Video description as of 2023-06-23 10:15 PDT:
This video shows that Reddit refused to delete all comments and posts of its users when they close their account via a CCPA / GDPR request. Posts and comments may contain PII. Specifically, Reddit tells users that they must delete the content themselves, which isn’t realistic if a user creates a lot of posts. Even if a user does delete their content, Reddit restores the content within a few days.
Video transcript:
- 2023-06-13 @ 15:15 PDT: user states he deleted all posts and comments
- 2023-06-16 @ 10:15 PDT (3 days later): user states all posts and comments have been restored
- 2023-06-19: user decides to submit a legal request under CCPA to delete content
- 2023-06-19 @ 11:07 PDT: user receives reply from “Reddit Legal Support” (RLS) which states they will delete the account but not the content associated with the account. It is up to the owner of the account to remove the content [e-mail contents reproduced below]
Reddit Legal Support (Reddit Support)
Jun 19, 2023, 11:07 PDT
Hello,
We would be happy to help you delete your Reddit account if you have one. Before we proceed please note:
1. Account deletion is irreversible.
2. Posts and comments must be separately deleted before deleting your account. If not separately deleted, the content of the posts and comments will remain visible and disassociated from any account. If you want your posts and comments removed, follow the instructions on our help page.
Once the above mentioned information is removed to your satisfaction, please submit your deletion request by using your Reddit account and this form so we know it's really you making the request.
More information about account deletion is available in our Privacy Policy.
Kind regards,
Reddit Legal Support
- 2023-06-19 @ 12:02 PDT: user replies back to RLS stating it is unrealistic expectation for end user to manually delete and alleges violation of CCPA [reply reproduced below]
Hello,
If I understand your response properly, you are refusing to delete all data associated with my account. I believe this is illegal and in violation of the CPR. In this case the onus is on you, Reddit, to delete all of the content associated with my account.
It is besides the point but last week I already deleted all of the posts and comments associated with my account. However Reddit has since restored most of the content.
It is untenable to demand all users to manually delete content when Reddit itself does not provide a self-serve mechanism to mass-delete content. Some users have thousands of posts and millions of comments.
Just as a reminder, my CPA request to delete my account and all associated data was made on June 19th 2023 and
must be completed by August 3rd 2023.
- 2023-06-24 @ 10:45 PDT: user has not received a reply from RLS. He decided to painstakingly delete all posts and comments while screen recording the effort. Video continues with the user manually deleting posts for his account (https://www.reddit.com/user/nucleocide). Then fast forwards to the end of the segment where the last posts are deleted
- 2023-06-25 @ 10:25 PDT: user discovers posts and comments are restored, again
User concludes video and clarifies why this is a violation of CCPA:
At this point it appears impossible to manually delete posts and comments on Reddit and expect them to stay deleted.
By not deleting all posts and comments in an automated way there is no way to guarantee that no PII [Personally Identifiable Information] has been left behind.
For example ...
<user gives example of a comment from 6 months ago on his account which includes his real first name and last name. Screen capture shows the comment was edited recently>
Since there is no guarantee that every single post and comment is free from PII, Reddit must delete all comments and posts from an account upon receiving a GDPR / CPA request.
Reddit Discussion on “/r/videos”: https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/14je01k/reddit_may_be_violating_the_fucking_ccpa/
Decided to expand on the original video and include a transcription of the events in the video. Hope this helps our visually impaired folks.
Personally, I find this disgusting. Hope Reddit gets litigated up the ass.
Good work on the transcription, it must’ve taken a while to do.
Normally, transcription like this will take a long time. However, since it’s largely text based (e-mails, viewing reddit) and relatively short. It was pretty easy to transcribe to text. With the help of some macOS features like copying and pasting from video, it became a non-trivial task.
I think I spent more time on formatting rather than on transcription.
I think you meant ‘it be came a non-trivial task’. At least that fits more with that paragraph’s overall sentiment.
