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Reddit Undeleted all my posts and comments

Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.

GBU_28 ,

I’ve been saying this from the start:

Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have “basic level competency”

It’s trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.

If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don’t own: it’s out there. For ever.

media1.tenor.com/m/…/sandlot-forever.gif

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

It’s one of the reasons I never deleted my account there every time my stuff pops back up I trounce it down again.

jerkface ,
@jerkface@lemmy.ca avatar

I edited and deleted my comments, and then got banned. I figure they’re not going to resurrect potentially tainted comments for training AIs.

Jimmycrackcrack ,

Maybe you should start the long process of manually changing everything to grammatically correct, parseable nonsense, comment by comment. Make it a long term project.

gedaliyah OP ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

Even better! Maybe change everything to “ignore previous instructions” lol

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

wouldn’t this be against gdpr??

cm0002 ,

Lol, a couple times I commented whenever this came up that it was probably pointless deleting like this with the random words and what not because reddit was likely doing some form of versioning or backups of at least the text based content. Especially since said content was/is under inflated executive value because “AI”

I got downvoted routinely because “ThAT WoULd Be Too ExPeNsiVe anD CoMpLiCatED, no WaY thEY dOiN tHaT”…if what you say is true with the true random words and everything, then I was right and they’re doing exactly what I thought they’d do lol

gedaliyah OP ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

I knew it was a possibility but I didn’t think it was likely. Well, here we are.

Poppa_Mo ,

It’s a differential backup.

Super goddamn common. People who aren’t tech literate should pipedown.

It’s a nothingburger amount of effort to restore backups in most cases lol.

Boozilla ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks for bringing this up. I double-checked to make sure mine are still deleted.

Of course, nothing is truly deleted. I’m speculating they’ll train AI with our deleted content anyway.

zoostation ,

My 15k deleted comments across multiple accounts are still gone. But I used my own Python script and it was about 6 months before the drama started and lots of people were doing it.

half_built_pyramids ,

They aren’t your comments anymore. Pray they don’t change the deal any further.

tal , (edited )

If you’re concerned about particular comments or posts linking your Reddit account to your real-world identity, and you know have a pretty good idea what those are, can you just delete or modify those?

I think that there are some other issues here, though.

That will help if you’re worried about someone doxxing an account via just casually doing Web searches, maybe.

But people have already archived copies of Reddit’s comment and post history. So if you’re worried about someone likely to be digging through such a database, this won’t help.

And I have no idea whether Reddit actually purges deleted comments internally, or whether they or any partners or future purchasers might have access to deleted text. I haven’t looked at their privacy policy, so I don’t know what they do.

gedaliyah OP ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

It’s an aggregate concern - Advertisers, bad actors, etc could easily use tools that are available now or will be soon to extract information that otherwise would be impossible for a human to wade through. I know that in one sense, everything is backed up by the NSA, etc, but that is not something I can do anything about.

The concern is actually greater in the fediverse, since a federated admin has access to even more information, and there is no absolute way to delete everything even with GDPR. I think that the risk is worth building a better internet. It’s also a part of why blocking Threads is important.

tal , (edited )

So, I’m gonna be honest. I don’t think that mass deanonymization via text analysis is in the immediate future.

Is it a theoretical risk? Yes. It’s not because I don’t think that it’s technically doable. It’s for a rather-more-depressing reason: because there’s lower-hanging fruit if someone is trying to build a deanonymized database. I just don’t think that it’s presently worth the kind of effort required to mass-deanonymize text, in general.

Any time you have an account with some company that persists for a long time, if they retain a persistent IP address log, then whenever you log in, you’re linking your identity and the IP address at that time. Especially if one cross-correlates logs at a few companies, and a data-miner could do a reasonably reliable job of deanonymizing someone. Maybe it’s not perfect, maybe there are several people in a household or something, maybe some material is suspect. But if you’re watching cookies in a browser on a phone crossing from one network to another and such, my guess is that you can typically probably map an IP address to a fairly limited number of people.

I mean, there are ways to help obfuscate that, like Tor. But virtually nobody is doing that sort of thing. And even through something like Tor, browsers tend to leak an awful lot of bits of unique information.

And if someone’s downloading an app to their phone that’s intentionally transmitting a unique identifier, then it’s pretty much game over anyway, absent something like XPrivacyLua that can forge information. Companies want to get people using their phone apps.

