomscrolling and seeing ads, so they couldn’t give a rats ass if the deleted content was a protest deletion or a generic user deletion.
Moderator “deletion” is a different kind and wouldn’t be affected by these restores.
Agree. Numbers of posts and comments count. Not quality. Never was quality.
Likely an algorithm that detects a large number of of quick deletions.
That is exactly why you should always edit your stuff before deleting it. Very few companies ever save more than the last version of your stuff, due to space and performance considerations. That way they can restore whatever they want, it’ll simply come out as “x” or whatever you put in there.
Except they’re also apparently restoring even edited posts and comments.
Source?
I scrubbed two accounts on the 13th, and they’re both back with the original posts as of this morning the 16th.
Same for me
Hmmm, not to be an apologist, but I wonder if this isn’t a data set integrity problem on reddits end. I reran PowerDeleteSuite, and it “acted funny” through the process.
When I checked my profile again, some posts were edited, and others were not. As I was paging through and manually editing the misses, the list of pages got shorder and shorter.
Perhaps a cache flush? I’m not saying put away the pitchforks here, just… This is weird.
Wouldn’t be the first time reddit’s backend went to total shit lol
I did this for this exact reason
In another thread, someone mentioned that the scripts that delete comments don’t work if the sub is private, so it could be that people are thinking their content was deleted, but the deletion didn’t actually happen.
I haven’t done it, so I can’t validate that.
This is actually good. Mass-deleting posts and comments hurts users more than Reddit itself in the long term.
When you strike, the goal is to inconvenience or otherwise impact the users of the service. That’s how you hurt the service provider.
When the bus drivers strike, who does it hurt more? The public transit office? Or riders?
When grocery store employees strike, that has direct impact on shoppers.
When the writers guild strikes, the most affected are filmnand television viewers.
The whole goal is to affect change by altering the behaviour of users. Otherwise, you just get scabs.
No, it hurts reddit more.
After reading this, I’m deleting my post and comment history immediately, but not my account. I will check regularly and delete again if reddit tries to bring it back. Might as well make them work for it.
you can schedule deletions with redact.dev app, in case you wanna set it up automatically
So I overwrite my posts and deleted with power delete suite, then deleted my account, and I’ve gone back and looked for my most recent posts and comments and they are still indeed gone.
I’m wondering if some people ran it while subs are already private and it simply wasn’t able to remove those posts and they didn’t show up until the subs became active again?
Not sure, but it’s not everyone that’s affected apparently.
This might be a silly question, because you know, big companies tend to ignore laws, but this cannot be GDPR (or maybe more importantly for this the California equivalent due to jurisdiction) compliant right?
“Nice”. I deleted my account after that… hopefully my articles stay deleted
Copying my comment from another thread below. I have since realised that Reddit does have to be GDPR compliant so it must be applicable, but does it apply to all content?
Would this actually be a GDPR breach? I was thinking about the right to erasure/to be forgotten earlier in relation to a post I saw about how your posts aren’t deleted on other federated instances, if you delete them on your home server. But I figured it wasn’t applicable because it’s not personal data and I’m thinking the same about this Reddit issue. Can anyone set me straight?
Yes, definition of personal data from GDPR:
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
Ah, thank you. I didn’t realise the definition covered so much but it makes sense especially with how the data could be used in conjunction with other identifying data. I should obviously brush up on my understanding of GDPR!
It’s a good definition. People are creatures of habit and often reuse usernames or other info across multiple accounts, plus registered emails, so it’s fairly trivial to cross reference and build a uniquely identifiable user profile off of just a single registered “anonymous” account.
What script are you using to mass edit? Even if they revert it, I would like to try.
I used PowerDeleteSuite to edit and delete. You can configure it to just edit if you want.
Edits seem to be throttled to one every 5 seconds. I ran powerdeletesuite several times and it got most of my comments, but still not all.
The throttling is new. They may be doing that to discourage people scrubbing their accounts, though it could also be a load issue since a lot of people have been doing.
When I did it last weekend it seemed to work fine. I had to run it a couple of times, and it took a while, but in the end it seemed to get everything.
The dev posted on r/PowerDeleteSuite two years ago about the rate limiting for edits. Said they where going to rewrite the script but never got around to it.
