I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
That’s pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I’m being notified about them now as “new” comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.
This is why Power Delete Suite edits the comment before deleting it. If Reddit is keeping a record of deleted posts and comments, then theoretically they’d only be left with a bunch of comments that say nothing. But I’m pretty sure that if they’re keeping deleted comments, then they’re also keeping edit histories.
I imagine they have full offsite backups they can pull data from. That’s why we have documentary shows like Mr. Robot, never forget 5/9!
Yes, comments are being restored, but what they’re saying is it’s not something they’re doing deliberately. The scripts people were running were basically failing and comments got restored automatically. That message literally encourages you to run them again or try different ones
That doesn’t even make sense. How could a script failing to delete a post have this outcome?
Yeah… My comments which were restored were deleted for several days before they started reappearing. That doesn’t sound like a flaw on the scripts, but a flaw on how reddit handles bulk comment deletion.
If you ran those scripts while subreddits were dark, the script can’t see those comments you made in those particular subs, (they’re hidden along with the sub) and can’t delete them. Then later when the sub comes back to public mode, your comments will appear as well. So comments you thought you wiped were simply hiding.
Just to add, also check the other sections on your comments when deleting (eg: hot/controversial) because sometimes those ones get missed by the scripts as well.
Not to say that’s the only thing going on… wouldn’t surprise me if they are bringing back some stuff considering their history of shenannigans.
Detect incomplete user tables and restore from older storage.
The issue is reddit doesn’t store all the data in one indexed and centralized location. It was pointed out that “hot” and “top” sorting aren’t just a sort, but literally TWO LISTS that are constantly being updated and adjusted. So if you remove a comment from one list or location, it still might exist in other places. Then when reddit software gets around to reconciling these differences, the copy that still exists gets pushed onto the other lists and returns.
I’m not trying to justify the system; it sucks and reddit is directly responsible for that. But it does seem like they’re not intentionally restoring content, it’s just a side effect of their bungled system.
Why do you assume that reddit saying that’s the explanation, means that that’s the explanation? Christian’s done a pretty good job of documenting multiple instances of Reddit lying about what’s going on, and spez has been observed editing other people’s comments, so I wouldn’t assume that they’re telling the truth in this instance either.
That makes absolutely zero sense. The scripts issue individual delete requests for each comment. If a comment is deleted, it should stay deleted, even if the script ultimately fails.
Sounds like a reddit admin posting on Lemmy spreading misinformation mischief to me! Is meat back on our menu boys?
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
Link it or put the email address in your post if you want people to actually do it
This is nothing more than reddit pushing their luck with european data laws, and finally relenting and going “OMG if your stuff wasnt deleted it was your fault, not ours, We promise it’ll totally work this time if you do it again, since we’ve turned off our desperation measures after being threatened by fines by the EU”
The founder of Tildes, Deimos, is a former Reddit backend engineer who believes this is a technical issue rather than a case of Reddit purposefully subverting user intentions:
Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.
There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.
All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.
This isn’t really a good excuse though. Right to be forgotten doesn’t me the right to be forgotten except in a cache loop. Sometimes this stuff is time sensitive.
If you added a 5s delay between deletes, they don’t come back. Not a caching issue
Removed by mod
They’d come back after a few days. I’d remember the first few comments at the top of the list, and they’d get deleted for a day or two then re-appear
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being “restored” were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don’t actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don’t need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn’t.
Oh, so we all got the same bs copy pasted response at the same time? Mine took over a month, so I’m referring it to ICO.
Oh so it was literally a co-incidence I got it a few minutes after the ICO email?
Apparently so. It’s impressive how it took them 1 month+ to come up with this from their “Legal Team”.
Mine are staying delete now after initially a few popping back up. What’s more concerning is that I requested my data a few weeks after I deleted my content. I was fully expecting to get empty files but nope ALL of my content. Dating back 10 years is still there! It’s not on my Reddit profile but they clearly kept it somewhere and can recall it whenever they want to. They do not delete the data.
Mine are staying delete now after initially a few popping back up.
Something like this happened for me too, but I believe these were comments that I didn’t yet delete, they just weren’t visible anymore. The older ones started to pop up once there was new space for them after deleting the newer ones. (On your profile not all comments you ever made are visible, only the newest/top/most-controversial ones, depending on what you sort for).
For example in my profile my very first post was visible, but none of the comments I made there. Before deleting the posts I went through each one and deleted my comments that way. There probably still are many comments from me laying around undeleted…
Mine were fairly recent and needed to be deleted several times to stay deleted. Seemed really random.
I’ve filed my GDPR request a couple days ago and a shreddit session is due after that. Then another GDPR request to check.
If you’ve got an old account and active account, you’ll need to use your export to iterate through all comments to delete. Any script or app not using the export will be severely limited by the way the API (and this website) return comment listings for users.
Shreddit is rate-limiting and takes the GDPR export file as input. It’s written in Rust with executable binaries available.
Oh, I swear I read through those docs before and didn’t see that feature. Well that’s cool.
I ended up writing my own shitty little script bc I couldn’t find an existing one. Glad it’s out there.
Oh, I swear I read through those docs before and didn’t see that feature. Well that’s cool.
I ended up writing my own shitty little script bc I couldn’t find an existing one. Glad it’s out there.
I got the exact same answer.
I kept all my communications with them and I still have to legally wait untill july 28th to report them to my national competent authority.
When the ICO recieve a complaint they usually send an initial notification email to the data controller to advise that a case officer will be assigned in due course.
Well, unless it relates to a serious or ongoing data breach, which tends to be triaged immediately into an active investigation.
Initial notification letters do usually recommend trying to resolve the issue with the data subject in the interim though.
That probably spooked Reddit into moving your case up the priority list as I imagine they’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of SAR, erasure and objection requests, considering the circumstances.
The response window for most of those rights is 30 calendar days + extensions if applicable, so they could also have just been responding as late as allowed, accounting for aforementioned probable backlog.
Do let us know when the ICO gets back to you though, will be fascinating to hear what they have to say.
I very much doubt they’ll get back. I also put about minimal effort into the report as I really don’t expect anything to come of it
Thanks for reminding me to delete my account & all its posts
Keep your account for a while after deleting
deleted by creator
They also claim that API changes is reasonable; they also claim that IPO is a great idea
So like they are clearly full of shit. How do you fight something like this?
Keep pushing with the relevant authorities. There is a difference between “We are not intentionally restoring comments” and “We certify that we have forgotten all of your info”, and that’s what these authorities enforce.
It doesn’t matter if Reddit’s inscrutable back end makes it difficult. That’s Reddit’s problem, not yours. If they want to do business in the EU, they either have to comply or pull a Meta and stop serving EU residents entirely.
They had a third option, to treat their users as human beings and not dumb fucks to exploit until they want to leave (and forget they ever went there), but they declined to use it.