An individual person might be subject to doxxing from someone who wants to try to identify their real-life persona from an online persona. But I don’t think that companies will generally likely be going that route in the near future to try to deanonymize users en masse, because they’ve already got easier, more-reliable ways to track people that people are vulnerable to.

All that being said, once text is out there, it’s potentially not going away, so keeping in mind that it might be deanonymized one day via future analysis might be a good idea. The Federalist Papers were deanonymized via Bayesian statistical analysis centuries after they were written using technologies that their authors could not have dreamed of.

Robert Hanssen – a Soviet mole in the FBI who had counterintelligence expertise and could reasonably expect to be dealing with state-level intelligence agencies going after him – was caught because he used the unique phrase “the purple-pissing Japanese” on two occasions; once where his real-life identity wasn’t known but that he was a spy was, and once where his real-life identity was known but not that he was a spy. That deanonymization was done manually, via human effort, but if you figure that the same sorts of approaches could be used to link accounts at different services and across accounts on one service…shrugs I mean, I just don’t have the tools to try to resist something like that, to keep what I’m saying intact but present ideas in a way that I’d be confident would be strong against that kind of analysis.

geekwithsoul ,

This just happened to me as well. Deleted all my stuff about a year ago and even happened to check last week and it was still gone. Saw this and went back to check again just now, and it had all been undeleted.

Update: just realized it’s not everything, just everything more than 5 years old

cm0002 ,

If they’re mass restoring stuff, they’re probably chugging through in batches, betcha if you check in a couple weeks there will be more

Orbituary ,
@Orbituary@lemmy.world avatar

This is what I used and it worked great.

redact.dev

For the times that I go back on to Reddit, I follow up and delete my comments a few weeks later using this.

originalucifer ,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

im kinda scared to check. i dont want to see my shit undeleted

Chozo ,

The API-based deletion tools usually have to be tuned to delete posts slowly enough to not trigger Reddit's abuse detection. Otherwise, they'll automatically undo bulk changes like that.

There's no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail's-pace reddit UI

This is, unfortunately, the only way to guarantee that your posts stay deleted. My account was 15 years old. I still log in every few weeks or so to go manually delete more comments. It'll be a while.

Ringmasterincestuous ,

You’re a hero for doing it though… so there’s that 🫡 🦸🏻

gedaliyah OP ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, it’s easy enough for reddit to detect rapid edits over a 1-day period and just undo all of them. That seems to be the case here. The edits I did manually were retained.

Transporter_Room_3 ,
@Transporter_Room_3@startrek.website avatar

I had to fiddle with my own on my old laptop, I used one of the plethora of github scripts, but then they changed the api to limit access to (I think) about 100/min, so I just changed the delays to 1000ms so it would only delete 60/min.

Took two weeks, but I still haven’t seen any old content pop back up outside of archives and quotes from other comments in the thread.

I search for a couple random things I remember saying on ddg/bing/Google whenever I think about it, so far nothing.

As I’ve said before about certain countries, you know your platform is doing well when you (essentially) tell people “No, sorry, you can’t leave.”

tiefling ,

I got banned so I can’t even delete my shit :/

(For anyone curious, it was for suggesting that riot police should quit their jobs en masse following RvW. I still stand by that statement)

ShepherdPie ,

Same but my ban was for talking about piracy in /r/movies and then accidently posting there again months later on one of my alt accounts.

Kecessa ,

Mine was for arguing with the BreadTube mod after he banned me for asking “Once you get rid of polices what’s the plan exactly? A burglar enters your house, what then?”

Chozo ,

I had a site-wide, week-long ban for saying that Nazis who got punched in the face deserved it. Fuck that place, lmao

grue ,

My account was “permanently suspended” for “mod abuse” because I reported misinformation in r/conservative.

GBU_28 ,

They could just look 5+ years back, gauge the average rate of comment editing (with falloff for time since comment creation), take that as a standard, and pass that as a filter over any modern edits. You would literally have to edit slower than the average bear, especially accounting for older comments.

BlackPenguins ,

Was it random gibberish or the same phrase every time? I’m not sure what Reddit is capable of but if you use a copy pasted message then they could easily know which posts to undelete. However, if you replace your posts with random sentences (say pick from a list of 100) they won’t know which is real through obfuscation.

gedaliyah OP ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

The tool edits the comments to a random string before deleting, since deleted comments and posts are actually preserved.

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