Reddit, my own comments and the GDPR information provided by reddit
Hello everyone.
With the API changes, I, too, was planing to delete my reddit account. I am still intending on doing so, but I wanted to purge all my content (mostly comments, some even helpful) from that site, before i finally pull the plug on my account.
I used PowerDeleteSuite to edit and delete all my comments, and it successfully edited and deleted about 2000 comments I made.
Visiting my reddit profile (either logged in or from an incognito browser tab, old reddit as well as new) shows that I don't have any comments or posts.
However, I decided to have reddit provide me with all my stored data, as per the GDPR. This data reveals that I made about 6000 comments over the years, and about 2000 of those comments reflect the edits I made using PDS. But the remaining 4000 comments are still unedited and can be reached via the url in the GDPR spreadsheet.
Is there a tool that allows mass editing all my comments based on a spreadsheet containing URLs to the comments, as tools like PDS are unable to find the remaining ~4000 comments?
Just wondering, but why don't you ask reddit to delete your data, according to the GDPR you have a right to that?
Fair point, I guess my issue is trust.
The GDPR data I received from reddit revealed to me that the comments I edited and deleted have not actually been deleted from the database, just edited.
EDIT: Furthermore, I am "worried" that all reddit would need to do to be compliant to my GDPR delete request, was to remove my association with the comments, i.e. leaving the comments up but disasociating it with my account by changing the poster name to [deleted]. It seems to me, that in order to be GDPR compliant, reddit only needs to allow me to delete my content myself, which they do - but manually editing and deleting 4000 comments is not a job I want to do.
Comments cannot be deleted at all. You can replace their content with empty text, but there will still be comments. No one in their same mind will delete anything from a production database, that's a big no-no.
… that violates the law
What makes you think nobody in their sane mind would delete anything from a production database?