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 don’t think they can just restore all comments and bypass the GDPR, that would be insane. It’s a very serious law in Europe.
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
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
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.
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.
your post is your IP and you own the rights to it and the right to have them deleted.
https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/individuals/know-your-rights/right-erasure-articles-17-19-gdpr
Would this be a GDPR violation? Serious question as I don’t know
Mine are back as well! WOW, talk about being a scummy company.
That is why you never edit anything in your database, only save a new version of it so you always can have a paper trail back with all the edits. Same with deleting, you just mark it as deleted. This data is worth a lot of money, they’d be stupid if they let the users destroy it.
And yes it’s against the GDPR and so on, but which one of us will sue them?
There’s no “may” about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.
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.
What’s more likely is there was a database syncing issue
More likely?
No what’s more likely is that they want to show a lot of posts and comments in their statistics before they go public. They are trying to make the protests look like it’s nothing.
This is messed up. I just recently deleted my account (used poweredeletesuite first to edit all my comments to a “.”) before finding out about the API stuff. With it deleted, if they’ve restored my posts, I have literally no way to ever delete any of it again. It’s not the end of the world for me fortunately (it could be bad for some people that may have revealed things that are too personal or could get them doxxed), but there were definitely things I’d like to have removed permanently.
This is why I’m not deleting my Reddit account, it’s all the “power” we users have over what’s going on, they’re gonna have to ban me to stop editing my stuff… and then we’re gonna do the GDPR dance.
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?
What if, instead of deleting all our comments, we edit them instead?
I was wondering this, leave the info for future people who may need support (like random IT threads), but edit a message in like:
[ Reddit has done X, Y, and Z, and I will no longer be commenting here. Come join the future over at join-lemmy.org. If this shows up in an AI result, know it was used without my knowledge or consent. ]
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 that use Reddit will become random nonsense.
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