this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Privacy Guides

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In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


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Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

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This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


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  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think we should promote Odyssey instead of YouTube. YouTube can also fuck people over any time over like reddit and it is in a much better position to do so. So if a creator has an Odyssey channel as well, why not provide an Odyssey link instead?

https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/reddit-breaks-the-law-trying-to-quell:6?r=86bBjbwaQEYfPativhC7gFKoZaUNt1ah

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is what I do innately.

I use RSS to track my "subscriptions". When one of those creators finally move over to ANY other platform other than youtube, I replace their youtube feed with that other platform. So all my subscriptions are in one place, but I'm not specifically tied to youtube.

Edit: I also don't need to login to my youtube/google account at all.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Man I I just use my rss feed as news reader. (I use read you from f-droid). Rss is such a dope and simple thing and I've just learned about it

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

How do you get youtibe channels over rss? That would be super helpful as youtibes recommendations constantly miss the mark for me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

So the link is templated like this...

www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<ChannelID>

Getting the channelID is the worst part of the process. Let's take Hacksmith Industries as an example though. You visit their page, https://www.youtube.com/@theHacksmith. Head over to the "About" tab. Then find the "Share" arrow. When you click that arrow you'll get "Share Channel" and "Copy Channel ID". Copy "Channel ID" will give you UCjgpFI5dU-D1-kh9H1muoxQ

So the feed for Hacksmith Industries would be

www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCjgpFI5dU-D1-kh9H1muoxQ

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There’s a comment pinned in the comments saying the content was being restored due to subreddits being changed from private to public. Still really shitty they don’t allow you to bulk delete though

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You say that as if it makes it okay. By definition, it means those comments were not deleted in the first place. When I want my monetizable data deleted, I want it deleted. Not "hidden". I'm a programmer. Changing a mode on a group does not have to "undelete" content. In fact, in any context involving business, explicit work to ensure the data is gone forever is often legally audited.

If they won't delete my data, and that ends up permitted, then I demand that any time my data is viewed or used, I expect compensation - just like musicians, writers, and media companies demand.

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

You're right that "technical difficulties" are not a good defense when they break the law, and neither is "we didn't do it on purpose." I don't think it would be a case where they'd have to pay for the use of the content, though, it would be a case under privacy law. And that would be a lose-lose situation, since if they won the privacy case, they would open a different, potentially nastier area of liability. I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've read, this is dangerous territory. Their safest move here would be to quietly re-delete everything, and try to convince users that the rollbacks never happened. (Aka "gaslighting.")

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

Still borderline illegal that they don't allow you to delete comments from private subredits...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I dont know if that's the only reason they are actually doing it though. I deleted a bunch of comments using shreddit after the protest was over and those comments were back again this morning. I spend 20 minutes going through just replacing a bunch with gibberish as a test to see if that gets restored and will try deleting again in a few days. But I will not try to use a bulk delete service again because I'm not confident those are effective.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Reddit both refused to delete comments and not showing some comments so that people cannot deleye manually? That's super "legal".

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do think genuinely there's quite a bit going on here. They genuinely could be deleting comments, but there's a LOT that goes into it. Different caching servers not updating, reverting to old caches, subreddits being re-enabled and hidden comments being shown again, and lots of things. I do tend to think that Reddit is a shitty company with no respect for their average user, but this is a situation that from a technical standpoint there's a lot in that pipeline that can go wrong and revert back to old data for safety.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Negligence generally stems from convenience or incompetence. I don't know which is worse.

[–] doppelgangmember 1 points 1 year ago

Just another major company "accidentally" deleting data. Nothing to see here.

[–] tallwookie 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] breadsmasher 20 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately it’ll likely be big payouts to lawyers, and fines. Users see pennies if anything.

Still, make them pay

[–] paulie420 2 points 1 year ago

LOL - yea right. I mean, sure... lawsuit time - but the 'big payouts' will only be to the suits speaking for the masses. Blah.

[–] whitehatbofh 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is read in one of these threads about reddit reporting deleted comments that if you white your comments and then delete it, they'll restore the edited version when next they do that.

A good edit would be:

I'm leaving reddit for good, because of how the admins and owners are mistreating third party app developers, mods, and users. I've moved to the Fediverse, which is a much nicer place, made by users and for users. I advise any who read this to do the same.

Here are a few links to get started:

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If they reappear then maybe a comment of "if you see this post it means my deleted comment has been restored" would be a good addition too?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wish someone would write a script that could do this for all comments.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are actually scripts that do exactly that, edit each comment with a predefined text and then delete it.

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

That's awesome!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are quite a few scripts to do so.

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite is one of the better ones, best run it quick though, it uses the API, and so might die at the end of the month

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

I didn't realize it blanked them out before deleting them

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

Not every mass-reddit-history deleter does. The good ones do.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How does that law actually work though? I thought it was only relevant to California residents.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't know if CCPA specifically limits itself to residents. Generally laws like this apply to any business conducted in California, unless they limit it in the law itself. This means either the user or the company is in California. Reddit is in California.

Of course there is also the GDPR in EU so I am going to try it now.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Me too, my deleted data has been restored twice now.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As long as at least one user from California was affected the Attorney General can take legal action against reddit.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

They are also held to account under GDPR.

Any site that does not explicitly block European users has to comply with it in case they have some European users.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For those manually deleting posts one by one, consider replacing your post with random copy and paste text from copyrighted banned books instead.

[–] Cybermass 3 points 1 year ago

Or to a link to "what is Lemmy?"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Having deleted my account only for this to happen, it really sucks, because now I have no way to actually get all of my old posts removed. I wasn't even deleting because of the protests, I was just purging an old account before they changed the API and I couldn't use power delete suite.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wish I could just delete my account and be done with it all, but having to hold onto it due to lack of confidence that things will stay deleted and require monitoring on my account from time to time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah was gonna delete on the 30th but ive already seen my comments coming back to life. So I guess we'll hold onto it and check in occasionally

[–] madmonki 13 points 1 year ago

all centric social media platforms eventually will fail at some point. long live fediverse

[–] LeHappStick 6 points 1 year ago

Lmao I was just reading a post on Reddit of people saying that Lemmy was bad regarding privacy because "comments aren't actually deleted".

Oh boy, the society...