A few days ago I deleted all of my posts and comments from reddit, but today they somehow reappeared.
I don’t know if that’s a bug or the admins themselves are restoring content, but I’m sure they’d have incentives to do so considering that they make money from your content, whether that is from generated clicks to the website or from selling those data to other companies to train AI models.
Assuming this isn’t just a temporary caching issue like someone else has suggested, denying people the right to delete their own data risks bring a GDPR nightmare down no the company.
Reddit sees “anonymized” data as being okay via GDPR. Thus Reddit thinks they can comply with GDPR by simply deleting your name off of the top of all the comments you leave behind.
This is why you occasionally see comments marked as written by
[deleted]with the comment body intact - that user used the GDPR to wipe their account.I’m not an expert on any legal system, let alone the European one, and so I can’t say if that’s sufficient by the letter of the law. But Reddit seems to think so, and thus if you “delete” your stuff it really just deletes your username (basically).
Removing the name isn’t enough. Some posts might contain stuff like “my real name is … and i live in so-and-so city” or “my birthday is today too!” which would all count as PII. This would need to be scrubbed too.
For the “[deleted]” part - there’s another way that happens. If you delete your reddit account w/o deleting the comment/post, then your text stays, but “[deleted]” is reported as the user who wrote it.
That’s true, but that’s not how Reddit sees it. Reddit says they have a “legitimate interest” in keeping your posts around, no matter what those posts say. They say that just removing the username is enough.
Again, I can’t speak to whether that’ll hold up in court, but that’s what Reddit is saying.
Yeah. So the general consensus here is that it wouldn’t hold up in court, see for example https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/41129/Just-started-the-process-of-editing-all-of-my-Reddit#entry-comment-174724
Such a stance would be particularly ironic considering one of the reasons that reddit cited for cutting off Pushshift from the API is because they felt Pushshift wasn’t honoring requests by reddit users to have their content deleted.
Actually, doubly ironic since Pushshift used to be a common way to get around the 1000 indexing limit on reddit and make sure you actually deleted everything.
They have the right to delete data that’s about them. Perhaps Reddit will make the case that the contents of their comments aren’t that, and once an account has been deleted so that those comments are no longer associated with a username then the identifiable personal information has been removed.
Assuming this isn’t just crappy caching issues.