I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.
I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they don’t appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.
You must log in or register to comment.
Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started. It did seem that editing then deleting might protect against Reddit’s restoration of posts and comments.
Update: Just checked. They’ve restored a lot of my old posts. This may turn into a years-long game of whack-a-mole trying to actually get our material deleted from that site.
This is exactly why (plus laziness) that I haven’t even bothered. They’re just going to put them back anyway.
I do have a post pinned in my account directing people to Lemmy though.
I PMed someone on Twitter asking them to use Mastodon. As soon as I sent the PM, Twitter temporarily locked my account for “suspicious activity”. I had to basically fill out a captcha to get my account back, but it didn’t send the message.
I rewrote it while being more careful with my phrasing and misspelling “mastedon” the second time.
Well, if they did suspend my account for doing that, I doubt I’ll ever find out.
Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started.
They haven’t restored anything. Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history. The problem is half of you people rushing to use these tools for the first time have no idea how they work.
I manually deleted everything reddit chose to show in my profile over the course of a week. I only stopped once absolutely NO comments or posts were shown in “new” reddit, old.reddit, and all types of sorting (old,new,top,hot,controversial). Waited an additional day and then checked again, just to make sure I really got everything. There simply was nothing left in my profile anymore.
Afterwards(!) I used “shreddit” and it found nearly a thousand effing more things to delete (981 comments to be precise). Ran it twice, and the second go didn’t find any more comments or posts.
My account is deleted now, and I can STILL find comments that are definitely mine but no longer attributed to my account (it says [deleted] where the username originally was) but since the account no longer exists, I can not edit/delete them again.
There is definitely something fishy with that site.
I understood that you cannot view, edit, or delete posts and comments from communities that are set to private. So if you run shreddit and a community later becomes public again, your posts can resurface.
Yes, but I definitely found comments that were mine, which didn’t show up in my account but showed up in the threads where they were posted, purely through Google searches just like the one described on this post.
The community wasn’t set to private anymore during that time tho: r/breath_of_the_wild reopened immediatly after the protests.
It’s not fishy (at least not intentionally so). It’s a limitation of their database. It can only show 1000 comments. So it won’t find your very old posts when you sort by them.
So they’re not restoring comments. It’s just very difficult to find your old comments to actually delete them.
I am talking about comments that I manually deleted tho. I saved certain comments first before deleting so I know that they’re the same ones that I manually nuked.
The answer to that post is mine, and I saved that comment because I wanted to use it for a guide later. It was definitely DELETED the day I closed my account, and it is the 1:1 same text as the saved comment, so I defo didn’t just confuse it with a different / similar comment.
Please ELI5 to me how it is “just a limitation of their database” that this comment exists, even tho it did originally pop up in the comment list AND was deleted.
PS: this is just one example of many many others - a whole lot of my longer in-depth comments are simply back again. And that sub was no longer set to “private” during that time.
>Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history.
This isn’t quite 100% true. Shreddit supports getting its comment list from a GDPR request, and if you do that, then it CAN access the older comments and delete them, it just doesn’t have any other way than that data request file to know about their existence.
That’s exactly what I did with redact.dev. You plug in the zip file and it uses the enclosed .csv files to find the posts and comments to delete. Has nothing to do with arbitrary db limitations or profiles at all.
It should also be noted that California, where Reddit is based, also has some GDPR-style privacy laws. People were posting the sources last month when Reddit first started undeleting deleted content, and that guy posted a video on YouTube of himself manually deleting comments and then having Reddit restore the exact comments he had deleted, which is supposed to be impossible.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Oh, and obligatory fuck Reddit, and fuck the shills who come here to defend that corrupt shit.
I’m manually deleting everything and still seeing the same thing.
Yes, I noticed this as well. I had to feed my GDPR export into a program to delete comments as the scripts that used reddit to find comment history didn’t go back far enough and did a terrible job. Even with that some comments caused errors which may have been due to some subs still being private at the time so I will do another pass.
And predictably the only guy in the thread who understands who Reddits listings work was downvoted. I guess some things never change.
I’m pretty sure they got downvoted for being rude
Reddit doesn’t allow you to delete comments in communities you can’t access, which means they can come back when the community is unprivated. This is completely against the GDPR, since they provide no other way for you to delete your comments. And if you are banned, you won’t even be able to access your comment history to delete them.
