Fuck. I really don’t like this.
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.
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 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
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
deleting from a database isn’t processing. It’s literally what right to be gorhotten requires
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
Mine are back as well! WOW, talk about being a scummy company.
That is really bad of Reddit.
So section 230 protects social media platforms regarding content users post.
If they reinstate a user deleted post who owns it?
Hoping this blows up in their faces as it’s a really shitty course of action to take.
I also don’t think GDPR looks to kindly at this.
It really doesn’t. Right to be forgotten from the Irish Data Protection Commission.
Legally, they are probably fine. They’ll delete your account and disassociate your comments from it if you ask and that likely has them covered.
your post is your IP and you own the rights to it and the right to have them deleted.
https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/individuals/know-your-rights/right-erasure-articles-17-19-gdpr
Would this be a GDPR violation? Serious question as I don’t know
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.
This is why I’m not deleting my Reddit account, it’s all the “power” we users have over what’s going on, they’ll have to ban me to stop editing my stuff… and then we’ll do the GDPR dance.
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.Google, ChatGPT, and all those language models are going to have a very hard time with this. People will change their old comments to random nonsense, so search results will that use Reddit will become random nonsense.
There’s no “may” about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.
Other then lemmy world is there any other instances we are connected to that I should know about? I am gonna add them to my old comments.
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.
Yeah me too. I added a block in my pi-hole setup to the whole Reddit domain. That may get removed later for search results reasons… maybe.
RIF user here, and I had to move it off my home screen (replaced with Jerboa for Lemmy) but I still can’t bring myself to delete it yet :(
Might as well wait until it dies on July 1st.
This is messed up. I just recently deleted my account (used poweredeletesuite first to edit all my comments to a “.”) before finding out about the API stuff. With it deleted, if they’ve restored my posts, I have literally no way to ever delete any of it again. It’s not the end of the world for me fortunately (it could be bad for some people that may have revealed things that are too personal or could get them doxxed), but there were definitely things I’d like to have removed permanently.
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.
That is why you never edit anything in your database, only save a new version of it so you always can have a paper trail back with all the edits. Same with deleting, you just mark it as deleted. This data is worth a lot of money, they’d be stupid if they let the users destroy it.
And yes it’s against the GDPR and so on, but which one of us will sue them?
