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 don’t think they can just restore all comments and bypass the GDPR, that would be insane. It’s a very serious law in Europe.
they are your IP that you can rescind permission to publish at any time
I think if that works it would be a great solution! Processing copyright claims is pretty time-consuming, so they‘d have to put a lot of work into it
But the Reddit ToS states that by submitting content to their Services you
grant [Reddit] a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content
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
You‘re right, you can use the GDPR to delete personal data. But again, I don‘t think posts and comment are considered personal data and that they would not have to be removed since they are essential to understanding the discussion as a whole
The GDPR was never intended to be able to destroy information, just to protect the privacy of users. So as long as there‘s no information that could identify a user in their posts/comments (which no one should make publicly available anyways) then Reddit is under no obligation to delete the content you generated. They only have to disassociate it from your account, which they do by displaying the username as „deleted“
Right, but how would they handle the case where personally identifiable information could be in the text itself?
Someone could tell a very descriptive story with enough detail that you can figure out who it is, or maybe someone who knows enough of the story in real life could figure out exactly who it was that made the comment?
For example, someone makes a comment with a long story and in there they include something like, “I’m Karen and I work at the restaurant where that [insert some major news story here…]”. People make mistakes all the time and they might want to quickly delete that information.
Not only that, if you look at enough of someone’s comment history you can start figuring out a lot of information about that person. In one comment they might mention the city they live in, in another they might mention the name of the business they work at, somewhere else you figure out their gender, in some cases they may even post a picture of themselves.
Edit: fixed formatting where some text was hidden.
Hmm yeah that’s true… So really the question is who decides what “sufficiently anonymized” actually means. Or what counts as personal data and what does not. Probably only a court can answer these questions since the GDPR is not very precise in that regard
I guess the best way to find out is to request deletion of all data including comments and posts, and if they don’t comply then take them to court or file a complaint with your national Data Protection Authority
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.
Mine are back as well! WOW, talk about being a scummy company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I kept mine.
I’ve run PowerDelete, and if they restore my comments I cannot even log back in to edit/delete them again.
Although I’d argue that restoring content the user has deleted without their consent, may also be considered a privacy violation. Maybe I’d posted something by accident, that I realized later I didn’t wanna share? All I’m saying is, it’s a dangerous road for them to take, as it exposes them to legal actions IMO.
BTW my comments are fine, still showing up as deleted.
Which is unfortunately not what I originally meant to do, but the tool does a poor job at warning to uncheck the delete checkbox. So after spending 5 minutes coming up with an impactful/helpful edit message pointing to my Lemmy profile and inviting people to get in touch if they needed that content absolutely (since I have a backup), I eventually messed up and run the tool with chained edit + DELETE actions. Yeah, that hurt a lil bit.
There’s no “may” about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.
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.
I notice when I Google “[username] reddit” all of my deleted post are still there. It just has my username as “[deleted]” any images are also gone.
I only deleted everything yesterday though so it may just not have caught up?
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.This is a new low.
No matter what side of the argument you’re on, posts and comments should not be allowed to be restored without the author’s permission. Reddit is only ensuring more people will go away or stay away.
Can confirm this, my comments are magically reappearing as well. I used PowerDeleteSuite and used the edit before delete function.
What’s more likely is there was a database syncing issue
More likely?
No what’s more likely is that they want to show a lot of posts and comments in their statistics before they go public. They are trying to make the protests look like it’s nothing.
