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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
There’s no “may” about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.
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
That is really bad of Reddit.
I sanitized all of my comments before I deleted them. They’re welcome to bring them back. it’s all just a protest message anyway. But for those who didn’t, this is really shitty.
Unedited messages were restored to my profile. You might want to check yours.
What’s more likely is there was a database syncing issue
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?
Now I’m thankful I’ve been editing and then deleting them for half a year.
This is the first morning I haven’t had any zombie comments pop back up on my account.
Funny thing I noticed was if I tried to edit my comments to “fuck you piss baby spez”, it would log me out every few seconds and force me to log back in. But editing with random words worked fine. looks like they have some filtering set up to protect his ego lol.
Edit: I take that back. Now there’s a bunch of year old, unedited, comments popped back up in there. Oh well, redact.dev goes brrrrrrr
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.
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 why I’m not deleting my Reddit account, it’s all the “power” we users have over what’s going on, they’re gonna have to ban me to stop editing my stuff… and then we’re gonna do the GDPR dance.
