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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Whatever makes you feel better. Keep screaming GDPR at everything…
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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
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)
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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.
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.
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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.
They’re doing It to mine too.
Cries in American
F murica.
As an American.
Funny when the product sees itself up in the store window!
Do you see them from a throwaway account?
Yes, you can. Or, at least I can see some of my (deleted, not visible in my profile) main’s comments from my alt account.
Something tells me that isn’t GDPR compliant.
If I were European, I’d be very angry right now. Actually, I’m angry anyway…but there’s less that I can do as an American.
Though I do have an avenue as a Virginian, its not one where I control the enforcement. I would have to get my corporate bootlicking Attorney General to do something about it, and that will never happen.
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.
same, i used Power Delete Suite and confirmed i deleted everything, but searching my old username pulls up a lot of posts and comments. all the posts still seem to be deleted but i’m seeing comments where the username is deleted but the comment is back.
