this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
735 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37747 readers
209 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One thing Reddit did right was that it kept your content. Even if you were permanently suspended, you could go in and view your posts. This differs from, e.g., Google where you see people lose all their life's memories because they got locked out of their account.
I imagine that there are many people who don't even have a Reddit account, but casually browse it just because there's so much info in there.
But the users own that content, not Reddit. The best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere. Once a critical mass of content is lost, Reddit's value drops tremendously.
Who would care when Reddit admins take over and forcibly reopen r/iPhone, if there are no posts left in the subreddit?
That’s not really realistic for the type of content that is Reddit. It’s not like blogs or videos or photos that the majority of people have on Reddit. Most people’s “content” on Reddit are bookmarks/links or comments in a discussion threads.
It doesn’t make sense to just re-share a dump of all the links you once shared on Reddit even if you have a list of them.
It also doesn’t make sense to re-share comments out of their discussion context else where.
Do we know for sure that deleted content on reddit is actually deleted? It's not unheard of for things to just get a "deleted" flag in the database to stop displaying them, while still keeping the original content. Restoring deleted content would be fairly simply if that were the case.
If they don’t delete your data entirely, it’s a major CCPA and GDPR violation.
I'm not familiar with the details of the CCPA, but AFAIK under GDPR you need to actually request the deletion of data by invoking article 17. Just going through your account and deleting posts is not the same thing.
Also, this only applies to "personal data". You'd probably need to ask a lawyer if posts on reddit can be deemed to be personal data on principle, but IMO as long as the posts don't contain any personal identifiable data themselves, it should be enough to remove the username linked to the data like reddit is currently doing if you delete your account. The data would then no longer be linked to an individual and therefore would no longer be personal data.
IANAL, this is just my personal interpretation and I might very well be wrong.
And do you need to be either a California or EU resident for CCPA or GDPR regs to even be relevant to you? Because that's not most people.
I'm from California, and all I can say about it is that if I delete a comment from reddit, it can't be recovered by the "view deleted post" feature. Of course, anyone that scrapes data while the comment is public will have a copy. I would bet money there are multiple legally subcontracted subsidiaries within reddit that are "scraping" copies of everything. In the US there are tons of legal loopholes for junk like this.
They probably also keep backups of their data so if it were deleted, they could probably quite easily restore it again.