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 think if that works it would be a great solution! Processing copyright claims is pretty time-consuming, so they‘d have to put a lot of work into it
But the Reddit ToS states that by submitting content to their Services you
grant [Reddit] a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content
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
You‘re right, if the law was applicable then they‘d have to „process“(delete) the data.
But since the right to information weighs heavier than the right to be forgotten (except when it comes to personal data, which can be used to identify a user) Reddit is not required by the GDPR to delete posts/comments that do not contain such information
But we can‘t really know for sure what counts as personal data unless someone drags a company in front of a court over something like this
@sensibilidades is probably right that they could just restore the previous state from a backup
In addition to that is a name not necessarily information that would identify you. There are many people out there that share the same name. It would require additional personal information, like address, phone number or something like that
Even if that would help deleting a users Reddit history I wouldn‘t exactly recommend posting putting that information on the internet
As far as I can remember, e.g., an email address with your name and surname counts as personally identifiable information, so it's included under GDPR policies. However, I agree with the backup sentiment.
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
Depends on how they store the comments, IP is within GDPR, but even then, I will just claim that i have posted personal information on comments so it still applies. If the comment is connected to my user in anyway, it's GDPR..
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.
they don't retain comment edit history. they literally don't possess this capability-- it's a GDPR requirement.
it's possible that some of your comments were missed when you tried to sanitize them. i ran into this issue myself and had to re-run the sanitization script a few times to get all of my comments.
My belief is that no, it wouldn't - because the posts don't contain identifiable information about people. I'm not an expert, though, and I'd love for someone to come and correct me if I'm wrong.
Edit: I just saw that @S4nvers gave a more detailed answer than me a bit lower down, essentially agreeing with me but quoting the relevant part of GDPR to explain why.
New plan, replace all your comments with threats of violence so the moderators delete them.
I'm not there yet but i am re-overwriting all my comments as many have been restored. I will be keeping this script on repeat over writing them over and over and over until the API changes.
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.
This is turning into such a shit show. I can see some group deciding to do some form of attack on Reddit, just for shits and giggles.
When the api stops being freely accessed, loads of bots will stop. The only ones using Reddit will be ones they have created, and that will be interesting to see what rubbish they spout. I bet we will see one bot going on the rampage saying 'Spaz is wonderful'.
It will be interesting to see how they deal with GDPR for us EU users.
I just deleted Apollo off my phone. I loved Apollo but I kept mindlessly opening it, I just can’t use Reddit anymore. I’m here now. I had a 17 year Reddit badge, but no more.
I uninstalled it on Wednesday. Reddit had become a time sink for me more than something of benefit, and unless Apollo is going to do a federated app, I'm back to just checking in periodically when I think about it (which is fine really).
Same here - but Boost user. I am strongly considering editing all of my comments (I'll have to look around and see if there are any ideas of a copy/paste format I can just use) which I think could be more valuable than deleting
But I'm not sure if the next step, deleting my account, would be more hurtful than my edited comments. It would be something like "this comment has been wiped in protest of spez's api changes that blah blah dont want free profit from our shared knowledge" compared to the comment still existing but my username being removed
I'm just so torn on deleting the account with all the history and people I've helped and met along the years. I guess I just need to hear a convincing enough argument to help me pull the trigger lol
This is the first morning I haven't had any zombie comments pop back up on my account.
Funny thing I noticed was if I tried to edit my comments to "fuck you piss baby spez", it would log me out every few seconds and force me to log back in. But editing with random words worked fine. looks like they have some filtering set up to protect his ego lol.
Edit: I take that back. Now there's a bunch of year old, unedited, comments popped back up in there. Oh well, redact.dev goes brrrrrrr
I used edit -> delete with Redact and they reverted my edits and restored my posts (in high population subreddits, it seems, but not smaller population ones).
I've gone back in and manually edited and deleted them by hand and they appear gone so far.
This will make Reddit worse. Some people will start to edit their comments to make them nonsense. Trust will erode further. Search will slowly become nonfunctional.
From a users perspective, coming across a nonsensical thread (because comments have been edited), is much worse than see deleted comments. Not only does trust disappear people, but people become angry that the comments are outright random/bizarre/lies.
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