this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
26 points (96.4% liked)

Reddit

13591 readers
3 users here now

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
norz@lemmy.ml
26
Reddit may be bringing back deleted comments (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by Devgard@lemmy.world to c/reddit@lemmy.ml
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

If you want to further investigate: Link to Reddit post

all 33 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] OurTragicUniverse@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] minode@szmer.info 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] S4nvers@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] HawkMan@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

deleting from a database isn't processing. It's literally what right to be gorhotten requires

[–] S4nvers@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

You‘re right, if the law was applicable then they‘d have to „process“(delete) the data.

But since the right to information weighs heavier than the right to be forgotten (except when it comes to personal data, which can be used to identify a user) Reddit is not required by the GDPR to delete posts/comments that do not contain such information

[–] MrAegis@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] S4nvers@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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“

[–] MrAegis@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] S4nvers@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] HawkMan@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

they are your IP that you can rescind permission to publish at any time

[–] S4nvers@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] jarfil@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] happyhippo@feddit.it 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

What's more likely is there was a database syncing issue

[–] Seigest@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] Tomthndsh@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Mine are back as well! WOW, talk about being a scummy company.

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 1 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] ActuallyIDoMind@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What if, instead of deleting all our comments, we edit them instead?

[–] HorseRadish@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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. ]

[–] Xenxs@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] krimson@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago

Can confirm this, my comments are magically reappearing as well. I used PowerDeleteSuite and used the edit before delete function.

[–] speedyturtle@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Trebach@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

There's no "may" about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.

[–] Ffkhrocks@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Grimm@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I also don't think GDPR looks to kindly at this.

[–] Philip@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

GDPR

The real PowerDeleteSuite is always in the comments.

[–] xc2215x@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

That is really bad of Reddit.

[–] BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] solidgrue@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Unedited messages were restored to my profile. You might want to check yours.

[–] Tomthndsh@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago

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 that use Reddit will become random nonsense.