Hi, I recently moved to Lemmy and don’t want Reddit to make any more money with my data.
I live in the EU, so I should have the right to demand deletion of all of my data according to the GDPR, right?
Did anyone write them an email or letter to request data deletion? And how did you write it?
They don’t comply with GDPR. Not sure if it still works, but you can use PowerDeleteSuite to edit and then remove your comments. It’s a good idea to keep your account open for another week or so to make sure Reddit doesn’t restore deleted comments (they did for a few comments on my account), then delete the account in the preferences tab (I used old reddit to do so)
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
To avoid rate limiting, there is a 5 second delay between editing and deleting each comment, so expect it to take a very long time.
I have seen that part of that may be due to subreddits going from private to open, so you suddenly have comments again.
Didn’t think about that, but that’s a good point.
Thank you, I will definitely try that.
Do you think they would not delete my comments if I wanted them to delete everything according to the GDPR? Because I could make a few test comments after deleting everything else(would be nice proof).
It might be naive of me to think that I can make a difference by reporting it, but I would love to see them get fined like Facebook/Meta recently did.
They claim to not have a way to delete your comments.
By all means, please report them to the proper authorities, but only after making a formal request, and after they respond.
Just used it myself. Still very much working.
They don’t comply with GDPR
What happens if you ask them to comply? Has anyone tried?
I hear some had success with it, but then Reddit got overwhelmed and stopped responding to it.
They (sometimes, from what I understand) claim that they cannot delete your commemt or post history, and will offer to delete your account while retaining the data.
Oh man I am so glad I did this last month instead of now. Had over 100k posts and comments combined, that would have been excruciating.
To answer your question.
Send Reddit this:
Sample Data Erasure Request (GDPR)
Here is the actual website of the European Union (GDPR) explaining this.
If you end up sueing them, please update us.
Thank you. I’m sorry for my late response. I will write the email today and keep you updated here on how they respond.
Sadly, I won’t be able to sue them because I just don’t have the time and money for that. But I would definitely report them to the data protection authorities.
That was more an exaggerated statement from me. I wouldn’t be surprised if at one point someone will do that.
Then again, Reddit might comply with your request.
Better to overwrite it with a different message. Twice. That makes restoration more difficult.
Do the tools that re-write your comments still work after the API changes?
IMO, don’t delete your account. I used to regularly run shreddit to “delete” my history. Same with Twitter and Facebook - I keep my accounts there to prevent hijacking.
Requesting your data (GDPR) and using shreddit with the GDPR setting because deletes all your posts and comments. Then you can delete your account and both your account and posts are gone
I went through and manually deleted seven years of history while watching BattleBots. It was therapeutic. I’ve left the account open for now just to make sure no skullduggery happens.
