this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

ML can be applied in a great number of ways. One such way could be content moderation, especially detecting people who use alternate accounts to reply to their own content or manipulate votes etc.

By including IP addresses with the comments they could correlate who said what where and better learn how to detect similar posting styles despite deliberate attempts to appear to be someone else.

It's a legitimate use case. Not sure about the legality... but I doubt google or reddit would ever acknowledge what data is included unless they believed liability was minimal. So far they haven't acknowledged anything beyond the deal existing afaik.

[–] towerful 1 points 10 months ago

Yeh, but its such a grey area.
If the result was for security only, potentially could be passable as "essential" processing.
But, considering the scope of content posted on reddit (under 18s, details of medical (even criminal) content) it becomes significantly harder to justify the processing of that data alongside PII (or equivalent).
Especlially since its a change of terms & service agreements (passing data to 3rd party processors)

If security moderation is what they want in exchange for the data (and money), its more likely that reddit would include one-way anonymised PII (ie IP addresses that are hashed), so only reddit can recover/confirm ip addresses against the model.
Because, if they arent... Then they (and google) are gonna get FUCKED in EU courts