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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.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Depends on how they store the comments, IP is within GDPR, but even then, I will just claim that i have posted personal information on comments so it still applies. If the comment is connected to my user in anyway, it's GDPR..
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
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they are your IP that you can rescind permission to publish at any time
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.
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.
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.
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
Oh, that's a really interesting take! I wonder if there's even any precedent for this sort of thing...
That is really bad of Reddit.
There's no "may" about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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They are going into their database and restoring the original comments. No just un-deleting them. This is exactly why I left my account active.
they don't retain comment edit history. they literally don't possess this capability-- it's a GDPR requirement.
it's possible that some of your comments were missed when you tried to sanitize them. i ran into this issue myself and had to re-run the sanitization script a few times to get all of my comments.
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.
gdpr includes your tlright to be forgotten and your ownership of your own IP, including posts, and right to erase your own content.
https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/individuals/know-your-rights/right-erasure-articles-17-19-gdpr
USA has something similar in coppa
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
Now I'm thankful I've been editing and then deleting them for half a year.
What if, instead of deleting all our comments, we edit them instead?
I was wondering this, leave the info for future people who may need support (like random IT threads), but edit a message in like:
[ Reddit has done X, Y, and Z, and I will no longer be commenting here. Come join the future over at join-lemmy.org. If this shows up in an AI result, know it was used without my knowledge or consent. ]
Can confirm this, my comments are magically reappearing as well. I used PowerDeleteSuite and used the edit before delete function.
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.
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