I’ve got a long haired tortie that scares me. If I take a bath she will try to climb on my chest and play with the water. I don’t want to find out what happens if she slips in.
When the ICO recieve a complaint they usually send an initial notification email to the data controller to advise that a case officer will be assigned in due course.
Well, unless it relates to a serious or ongoing data breach, which tends to be triaged immediately into an active investigation.
Initial notification letters do usually recommend trying to resolve the issue with the data subject in the interim though.
That probably spooked Reddit into moving your case up the priority list as I imagine they’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of SAR, erasure and objection requests, considering the circumstances.
The response window for most of those rights is 30 calendar days + extensions if applicable, so they could also have just been responding as late as allowed, accounting for aforementioned probable backlog.
Do let us know when the ICO gets back to you though, will be fascinating to hear what they have to say.
The opposite for me. I want my helpful comments to be gone from Reddit. If they want to make money off my content, they better pay me, that’s how one acts according to Spezface.
I’ve been waiting for the whole restoration thing to shake out, and only went through my highest upvoted posts and comments to delete just those by hand (after receiving my GDPR data dump of all my posts and comments 2 weeks ago).
Keep pushing with the relevant authorities. There is a difference between “We are not intentionally restoring comments” and “We certify that we have forgotten all of your info”, and that’s what these authorities enforce.
It doesn’t matter if Reddit’s inscrutable back end makes it difficult. That’s Reddit’s problem, not yours. If they want to do business in the EU, they either have to comply or pull a Meta and stop serving EU residents entirely.
They had a third option, to treat their users as human beings and not dumb fucks to exploit until they want to leave (and forget they ever went there), but they declined to use it.
This. The whole question of whether Reddit meant to restore comments is a distraction. The actual issue is that people who wanted their comments deleted are finding that their comments have not been deleted. If Reddit wants to prove that it was not their fault, they can do it in court. No lawyer is going to believe the kind of half-assed excuses Reddit has been handing out. I would like to see this hashed out in court, if for no other reason than that a court case is probably the best way to find out what is actually happening here. It seems like Reddit not going to be honest unless they’re forced to be, even when honesty would benefit them.
If it isn’t on purpose, then they have a bug that is restoring comments. My main account is 18 years old. Cake Day is December 2005. I deleted it all, and then I checked from multiple devices to ensure when I logged in it was all gone, and it was. Until it wasn’t. I had about 100 random comments from 2013 to 2022 come back. So I manually deleted them all… again. And then a few days later, suddenly different comments are back. I must have repeated this deletion process 4-5 times. Each time, Reddit’s interface (not a third party script or app) showed me everything was gone… until it wasn’t.
They have some automated recovery going on whether they want to admit it or not.
Site is broken enough it may be both not on purpose and automated. The suggestion to use 3rd party scripts says it all. Aren’t they legally obliged to implement that feauture? And yeah, they recently fucked over 3rd party apps, so it’s even more ridiculous. It would be nice if they have a lot of complaints anyway.
I’d have to dig around for it, but I remember someone posting on here that reddit was restoring their comments. Then they found out that the comments they claimed reddit restored were actually in a privatized subreddit that opened back up. The script they were running to delete comments couldn’t because it didn’t have access to the comments to delete them.
Reddit is doing a lot of shady shit but I don’t feel like this is one of them.
Please do so, when you can. This is not just about protesting, deletion can be a matter of personal safety for some people, which is why these laws exist.
When you have to be this hands on with your site, manipulating it, it just means your circling the drain… slowly working your way down.
It’s going to get exhausting putting out these little fires constantly. If only they had a group of people that would happily do the moderation for them… for free.
But why even acknowledge it if you’re just going to lie about it. Cringe.
If you’ve got an old account and active account, you’ll need to use your export to iterate through all comments to delete. Any script or app not using the export will be severely limited by the way the API (and this website) return comment listings for users.
So those things only matter as search engine discoverability right? Doesn't Google cache and keep them for pretty long though, so does it matter if user deletes their old content?
Let's say I do a google search for "how to frobitz a widget" and the top result (because as you say it's in Google's cache) points me to a post on /r/WidgetFrobitzing.
I then click through and find that the post is deleted or has been changed to say "lol Spez sucks use Lemmy" or whatever. I'll almost certainly close that tab and go back to google to find another link. That deprives Reddit of clicks through its ads, of time spent on site, and it also means that user is less likely to follow links to Reddit in future as they will know they're not as useful as Google thought they were.
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being “restored” were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don’t actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don’t need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn’t.
I definitely do not believe any of these stories of comments intentionally restored. Not one piece of concrete proof of it happening has been submitted by anyone. It's definitely one of those "do your own research" things.
But also, Reddit is responsible for this situation by not having a first party tool for self-service full account deletions. They deserve all these conspiracies hitting them for omitting such an essential feature.
Your comment misses the very important point that nobody who experienced this issue had the clairvoyance to screenshot their cleared profile on Day A to prove that their comments were restored on Day B, C, or D. You’re expecting someone to have explicitly predicted that exact circumstance and deliberately documented it before it ever happened to them. That’s like complaining to your neighbor they they can’t prove the scratch wasn’t already in their car door after they watch you hit it with your own.
These rumors of restored comments have been going on since the start of the reddit blackouts. And they're largely not happening anymore now that the blackouts are over. It was the blackouts. I checked my comments and deleted new ones almost every day during the blackouts, and whenever they "came back" they were all on a previously-private sub and they "came back" as a bloc. It was private subs having comments be private, then turning public/restricted and "restoring" the previously-inaccessible comments.
Literally just one confirmed case of someone who knew about the "restorations" and took some kind of backup before deleting to prove it happening. Just one case. But there isn't.
There is absolutely zero chance Reddit would be restoring only certain comments. It would be widespread if they were doing it. They aren't going to send out one of the professional sitewide mods with admin tools to review deletions and randomly restore only certain comments.
Spot on. Even when they've been caught doing things most people thought was shady (e.g., last year's /r/place manipulation), they tend to not outright deny it, but rather admit it and offer a half-assed explanation and end the conversation at that.
They wouldn't do something that flagrantly disregards EU/CA privacy laws. If they did it, they'd have have a justification they thought would hold up in court. If they had a justification that held up in court, they'd happily plop it in a comment that's pinned with a few dozen rewards and ignore any responses after that.
Regarding PowerDeleteSuite it’s because it hasn’t been updated in multiple years and since then (like a year after the last PDS update) Reddit added a cooldown for editing comments. I assume the same exists for deleting.
So when you run the script, occasionally you hit the 5-sec cooldown but the script just keeps moving, thinking everything is okay.
I just used the tool last week and it deleted 3500 comments successfully. A couple of times it encountered errors, but it stopped and asked what I wanted to do before proceeding.
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