The reason nothing happens is because no one is going to unite under a class action lawsuit to make it happen, and when all is said and done EU politicians don’t really listen to these complaints. Try getting in contact with Margrethe Vestager, but don’t expect a reply, even though they had no problem doing an interview and Q&A with Reddit Talk under pluralism activists like Akaash Maharaj who let themselves get compromised by reddit’s NFT confidence scam. At the end of the day, they’ll still maintain their Twitter and Reddit accounts while only paying lip service to the fediverse and ignoring GDPR violations they could themselves claim if they were so interested.
This doesn’t account for the post being hidden from your post history on accounts that aren’t banned, which I’ve seen firsthand.
Is it really a GDPR violation if no article 17 request was sent AND those comments contain no PII? PII is the key for GDPR, your “IP”/contribution to Reddit means nothing
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
Read it and weep, it’s not just PII, it’s PD. Sort of why it’s called “Right to be Forgotten”.
https://techgdpr.com/blog/difference-between-pii-and-personal-data/
“Personal data” shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person Even pseudonymised data falls under it,
Yes strong protection will make me cry so hard.
If my reddit comments are helping troubleshoot something technical and unrelated to me, that still isn’t personal data. Valuable comments will be available on reddit and generating them traffic from Google searches regardless of how much people here scream about GDPR.
In other words, you didn’t read the links. Here is another one from actual lawyers who actually know the law and do actually prosecute for it:
https://arighttobeforgotten.co.uk/right-to-be-forgotten-social-media
https://wolf.agency/en/the-right-to-be-forgotten/
I’m sorry, but outside of the US, you don’t get a free pass to be shitty. It will still require money and effort to bring to court, however.
Not American. You misunderstand the concept of “personal”.
Edit: also it doesn’t really matter if you are in the US (or where you are at all). If you deal with European customers (their data) you have to obey GDPR. That’s why some sites have opted to simply block European visitors.
Tell your people/alts to distribute their downvotes further up the branch, they look as ridiculous as your inability to understand evidence even when directly presented with it. It’s sort of funny to not even have them show up on kbin, I imagine it might be some misguided attempt at obfuscating, although the positive upvotes from accounts with zero comments or activity in old deep threaded content tell me enough. Man I love the transparency in contrast to reddit 😀
Whatever makes you feel better. Keep screaming GDPR at everything…
I’m in the US and deleted all my posts & comments months ago. I also deleted my account when the whole ruckus started over there. Just tried this search and low and behold, my old posts came up. Not happy about this.
Should be illegal. Is it not due to GDPR in Europe at least?
It totally is illegal. We just need someone with a good lawyer to push through.
How is it illegal
Read GDPR, Art. 17 GDPR Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)
It’s even worse because people deleted the content themselves and it still shows up and is editable. (Not to be confused with cached by search engine)
Agree. Under GDPR this is totally forbidden. Issue a take down request and when that is not being followed up they will have major issues in the EU.
They do this by removing the username from the content but they’re allowed to keep the content
What if the content identifies you?
It’s not illegal, they don’t have to provide this feature to you for you to edit your own comments.
They do have to delete it if you ask them tho.
Technically all they have to do is anonymize you by disassociating your comments from your profile
What if your comment identifies you?
Good point
> low and behold
*lo
*low and belowed
But this is funnier. :)
The EU needs to smack Reddit with those fat GDPR-violation fines.
Is there a way OP can report reddit for this?
I have done but from past experience they don’t do their job at all.
How about instead of deleting, you edit the comment so it’s taken completely out of context. Nonsense words, random poems, list of colors, etc.
They did.
Search engines do not scrape the entire internet every single time someone searches. They do routine scrapes of web content and create a cache of what was there, and search that cache. This is why updates to websites do not always reflect on searches.
You’re contents are findable on Google because the last time they bothered to scrape that particular Reddit post was when your comment was intact, and they have not had a need to scrape it again since then.
They are finding comments through Google and are then able to view, edit, and delete them on Reddit. They are not able to view them on their profile page.
They said the originals do not appear on their account on Reddit. They also said they edited their original posts to be empty. They’re able to edit and delete their modified (empty) comments based on what I understand of their post.
