I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.
There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.
All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.
This isn’t really a good excuse though. Right to be forgotten doesn’t me the right to be forgotten except in a cache loop. Sometimes this stuff is time sensitive.
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being “restored” were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don’t actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don’t need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn’t.
I definitely do not believe any of these stories of comments intentionally restored. Not one piece of concrete proof of it happening has been submitted by anyone. It's definitely one of those "do your own research" things.
But also, Reddit is responsible for this situation by not having a first party tool for self-service full account deletions. They deserve all these conspiracies hitting them for omitting such an essential feature.
Your comment misses the very important point that nobody who experienced this issue had the clairvoyance to screenshot their cleared profile on Day A to prove that their comments were restored on Day B, C, or D. You’re expecting someone to have explicitly predicted that exact circumstance and deliberately documented it before it ever happened to them. That’s like complaining to your neighbor they they can’t prove the scratch wasn’t already in their car door after they watch you hit it with your own.
These rumors of restored comments have been going on since the start of the reddit blackouts. And they're largely not happening anymore now that the blackouts are over. It was the blackouts. I checked my comments and deleted new ones almost every day during the blackouts, and whenever they "came back" they were all on a previously-private sub and they "came back" as a bloc. It was private subs having comments be private, then turning public/restricted and "restoring" the previously-inaccessible comments.
Literally just one confirmed case of someone who knew about the "restorations" and took some kind of backup before deleting to prove it happening. Just one case. But there isn't.
There is absolutely zero chance Reddit would be restoring only certain comments. It would be widespread if they were doing it. They aren't going to send out one of the professional sitewide mods with admin tools to review deletions and randomly restore only certain comments.
Spot on. Even when they've been caught doing things most people thought was shady (e.g., last year's /r/place manipulation), they tend to not outright deny it, but rather admit it and offer a half-assed explanation and end the conversation at that.
They wouldn't do something that flagrantly disregards EU/CA privacy laws. If they did it, they'd have have a justification they thought would hold up in court. If they had a justification that held up in court, they'd happily plop it in a comment that's pinned with a few dozen rewards and ignore any responses after that.
Regarding PowerDeleteSuite it’s because it hasn’t been updated in multiple years and since then (like a year after the last PDS update) Reddit added a cooldown for editing comments. I assume the same exists for deleting.
So when you run the script, occasionally you hit the 5-sec cooldown but the script just keeps moving, thinking everything is okay.
I just used the tool last week and it deleted 3500 comments successfully. A couple of times it encountered errors, but it stopped and asked what I wanted to do before proceeding.
“Welcome to gaslighting 101! Please take a syllabus from the pile you will [not] find by the door, which will [not] include your instructor’s contact information and office hours.”
heck I can't even get my data to begin with. When it did not show they sent me bakc an email saying it would take up to 30 days. today I emailed back that it has been well over 30 days.
Mine are staying delete now after initially a few popping back up. What’s more concerning is that I requested my data a few weeks after I deleted my content. I was fully expecting to get empty files but nope ALL of my content. Dating back 10 years is still there! It’s not on my Reddit profile but they clearly kept it somewhere and can recall it whenever they want to. They do not delete the data.
Mine are staying delete now after initially a few popping back up.
Something like this happened for me too, but I believe these were comments that I didn’t yet delete, they just weren’t visible anymore. The older ones started to pop up once there was new space for them after deleting the newer ones. (On your profile not all comments you ever made are visible, only the newest/top/most-controversial ones, depending on what you sort for).
For example in my profile my very first post was visible, but none of the comments I made there. Before deleting the posts I went through each one and deleted my comments that way. There probably still are many comments from me laying around undeleted…
I hate a lot of the things that reddit has been doing but I still think not all of them are on purpose. I ran into this issue myself before it was widely discussed and my first thought was that it had simply failed to delete some comments or deleted only from some cache.
So far every exampe I’ve seen of this can still be explained by bad engineering and I see no reason to think it is “undeleting” stuff by design, since it seems to happen to very random content that has no general value (like restoring 20 random comments out of 900 that were deleted).
This is nothing more than reddit pushing their luck with european data laws, and finally relenting and going “OMG if your stuff wasnt deleted it was your fault, not ours, We promise it’ll totally work this time if you do it again, since we’ve turned off our desperation measures after being threatened by fines by the EU”
When the ICO recieve a complaint they usually send an initial notification email to the data controller to advise that a case officer will be assigned in due course.
Well, unless it relates to a serious or ongoing data breach, which tends to be triaged immediately into an active investigation.
Initial notification letters do usually recommend trying to resolve the issue with the data subject in the interim though.
That probably spooked Reddit into moving your case up the priority list as I imagine they’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of SAR, erasure and objection requests, considering the circumstances.
The response window for most of those rights is 30 calendar days + extensions if applicable, so they could also have just been responding as late as allowed, accounting for aforementioned probable backlog.
Do let us know when the ICO gets back to you though, will be fascinating to hear what they have to say.
Keep pushing with the relevant authorities. There is a difference between “We are not intentionally restoring comments” and “We certify that we have forgotten all of your info”, and that’s what these authorities enforce.
It doesn’t matter if Reddit’s inscrutable back end makes it difficult. That’s Reddit’s problem, not yours. If they want to do business in the EU, they either have to comply or pull a Meta and stop serving EU residents entirely.
They had a third option, to treat their users as human beings and not dumb fucks to exploit until they want to leave (and forget they ever went there), but they declined to use it.
This. The whole question of whether Reddit meant to restore comments is a distraction. The actual issue is that people who wanted their comments deleted are finding that their comments have not been deleted. If Reddit wants to prove that it was not their fault, they can do it in court. No lawyer is going to believe the kind of half-assed excuses Reddit has been handing out. I would like to see this hashed out in court, if for no other reason than that a court case is probably the best way to find out what is actually happening here. It seems like Reddit not going to be honest unless they’re forced to be, even when honesty would benefit them.
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