A few days ago I deleted all of my posts and comments from reddit, but today they somehow reappeared.

I don’t know if that’s a bug or the admins themselves are restoring content, but I’m sure they’d have incentives to do so considering that they make money from your content, whether that is from generated clicks to the website or from selling those data to other companies to train AI models.

  • liminis@kbin.social
    7·
    1 year ago

    Assuming this isn’t just a temporary caching issue like someone else has suggested, denying people the right to delete their own data risks bring a GDPR nightmare down no the company.

    • EnglishMobster@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      Reddit sees “anonymized” data as being okay via GDPR. Thus Reddit thinks they can comply with GDPR by simply deleting your name off of the top of all the comments you leave behind.

      This is why you occasionally see comments marked as written by [deleted] with the comment body intact - that user used the GDPR to wipe their account.

      I’m not an expert on any legal system, let alone the European one, and so I can’t say if that’s sufficient by the letter of the law. But Reddit seems to think so, and thus if you “delete” your stuff it really just deletes your username (basically).

      • abff08f4813c@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Removing the name isn’t enough. Some posts might contain stuff like “my real name is … and i live in so-and-so city” or “my birthday is today too!” which would all count as PII. This would need to be scrubbed too.

        For the “[deleted]” part - there’s another way that happens. If you delete your reddit account w/o deleting the comment/post, then your text stays, but “[deleted]” is reported as the user who wrote it.

        • EnglishMobster@kbin.social
          0·
          1 year ago

          That’s true, but that’s not how Reddit sees it. Reddit says they have a “legitimate interest” in keeping your posts around, no matter what those posts say. They say that just removing the username is enough.

          Again, I can’t speak to whether that’ll hold up in court, but that’s what Reddit is saying.