I don’t see anything in OP’s post that indicates Reddit.com itself is displaying the originals, only the search engines are, and the cache would be the reason why.
I just did a search just like OP said and while it’s true that most results are just outdated scraped content where my posts and comments have been deleted, I did find one just now that doesn’t appear on my account overview, but that I could see, edit, and delete on the reddit thread itself.
The second and third sentences of the second paragraph are talking about Reddit itself. OP does not see the comments in their own Reddit page, mass edited and deleted them at some point, but is still about to find them through a search engine actively on Reddit.
Maybe try reading it again
This is fine due diligence. You just need to frame it as such instead of confidently saying these things happened.
Skepticism is fine. Just assuming Reddit didn’t do something this egregious (when they probably did) is poor form.
This is not the first account I’ve heard of comments rising from the grave.
they are still served by Reddit
🤔
They also appear when you click through the link and look at the Reddit site. They can be editted and deleted. These are not cached search results Reddit is genuinely showing those comments and yet they can not be found in your account that shows you have no comments at all. That is not what is happening here.
Do the comments still show after you empty your own browser’s cache too? That seems less likely to be the culprit, but worth a check to be certain.
Elsewhere in this post there’s also a helpful user who notes that the mass-editing programs can only handle a thousand comments. Is it possible this is why some of your comments are still there?
Yes, I happen to be incidentally be finding this on a brand new install of Windows as my motherboard failed last week so its super duper clean.
OP is not saying that Google’s scrape still retains his reddit comments. He’s not referring to seeing this information on Google, but on Reddit.
He’s saying that reddit is retaining his comments and still serving those comments up when refreshed directly. They’re de-linked from his reddit account so he doesn’t see them through his reddit account, but the information is restored throughout the reddit site to be viewed.
They literally rolled back subreddit comments posts and all by weeks and years. so doesnt surprise me. We were their “item sold” and they aint giving that up. Sadly seems like the protests didnt do much. Some of us left but that about it.
OP said they did exactly that using shreddit.
Edit: Lemmy acting weird, this is supposed to be a comment to user ricecooker.
Sigh, whatever.
You’re allowed to delete comments on Lemmy :)
(They’ll still be visible to third-party app users but that’s another topic, it should be fixed eventually)
deleted by creator
I deleted my own comment above, what do you fellow Lemmings see?
I see ‘deleted_by_author’, nothing else. Your username is still above the comment along with a rough time of when it was posted.
I replaced all of mine with “fuck spez” and then deleted my account but not posts, so they’re still there. I went back and checked lol
They’re doing It to mine too.
Cries in American
F murica.
As an American.
Would it be better to edit posts and change them to nonsense? Random poems, list of dog breeds, song lyrics, random SQL code…
I changed all my comments over 5 karma with multiple pages of lorem ipsum placeholder text.
Underrated comment. Beautiful!
Appropriately-rated comment.
I tried to do this with a script but there’s a rate limiter on it for editing, but not for deleting. And I had a fuckload of comments.
Yes. Preferably something the LLM people can’t easily identify as garbage. Make your data less valuable.
It’s a known issue, only your last 1,000 comments are shown in your user profile so scripts like PowerDeleteSuite won’t catch the older ones. Also some of the comments go through, but then you just run the script again. Not much you can do about the older ones though.
ive been using Powerdeletesuite for reddit routinely for years. this is nothing new. it’s confusing bullshit and inconsistent but not new, at least
An easy test would be to load that thread in incognito and see if it shows the undeleted version.
They don’t seem to have an issue showing it to you logged in, its just it doesn’t appear in your content under your account so the only way to find your own comments is with an external search engine. You don’t need incognito.
Search engines are not live services. That’s old data that Google may or may not ever purge from their index. Using a search engine to determine if your comments are deleted is not going to work.
Just open up threads you’ve posted on in an incognito window. If you’re really paranoid, do it from a VPN, too. If you still see your comments on the live Reddit page, then Reddit un-deleted them. If you don’t, then they’re deleted, but search engines still have that data cached indefinitely.
Getting downvoted for logic and reality, apparently.
Explaining how things really work is always shamed by the masses.
deleted by creator
