A few days ago I deleted all of my posts and comments from reddit, but today they somehow reappeared.
I don’t know if that’s a bug or the admins themselves are restoring content, but I’m sure they’d have incentives to do so considering that they make money from your content, whether that is from generated clicks to the website or from selling those data to other companies to train AI models.
Removing the name isn’t enough. Some posts might contain stuff like “my real name is … and i live in so-and-so city” or “my birthday is today too!” which would all count as PII. This would need to be scrubbed too.
For the “[deleted]” part - there’s another way that happens. If you delete your reddit account w/o deleting the comment/post, then your text stays, but “[deleted]” is reported as the user who wrote it.
That’s true, but that’s not how Reddit sees it. Reddit says they have a “legitimate interest” in keeping your posts around, no matter what those posts say. They say that just removing the username is enough.
Again, I can’t speak to whether that’ll hold up in court, but that’s what Reddit is saying.
Yeah. So the general consensus here is that it wouldn’t hold up in court, see for example https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/41129/Just-started-the-process-of-editing-all-of-my-Reddit#entry-comment-174724
Such a stance would be particularly ironic considering one of the reasons that reddit cited for cutting off Pushshift from the API is because they felt Pushshift wasn’t honoring requests by reddit users to have their content deleted.
Actually, doubly ironic since Pushshift used to be a common way to get around the 1000 indexing limit on reddit and make sure you actually deleted everything.