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?
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?
That doesn’t violate anything, I have GDPR training.
The data is never deleted because that will destroy the database. Your comment is not just a comment, it’s also part of the indices which take forever to rebuild on delete, part of relations which will break, and also you can’t just remove portion of a file on disc when this file is many gigabytes big and is accessed in read and write modes simultaneously by millions of people each second.
Not a single developer worth their salt will ever delete anything.
This is bullshit.
A DBMS (database management system) handles all the necessary file file synchronisation necessary for simultaneous reading and writing. It’s a layer on top. File access sharing does not matter.
On a file you can write data in-place - without having to change surrounding data. You can clear existing data without the need to free the space it used.
Foreign keys in DBMS prevent relations from breaking.
How viable or costly data deletion or removal is greatly depends on your DBMS/storage system and usage pattern. Do you know how Reddit stores their data?
Data may be marked for deletion and regularly be deleted and indices rebuilt. Or it may keep deleted-marked content but clear its data. Both are viable and effectively data deletion. A record that holds no more of its data is no longer the data it was before.
Have you ever done any development or are you just taking random nonsense? Oh man…
My role is Lead Developer. So yes.
What’s your background?
Just some 20 years of software development. Yeah, if you delete data from DB, you’re not a lead, sorry. I wouldn’t hire you above junior, mate.