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
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
A blatant lie. They’ve restored some of my posts and comments 4 times.
I hate a lot of the things that reddit has been doing but I still think not all of them are on purpose. I ran into this issue myself before it was widely discussed and my first thought was that it had simply failed to delete some comments or deleted only from some cache.
So far every exampe I’ve seen of this can still be explained by bad engineering and I see no reason to think it is “undeleting” stuff by design, since it seems to happen to very random content that has no general value (like restoring 20 random comments out of 900 that were deleted).
I’ve filed my GDPR request a couple days ago and a shreddit session is due after that. Then another GDPR request to check.
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.
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
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.
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