I found a plug-in for Firefox that deletes all posts and comments from your reddit account. (Power Delete Suite). Now I am in talks with reddit, to have them delete my account and data.
They say that all content will be disassociated when I delete my account but I had them confirm that they won’t recreate it when I have deleted it. They still say that they will retain the IP used for creating the account. Not sure if this is legitimate data redemption after I have asked for my data to be deleted according to GDPR?
Be careful here, these tools don’t always delete everything, see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than
A better way is to make a GDPR request for your data and then use something like shreddit to delete it. If you can’t wait, then you can also try the process described in https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the
I had them confirm that they won’t recreate it when I have deleted it
Important to retain this!
They still say that they will retain the IP used for creating the account. Not sure if this is legitimate data redemption after I have asked for my data to be deleted according to GDPR?
Only if they can find some other basis to keep it now that you’ve withdrawn your consent - e.g. some law in an EU member requires them to retain the IP address. Another example - they claim they need it in much the same way that the credit card money needs to know your personal info so they can continue collecting your payments until the debt you own them is paid off.
TBH, I’m hard pressed to understand on what alternative basis they are able to use to retain your IP address. This might be something to refer to your regulator for additional information.
I actually did make a GDPR request asking Reddit to delete all my posts and comments, but they said that they can delete my account and personal data, but will retain content as it will then be disassociated. I repeadedly asked them to delete my conent but they told me that i had to do this before deleting my account! This is why I requested that they did not recreate the posts that I had deleted using that script. It seems to have done the job though
Yeah, the point of the GDPR request - the data retrieval request - is to get a copy of all posts and comments, which can then be feed into a script that does the actual deletion. Note - I’m not saying that reddit should not do the deletion themselves - in fact I feel that they should, seeing how hard they make it to do it ourselves with their stupid limits.
Why do we need to ask reddit for a copy of all our comments to delete them? Because reddit has hidden limits and you can think you’ve deleted everything, only to realize too late (after you deleted your account) that a bunch of stuff got missed and now can no longer be deleted. See for example https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/46805/Strange-phenomenon-while-deleting-my-comments and https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/172540/How-can-I-automate-the-process-of-deleting-my-remaining and https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/p/425000/If-you-re-nuking-your-old-reddit-content-this-might-be
Worse, all tools like PDS will give a false sense of security here. You’ll see from your profile that you have no posts and no comments left, but then you Google your own reddit username and find a bunch of stuff. (It’s actually reddit and not the tools like PDS to blame for that false sense of security.)
It seems to have done the job though
My question is - how do you know? how did you check?
you are right! I only checked on my profile, so can’t be sure. It’s just misleading though if they still keep them. Anyway, it seems that they have already removed my account or at least removed access to it to me so there is not much to be done now i guess. That went a lot faster than i had expected
you are right! I only checked on my profile, so can’t be sure. It’s just misleading though if they still keep them.
Yup, that’s kind of one of the biggest issues with them actually. It’s incredibly misleading!
Anyway, it seems that they have already removed my account or at least removed access to it to me so there is not much to be done now i guess.
Yeah, I’ve heard this story before. Hopefully PDS got all of yours and hopefully this post will help others as well.
Power delete suite only deletes comments visible in your profile, and if you have more than the profile is able to display you’ll need to rely on the GDPR request file to manually delete the rest. I’ve had to go through and do that, since despite my profile showing nothing checking some comment links from my GDPR showed that there are comments that weren’t deleted due to reddit comment display limitations.
They haven’t complied to anything I asked them under GDPR. Still got comments and posts restored, still got disassociated comments, still got my account. It’s been 1 month tomorrow. I’m going to fill a complainted to the CNIL
I don’t think it is because the comments got restored but because the reddit profile can only display something like a 1000 comments, and scripts like power delete suite can only delete what the profile shows.
For the rest you’ll need to request GDPR file and the check each comment link provided to delete the ones the scripts weren’t able to delete.
