Reddit is restoring deleted posts

Shindig@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.ml – 6 points –
mstdn.games

I just logged in and checked my reddit account, and all my deleted posts have come back.

41

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

@Alkalyon

@shindig1457

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.

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.

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.

Holy shit! They restored my comments that I deleted the other day. What a crock of shit. Fuck u/spez.

They're really scraping the barrel now.

But the main thing we can do is move quality content here.

If this checks out, they may be in disrespect of a bunch of privacy laws including GDPR.

This is why I edited all my comments to say that a certain CEO is a greedy little pig boy instead of straight on deleting them.

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;

Folks in the EU should file a GDPR complaint against reddit for every deleted post restored.

I bet someone could script that and share the code...

Rather than delete posts, I propose all rexxitors instead edit all of their posts and comments to say that they are leaving reddit for good to go to the fediverse instead. Such edits should provide links to major Fediverse sites and getting started guides, with advice for other redditors to abandon that place and join us here.

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?

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.

WTF!!! Thx for raising awareness. This is crossing a line.
I guess next step would be not to delete posts but to edit them.

Really? How does that play with jurisdictions that have right to right to be forgotten laws? Seems like a pretty risky play for them to restore deleted posts that were explicitly deleted by its author.

thankful i used a script to mass-edit my profile, which seems to still be in effect (first and only time i visit a reddit URL post-spezdown, just directly typed my profile link so i don't give the front page any "views" or "engagement" or whatever the corpo hogs are calling it now)

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

"Nice". I deleted my account after that.. hopefully my articles stay deleted

I don't think deleting your account impacts your content there in any way. I've seen lots of posts in the past from accounts that were deleted after posting.

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.

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.

This is actually good. Mass-deleting posts and comments hurts users more than Reddit itself in the long term.