this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
198 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37738 readers
481 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
gyrfalcon@beehaw.org
rs5th@beehaw.org
Los@beehaw.org
coldredlight@beehaw.org
SemioticStandard@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social
remington@beehaw.org
198
Reddit makes it impossible to delete PII, refuses to do it itself violating GDPR (youtu.be)
submitted 1 year ago by ruffsl@programming.dev to c/technology@beehaw.org
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/251752

It is important to note that although this may be a result of Reddit's UI not displaying the content users posted to now-private subreddits, it remains a problem. Additionally, I agree with the author's comments in the video description, as it appears strategically unrealistic for Reddit to ask that users manually delete the content themselves.

This is particularly true when considering that many automated methods to accomplish this task will be hindered by Reddit's upcoming API pricing changes. Furthermore, Reddit has demonstrated a recurring pattern of rolling back databases using historical backups, thereby disregarding user deletion requests that were submitted prior to the database rollback.

See similar discussion of this video on Hacker News:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] shirro@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

I believe the reddit API might not allow full discovery of comment history. At least my experience with deletion tools was that once I had the data export to check I found only a small portion of the posts from by 12 years of history were deleted despite the reddit UI and deletion tools not showing any comments remaining.

I had to use a tool to go through the GDPR export to find all the posts and the tool has had problems due to some subs being private due to protests. I suspect a lot of people who thought they deleted their entire comment history may not have done so.