Reddit user alleges California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) non-compliance/violtion; and finds it difficult to delete posts and content on Reddit

Good work on the transcription, it must've taken a while to do.

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 😊

How does one go about holding a US based company accountable violating an EU law that they aren't required to comply with?

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.

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.

It´s worth a try isn´t it? Maybe there are templates to use?

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

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.

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).

I’m OOTL, spez did what now?

Good question. Yes, it would be much harder because you're basically shotgunning your posts all over the place when posting here. I would think it's pretty much impossible to make sure that every single instance of it is gone.

It would basically be the same experience as leaked nudes currently. Whack-a-mole with dozens of different sites and needing to send a takedown request to each one, some of them sketchy or based in other geographies/jurisdictions.

Reddit has sites like push shift that copy every single post permanently for academic use. It's unlikely that there won't be (or already aren't) similar data vacuums for the Fediverse. In my opinion it's a good idea to think of everything on the Fediverse as permanent.

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.

Or if the account is permabanned. Pretty much any time an account is no longer accessable.

Facebook has entered the chat

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.

From my quick reading Privacy Act 1988 and GDPR are fairly consistent with eachother, but our legislation is a bit outdated. It seems to be amended every few months, but only in relation to niche clauses that cover very specific circumstances about someone in a particular role and their specific ability to interact with data.

-There is no distinction in Privacy Act between a data processor and a data controller. GDPR regulates individual responsibilities for both.

-In the Privacy Act there's nothing to stop multiple de-identified datasets from being cross referenced together in a way that could re-identify the data subject.

-The legal basis to protect consumers from collection of personally identifiable data is stronger under GDPR. The only thing an Aus organisation needs to do to collect sensitive data is establish that it's 'reasonably necessary' for their core business operation.

Also note that although GDPR is a European union regulation, many Australian businesses are still beholden to it, e.g. if they knowingly collect information from European customers or have a branch located in EU. You can't really have an EU branch that's GDPR-compliant if your parent company overseas isn't.

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.

Was this written by an AI?

Pardon my ignorance, but doesn't that just work for 30 days, until the review process for the DMCA is completed?

This is the main reason people keep claiming comments are "being restored". They aren't, they just were on private subs that were reactivated.

But that means if you delete your account while a sub is private, you lose all access to be able to delete those posts when they come back.

Reddit needs to provide some kind of service or tool to delete ALL posts made by your account to avoid this problem. Many people who deleted their accounts without knowing this loophole are currently SOOL. I really, really hope they face some regulatory response/fines because of this.

It apparently doesn't purge everything. I had used shreddit and I am still able to read some of my older comments. Luckily the actual posts are gone (I manually deleted everything).

Reddit is fishy either way - I was manually deleting my comments each day over the past week and occasionally reached the "end" of the comment list. "There seems to be nothing here" and "This user hasn't posted anything" displayed regardless of whether I used old.reddit or the redesign, and regardless of how I sorted the list (new VS top). A couple of hours later, there were comments again, multiple pages' worth of content....

After I got the "this user hasn't posted anything" message two days in a row, I used shreddit, and it found and deleted a whooping 981 MORE comments that reddit chose to not show me. And that was definitely not all of it, provable. (This comment for example is one of mine and I am rather sure that I had deleted it as I have the same text copy-pasted in my "saved from reddit before deleting" folder)

PowerDeleteSuite on GitHub

Alternatively to keep on deleting my reddit posts every day ?

Late to the game here, but that's the approach I've gone with. I got Shreddit, made a config file (containing the necessary detail for all my accounts), and made a shell script that I ran three times a day, likely until June 30.

Nowadays, my accounts look clean enough, and whenever some post or comment resurface, the next run of the script should take care of it.

And just on top of all that, I do check my accounts from a different browser I never use Reddit on. So far it's clean-looking, no posts or replies showing on any of them. But whether or not Reddit actually deleted them, I'm not sure. I'm never sure.

Doesn't seem to work.

First off browser didn't even allow to open embed website within none securely written website. With less secure setting old.reddit.com will refuse connection.

How to make it work?

I don’t see how your comment history would be considered “personal data”.

From the GDPR definitions: The data subjects are identifiable if they can be directly or indirectly identified, especially by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or one of several special characteristics, which expresses the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, commercial, cultural or social identity of these natural persons. In practice, these also include all data which are or can be assigned to a person in any kind of way. For example, the telephone, credit card or personnel number of a person, account data, number plate, appearance, customer number or address are all personal data.

irrevocable You’ve agreed that your posts are no longer your “personal data” at that point…

No, that is not how that works under European law at all. You can at **any **time revoke this right, that's one of the basic rules of GDPR. And yes, Reddit falls under GDPR as they specifically enable EU citizens to use their services.

Companies put illegal things in their TOS's all the time.