I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.
I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they don’t appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.
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Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started. It did seem that editing then deleting might protect against Reddit’s restoration of posts and comments.
Update: Just checked. They’ve restored a lot of my old posts. This may turn into a years-long game of whack-a-mole trying to actually get our material deleted from that site.
This is exactly why (plus laziness) that I haven’t even bothered. They’re just going to put them back anyway.
I do have a post pinned in my account directing people to Lemmy though.
I PMed someone on Twitter asking them to use Mastodon. As soon as I sent the PM, Twitter temporarily locked my account for “suspicious activity”. I had to basically fill out a captcha to get my account back, but it didn’t send the message.
I rewrote it while being more careful with my phrasing and misspelling “mastedon” the second time.
Well, if they did suspend my account for doing that, I doubt I’ll ever find out.
I’m in the US and deleted all my posts & comments months ago. I also deleted my account when the whole ruckus started over there. Just tried this search and low and behold, my old posts came up. Not happy about this.
low and behold
*lo
*low and belowed
But this is funnier. :)
Should be illegal. Is it not due to GDPR in Europe at least?
It totally is illegal. We just need someone with a good lawyer to push through.
How is it illegal
Read GDPR, Art. 17 GDPR Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)
It’s even worse because people deleted the content themselves and it still shows up and is editable. (Not to be confused with cached by search engine)
Agree. Under GDPR this is totally forbidden. Issue a take down request and when that is not being followed up they will have major issues in the EU.
They do this by removing the username from the content but they’re allowed to keep the content
What if the content identifies you?
It’s not illegal, they don’t have to provide this feature to you for you to edit your own comments.
They do have to delete it if you ask them tho.
Technically all they have to do is anonymize you by disassociating your comments from your profile
What if your comment identifies you?
Good point
Search engines do not scrape the entire internet every single time someone searches. They do routine scrapes of web content and create a cache of what was there, and search that cache. This is why updates to websites do not always reflect on searches.
You’re contents are findable on Google because the last time they bothered to scrape that particular Reddit post was when your comment was intact, and they have not had a need to scrape it again since then.
They are finding comments through Google and are then able to view, edit, and delete them on Reddit. They are not able to view them on their profile page.
They said the originals do not appear on their account on Reddit. They also said they edited their original posts to be empty. They’re able to edit and delete their modified (empty) comments based on what I understand of their post.
I don’t see anything in OP’s post that indicates Reddit.com itself is displaying the originals, only the search engines are, and the cache would be the reason why.
I just did a search just like OP said and while it’s true that most results are just outdated scraped content where my posts and comments have been deleted, I did find one just now that doesn’t appear on my account overview, but that I could see, edit, and delete on the reddit thread itself.
The second and third sentences of the second paragraph are talking about Reddit itself. OP does not see the comments in their own Reddit page, mass edited and deleted them at some point, but is still about to find them through a search engine actively on Reddit.
Maybe try reading it again
This is fine due diligence. You just need to frame it as such instead of confidently saying these things happened.
Skepticism is fine. Just assuming Reddit didn’t do something this egregious (when they probably did) is poor form.
This is not the first account I’ve heard of comments rising from the grave.
they are still served by Reddit
🤔
They also appear when you click through the link and look at the Reddit site. They can be editted and deleted. These are not cached search results Reddit is genuinely showing those comments and yet they can not be found in your account that shows you have no comments at all. That is not what is happening here.
Do the comments still show after you empty your own browser’s cache too? That seems less likely to be the culprit, but worth a check to be certain.
Elsewhere in this post there’s also a helpful user who notes that the mass-editing programs can only handle a thousand comments. Is it possible this is why some of your comments are still there?
Yes, I happen to be incidentally be finding this on a brand new install of Windows as my motherboard failed last week so its super duper clean.
OP is not saying that Google’s scrape still retains his reddit comments. He’s not referring to seeing this information on Google, but on Reddit.
He’s saying that reddit is retaining his comments and still serving those comments up when refreshed directly. They’re de-linked from his reddit account so he doesn’t see them through his reddit account, but the information is restored throughout the reddit site to be viewed.