Anyway, thanks for the work. I much rather skim a text than watch a YouTube video.
My grammar took a nose dive after transcription 😅. I fixed it. Thx
Seriously, thank you for that extra mile. This is the kind selflessness that I remember on the old internet
Thank you. I’m not visually impaired but I have cognitive issues that make watching videos difficult. I appreciate your time and effort 😊
This seems enough to me to sue them on grounds of violating the GDPR. Not sure where spez is going with this but paying GDPR fines will most definitely not do any good to reddit’s profitability lol
How does one go about holding a US based company accountable violating an EU law that they aren’t required to comply with?
They are required to comply with it if they want to offer services to European customers. If they don’t comply with the local regulation they will face fines and if they don’t pay them and become compliant, they might have their access blocked from within the EU.
The same is true for Brazil, which has similar legislation to the GDPR to protect Brazilian users from online services abusive practices regarding their data. Services can and have been blocked in Brazil for failing to comply with local regulations.
Adding to this, while there are certainly ways to bribe the Brazilian regulatory and supervisory bodies, they’re pretty damn heavy handed and pro-consumer to begin with. One agency has recently fined Netflix for their bait-and-switch marketing to what is estimated as several hundred million USD, with even bigger fines to come.
Has this ever actually happened?
In Europe fines have been dealt but no blocking yet as far as I am aware. Just the fine and threat of a block happening is usually enough to make companies comply because they don’t want to lose out on the market share.
Edit: Link to Europe statistics: https://www.privacyaffairs.com/gdpr-fines/
A lot of US news sites are blocking themselves out of Europe instead of complying.
I don’t think that’s something that Reddit would do. They currently have offices in Dublin and Amsterdam, they clearly have an interest in the European market.
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Blocking did happen, I am not sure how often. Clearview AI and openAI (chatGPT) in Italy at least come to mind.
https://www.garanteprivacy.it/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/9751323#english_version
https://www.garanteprivacy.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/9870847#english
A lot of local.usa news sites region block EU ipaddresses to premptivly as they do a lot of tracking.etc that would.violate it so they just chose not to have the hassle of eu visitors
Yeah I read about that but it seems to be voluntary. I haven’t read anything about anyone actually being blocked, but it seems to be because the threat of a fine and blocking is enough. Another commenter pointed out they have offices within the EU so I guess EU officials could chase them up there.
So Brazil has the equivalent of China’s firewall? Or is this something implemented at the ISP level?
It’s implemented at the ISP level, Brazilian courts can mandate all nationally operating ISPs and mobile carries to block certain websites or services if they fail to comply with for example a judicial warrant. This has happened twice with WhatsApp for instance, and Telegram was threatened with it as well because they refused to hand over the identities of neonazi domestic terrorist groups.
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I am aware, but businesses generally don’t want their users to jump through hoops to be able to access their services.
The average user doesn’t even know what a proxy is. At that point, you’ve killed profitability.
The same way they have with Facebook, Google etc. If they continue to do business in Europe with European users, they comply with European law or get fined significant amounts.
They are required to comply with the GDPR to operate in Europe.
Even more, they are required to comply if they target European countries as a market. For example, if you have registration open and you have translations in - say - French, Italian, German etc. It is already enough to force you to comply, as there is the clear intent of targeting European users.
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That Irish sandwich corporate structure (that’s really a thing , I’m not making it up) to dodge taxes is coming home to bite them in the ass. How delicious…
By this magic where they OPERATE IN EUROPE.
It’s either comply with laws regarding EU users or get blocked from operating in EU countries, I’m not sure of the entire process though
Yeah, they have to obey the law wherever they operate.
Internet empires like Facebook and Reddit have a lot of grey area to be honest
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Discord is worse. At least Reddit lets you delete everything you post. With Discord, if you are banned from a server, then there is no way to delete your posts in that server. That is insane to me in this day and age.
