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Comment by cuddlyogre | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time sympathizing with people complaining that Reddit made it difficult to freely scrape the entire site to train AI. I also have zero empathy for Reddit that they are hopefully going to lose a large chunk of that data from users that don't like being treated as free labor.

With Reddit's history of editing the database directly to make a point at the expense of its users, who's to say they don't have the full history of a person's post and will just discard the posts changed by addons like this? Or if not revert the changes on the frontend, they just provide the full history to AI trainers?

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> who's to say they don't have the full history of a person's post and will just discard the posts changed by addons like this

They have done in the past. With the API changes I used a script to edit and then delete all of my reddit comments, and I then deleted my account. I checked recently and all my pre-edit comments were restored.

Of course we may never know for sure, but if you are European, they have to include all data about you in a GDPR data request. Also, I'm not sure if GDPR grants you the right to delete your posts for good?

I don't know about singular posts, but if you wish to delete your account and all your data, they must comply.

What about the third parties that Reddit has already sold the data to? Does GDPR require Reddit to chase them down and make them delete it as well?

yes, and if they cannot, they are violating the GDPR and have to pay fines.

This is why datasets are rarely sold as massive CSV's in the modern world - instead companies with data sell access to API's, with the expectation you'll query for what you need in real time.

They only need to delete personally identifying data. That means they could probably just remove the username from your post, but leave the post text there attributed to "anon".

They already do this, the username becomes "[deleted]"

Recital 66's wording ("right to be forgotten") suggests that Article 17 should be understood in this way, but Reddit might claim the 3(d) exception. I don't think that would be valid, but you might have to go to the courts if they do.

Or they could just be like HN... Any post over X hours becomes uneditable.

it used to be the case that reddit threads became read-only after six months, but they removed that limitation about a year ago i think

I think it is now configurable by the moderators of each subreddit.

Which is illegal.

When the API changes were introduced, I tried to overwrite and delete my comments with a similar browser addon.

I had to repeat the deletion for months afterwards every week, because Reddit restored some random comments of mine again and again, even though they supposedly can not be recovered after being deleted.

I'm fairly convinced that they keep the data even after you delete it. I tried to follow up with a GDPR request, which they answered dishonestly and incomplete, I escalated that to my local authorities and then it took a few months for that authority to get back to me, requesting more information. Sadly I'm not in the mood to throw more of my personal time on this, but hope that at some point Reddit faces some legal actions for their behaviour.

Of course. Does anybody really believe any online company "deletes" their content? Even if some company does make a good faith effort to delete. They have backups, and probably shoddy backup practices where your data remains, gets brought back, is even just laying around in some 'backup_old' directory.

>I'm fairly convinced that they keep the data even after you delete it.

Honest question: How young are you? This reads like someone who's very young and naive learning for the first time how the digital world works.

Reddit said years ago that they keep the content of deleted comments, but editing overwrites the content in their database, that is why these extensions were written.

They must have changed it or been lying from the start. (Reddit was partly open source waaayyy back in the day, so one could go check)

Or they're conveniently considering the use of those extensions as an ongoing cyberattack (they probably go against ToS, at the least), and use this opportunity to test their ability to restore from backups.

Why do you think they are learning how the digital world works for the first time? Can you give a specific example please?

> I tried to follow up with a GDPR request, which they answered dishonestly and incomplete

Based on what?

Based on the information provided being contradictory with itself, and omitting things that were at that time plainly visible on the site. Also, there were comments restored against my will from years ago, which were not contained in the data dump, even though others were. Which means that Reddit holds data in other places (otherwise they would have been unable to restore that), but have not detailed them in the GDPR request, which means that they have answered dishonestly and incomplete.

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