The EU needs to smack Reddit with those fat GDPR-violation fines.
Is there a way OP can report reddit for this?
I have done but from past experience they don’t do their job at all.
They’re doing It to mine too.
Cries in American
F murica.
As an American.
They literally rolled back subreddit comments posts and all by weeks and years. so doesnt surprise me. We were their “item sold” and they aint giving that up. Sadly seems like the protests didnt do much. Some of us left but that about it.
How about instead of deleting, you edit the comment so it’s taken completely out of context. Nonsense words, random poems, list of colors, etc.
They did.
Do you see them from a throwaway account?
Yes, you can. Or, at least I can see some of my (deleted, not visible in my profile) main’s comments from my alt account.
Something tells me that isn’t GDPR compliant.
If I were European, I’d be very angry right now. Actually, I’m angry anyway…but there’s less that I can do as an American.
Though I do have an avenue as a Virginian, its not one where I control the enforcement. I would have to get my corporate bootlicking Attorney General to do something about it, and that will never happen.
I thought some of my old posts were restored but it turned out that those subreddits were still dark when I ran the delete script and had since reopened. Don’t know if this is the same situation as you but maybe check if that is the case?
Do the comments show up in your account profile under your comments?
Many of these were deleted long before the protests actually and some not in subs which went private. There is no obvious reason why these particular comments are detached from my accounts comments and yet still owned by me and not accessible from the reddit account page.
Sometimes comments are just not properly linked to your profile for whatever reason, I’ve had it happen a number of times throughout the years. You can view them and edit them, but they don’t show up on your profile - exactly like you’re describing here.
I’m not saying Reddit isn’t doing something fucky here, but rather that it’s absolutely not a guarantee of anything malicious.
They did, I was able to run the shred script again and remove the comments.
I’m going to try the same search as you and see if my comments are there… you got me spooked!
Edit: looks like I’m good across all my old accounts. There was cached data but that’s expected.
Comment made for raising a useful post.
OP said they did exactly that using shreddit.
Edit: Lemmy acting weird, this is supposed to be a comment to user ricecooker.
Sigh, whatever.
You’re allowed to delete comments on Lemmy :)
(They’ll still be visible to third-party app users but that’s another topic, it should be fixed eventually)
This is more a function of how Reddit’s databases and listings work. Automated tools can’t find all of your content because of the limitations on listings. It’s really funny though that people are ascribing abilities to a company with a very low competency level.
same, i used Power Delete Suite and confirmed i deleted everything, but searching my old username pulls up a lot of posts and comments. all the posts still seem to be deleted but i’m seeing comments where the username is deleted but the comment is back.
If you deleted your account the name will appear deleted presumably then you no longer have the ability to edit them? I see them associated with my account still since I never deleted the account just all the posts and comments.
Yea, the account is deleted so I can’t log in to try and edit.
I replaced all of mine with “fuck spez” and then deleted my account but not posts, so they’re still there. I went back and checked lol
An easy test would be to load that thread in incognito and see if it shows the undeleted version.
They don’t seem to have an issue showing it to you logged in, its just it doesn’t appear in your content under your account so the only way to find your own comments is with an external search engine. You don’t need incognito.
Search engines are not live services. That’s old data that Google may or may not ever purge from their index. Using a search engine to determine if your comments are deleted is not going to work.
Just open up threads you’ve posted on in an incognito window. If you’re really paranoid, do it from a VPN, too. If you still see your comments on the live Reddit page, then Reddit un-deleted them. If you don’t, then they’re deleted, but search engines still have that data cached indefinitely.
Getting downvoted for logic and reality, apparently.
Explaining how things really work is always shamed by the masses.
Would it be better to edit posts and change them to nonsense? Random poems, list of dog breeds, song lyrics, random SQL code…
I changed all my comments over 5 karma with multiple pages of lorem ipsum placeholder text.
Underrated comment. Beautiful!
Appropriately-rated comment.
I tried to do this with a script but there’s a rate limiter on it for editing, but not for deleting. And I had a fuckload of comments.
Yes. Preferably something the LLM people can’t easily identify as garbage. Make your data less valuable.