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In the code, looks like Lemmy instance administrators are given the option to purge all data associated with the account.
pub struct BanPerson { ... /// Optionally remove all their data. Useful for new troll accounts. pub remove_data: Option<bool>, ... }Usage of the “remove_data” boolean optional:
... // Remove their data if that's desired let remove_data = data.remove_data.unwrap_or(false); if remove_data { remove_user_data( person.id, context.pool(), context.settings(), context.client(), ) .await?; ...From a user perspective, there is a route available for them to delete their account:
But not clear if this removes the account AND posts and comments.
disclaimer: I don’t use rust and not familiar with the common libraries and stdlib, so maybe somebody else can chime in
The function names are quite clear. It looks like it deletes everything
Yes, reddit let’s you delete everything you post but then they secretly repost it all a few days later. I’d argue that’s worse because they make you think it’s deleted but it’s not.
This behavior is demonstrated in the video and many other reddit users have posted similar complaints recently. I have personally experienced the same issue.
I agree that if Reddit is doing that, then that is unacceptable. I have no reason to doubt it, but I have not experienced it myself.
At least Reddit lets you delete everything you post
Only the last 1000 comments or so. Earlier comments get dropped from your user profile and become virtually inaccessible, only findable with a google search.
Also, comments from closed subreddits are inaccessible to you, but still there (i.e. when the subreddit reopens, they will become available again).
Interesting, from a GDPR perspective this is unacceptable.
Pondering about a proper GDPR complaint.some of my old reddit accounts might have > 1000 comments.
The video creator appears to be from California, since he was trying to claim account deletion under CCPA. If reddit legal support is also slow rolling account and associated content deletion as well for GDPR, then the legal blowback could be massive.
I assume that they just don’t have the infrastructure to do it, otherwise they would just use GDPR code for CCPA.
As a software developer: GDPR was a real pain to refit into an old legacy system. It’s less of a pain if you know beforehand and can plan ahead.
Would suck if they had to spend money on the infrastructure to mass-delete data that the deletion of lessened their value to investors.
Shame.
It’s a flawed risk assesment.
short term not complying is much cheaper. long therm it’s bad, but for the individual : “whatever, I got my bonus and switched to another position”It’s actually a risky game. It doesn’t happen often, but under GDPR not complying can result in the stop of data processing. It happened recently with Italy and OpenAI for example. If that happens, reddit would be forced to stop processing any data from people coming from that particular country, or countries, because each data protection authority can act. Of course that is the equivalent of a nuke, but it can happen, and if it happens I am not sure anybody is getting bonuses soon…
My account is 16+ year old and has 300 k combined karma. I will be sure to contact my data protection officer to complain. Reddit needs an audit to document they wipe the db properly, and the data is gone from backups. Not just my data, anything they got on me.
After seeing the comments above, I was about to say precisely this. Getting the data protection authority involved is the most sensible way.
It´s worth a try isn´t it? Maybe there are templates to use?
If anyone here lives in California and has had reddit violate their rights you can file a complaint here: https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-business-or-company
I made a GDPR request through reddithelp.com last night; maybe I shouldn’t have bothered! Assuming I don’t hear back, I’ll resend the request via email then report them to the Information Commissioner (UK gov dept) if I’ve had no proper response.
By the way, I’m not sure if the California law is the same, but with a GDPR “right to be forgotten” request, the organisation must delete your data from their backups (or at least make sure your data will not be restored from a backup). Asking you to delete your own comments clearly won’t meet that requirement.
I’m gonna send mine registered mail. The way they have been behaving, I wouldn’t put it past them to just send requests straight to the trash, then claim they never received them with a shit eating grin on their face.
Wish i did it via mail. There’s no proof/track otherwise (unless you record it).
Requested my data last week. Does anybody know the legal timeframe for them to comply?
Does Reddit have an email address for receiving such requests?
so the CEO known for sharing pornographic pictures of minors online does not respect people’s privacy after all? who would’ve thought
I’m OOTL, spez did what now?
