Leave nothing behind : reddit

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023

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Leave nothing behind (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by cosmicrookie to c/reddit

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I found a plug-in for Firefox that deletes all posts and comments from your reddit account. (Power Delete Suite). Now I am in talks with reddit, to have them delete my account and data.

They say that all content will be disassociated when I delete my account but I had them confirm that they won't recreate it when I have deleted it. They still say that they will retain the IP used for creating the account. Not sure if this is legitimate data redemption after I have asked for my data to be deleted according to GDPR?

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They have repeatedly restored comments for me recently.

Maybe it’s not malicious but it sure as fuck is annoying.

This didn’t use to happen but started fairly recently (ie: the last 2-3 months). It seems to have stopped the last time I ran my scripts. Maybe legal lit them up?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

They were doing it regularly through June, but less so towards the end and into July.

All those people who deleted their comments and then deleted their accounts may find that their comments were restored.

[–] JimmyMcGill 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m very much on the hate Reddit train but that also happened to me and I think I have an explanation.

I think those delete scripts have a hard time in deleting your posts and comments in subreddits that have since gone private. Then if the subreddit reopens (probably because they were forced by Reddit or something) then all the comments you made there “come back” and it appears that Reddit restored them.

At least when I deleted all the comments in my Reddit account I the checked in a few days and I have a few that came back and they were all from the same subreddit that was private for protest before.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The scripts only work from your profile, specifically it checks the New, Hot, Top and Controversial pages. Each of these lists (and some of them let you sort by time also) are limited to 1000 comments.

If you have an old account with lots of comments, you may find many of your comments don't fit into these lists, and won't have ever been deleted by the scripts. For myself, I kept a link to a couple of my old Top comments open, ran the script, then found the top comment had been deleted but my subsequent replies (old comments with small karma) were left untouched.

The only effective way to get these comments is yo use the direct comment links in a data access request. This data can be fed into some scripts, eg shreddit (the github version not the paid website version) and can automate it, however I'm not sure if these still work since 1 July.

As for comments being restored, supposedly this was because of reddit's CDN structure. You'd delete it on one node, then another would restore it. This did not happen in my experience when deleting via the direct comment link, rather than from the profile pages, and I haven't had any restored since the end of June.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That’s not what’s happening here. I have used a script (not this one), it went through all my comments, overwrote them, and I checked my reddit profile and it was all gone.

Then, several days later, some comments were back again.

I ran the script again to delete those, and again reddit showed me that, in fact, they were gone. Only to have some of them reappear later… I think I ran that script about four times.

Now, I’m not saying this is intentional, because there was no rhyme nor reason which ones, though all of them were older and older every time I ran the script. I guess something in the backend of reddit isn’t working as intended, but it is, as a matter of fact, reddit who has copies of your comments and edits and reinstates them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you have posts or comments on a sub that went private they won't appear on your profile, and these auto-delete tools won't see them. When (if) the subs go public your content will re-appear.

I'm not defending Reddit here but I think that with so many subs having gone private, this is at least part of the problem. I was upset initially when a bunch of my content was "restored" but I realized it was all from the same three subs that had opened back up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not sure if this is legitimate data retention

AFAIK that’s not yet been legally established.

GDPR is only concerned about personal data, which is defined as „any information which are related to an identified or identifiable natural person.“

Now reddit‘s argument is that by disassociating the comments from your username they effectively anonymized that data, and then it does no longer fall under GDPR.

It would be interesting to edit every comment with personal data, and any email address you can prove you have access to is considered personal data…

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Shreddit (the one on GitHub, not the web app) seems to do better than PDS. After finishing with PDS, I found posts of mine on Google that were publicly visible but now hidden from my profile. Haven found anything like that since using Shreddit.

[–] BrightCandle 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Keep your account as they will restore the comments. Also check with Google et el to make sure there aren't comments that have been hidden from your account page but still present on Reddit.

[–] cosmicrookie 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I could not remember one of my comments or posts to google, for the life of me...

[–] PhoenixRising 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You should be able to Google search your username if you haven't deleted your account.

[–] cosmicrookie 0 points 1 year ago

Reddit has deleted my account now so even if there was any comment or post, I would not be able to claim it

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