Back in the day invitations to be a mod were auto-accepted so the mod of /r/jailbait added him to the modlist
The guy’s a crappy CEO I’m not sure why people have meme about stupid shit like the above to distract from that especially on the fediverse which has it’s share of questionable content
Spez was a mod of /r/jailbait
Worth noting that at the time users did not need to agree to be a moderator, it could be thrust upon them. I’ve heard that he had comments both on the sub and comments defending it, but have not personally seen any proof of that.
It’s not strictly untrue, but it has implications that I don’t personally quite believe (though I’m willing to change that opinion if somebody has evidence).
Spez was a mod of the jailbait sub before the corporate buyout shut it down. Technically we don’t know if he shared any pictures, but we know he was a mod at one point.
It should also be said that back then you could nominate users to be a mod and appoint them without their input.
He’s a piece of shit, but worth noting he was a mod of /r/jailbait at a time that mod requests sent to users were auto-accepted. He did not need to actively do anything. All he needed to do was ignore his Moderator privileges and inbox for a while.
EU GDPR - where to report if someone refuses to delete personal data.
List of institutions for each EU member.: https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_endeleted by creator
Well shoot. I’m in California these days and recently deleted all my comments on Reddit. I’ll have to monitor and see if they come back…
Since some have been restored you can now file a complaint with California. https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-business-or-company
Lots of zombie posts. I had to run power delete every day for 7 days before it stopped seeing posts reappear.
Yeah I should have kept it going for a few more days.
But you shouldn’t have to, really.
Mine came back. If I’m using a VPN out of the EU, would the GDPR apply to me?
It applies to EU citizens.
That’s insane. I’m no lawyer but I’ve used the CCPA to get my info removed from a lot of those data-broker sites. It’s always immediate, “Okay, we’ve removed your information.” California better hit Reddit hard for this, and Europe too.
Is anyone surprised at this?
I think Reddit should be forced to retroactively delete all comments and post history from users who have since deleted their account. If the user account was deleted, there is no reason they should be allowed to keep the data on that deleted account, period.
At the very least a company should be required to give the option to nuke your data when deleting an account. Not sure if this exists in any legislation but would be useful.
Not really. The list of controversies from reddit have continued to increase since 2014. The latest controversy was just the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
Personally, I am not familiar with CCPA, so I can not really comment on the justifications claimed by the video creator. But the fact that reddit legal support is slow rolling the deletion of the content generated is just scummy.
Facebook has entered the chat
Or if the account is permabanned. Pretty much any time an account is no longer accessable.
That is crazy. I spent hours one week ago deleting manually all my comments. I had an empty profile. After reading this post I checked my account and all my comments are back. That is crazy. What a shit company. I’m hesitant to submit GDPR request since I feel like I’ll lost account access with comments still visible…
I guarantee most power users are the ones who are upset about this change. Losing decades of content they created for free hurts reddit unimaginably. How many articles have you seen about SEO ruining Google and needing to append ‘reddit’ to searches?
Power users deleting their content ruins that search engine to reddit pipeline.
Tried this last night and my posts are back too. Thinking about editing each and replacing with some shit about spez. That will surely get it removed
I had to DMCA some of my stuff off the site to get it to stay off.
Pardon my ignorance, but doesn’t that just work for 30 days, until the review process for the DMCA is completed?
We’ll see what they do. What I flagged I am the registered copyright holder for. Metallica proved that we can treat them stealing copyrighted material that was expressly forbidden like it’s industrial espionage, I’m sure I can find an IP lawyer with a raging hate-on for Reddit.
It’s funny. I got a little drunk and posted something on Reddit I really ought not have. I went back a day later and deleted it. A day after that, the comment came back, and I was suspended for three days over it. If you hadn’t brought that comment back from the dead, this wouldn’t even have happened, but okay, whatever. It wasn’t like I wanted to spent too much time at Reddit after the lemur-eyed, horse-teethed worm told us how expendable we all are as users.
