this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Do we know for sure that deleted content on reddit is actually deleted? It's not unheard of for things to just get a "deleted" flag in the database to stop displaying them, while still keeping the original content. Restoring deleted content would be fairly simply if that were the case.
If they don’t delete your data entirely, it’s a major CCPA and GDPR violation.
I'm not familiar with the details of the CCPA, but AFAIK under GDPR you need to actually request the deletion of data by invoking article 17. Just going through your account and deleting posts is not the same thing.
Also, this only applies to "personal data". You'd probably need to ask a lawyer if posts on reddit can be deemed to be personal data on principle, but IMO as long as the posts don't contain any personal identifiable data themselves, it should be enough to remove the username linked to the data like reddit is currently doing if you delete your account. The data would then no longer be linked to an individual and therefore would no longer be personal data.
IANAL, this is just my personal interpretation and I might very well be wrong.
And do you need to be either a California or EU resident for CCPA or GDPR regs to even be relevant to you? Because that's not most people.
I'm from California, and all I can say about it is that if I delete a comment from reddit, it can't be recovered by the "view deleted post" feature. Of course, anyone that scrapes data while the comment is public will have a copy. I would bet money there are multiple legally subcontracted subsidiaries within reddit that are "scraping" copies of everything. In the US there are tons of legal loopholes for junk like this.
They probably also keep backups of their data so if it were deleted, they could probably quite easily restore it again.
Deleting your content is letting reddit off easy. Thats why I plan on editing every comment I've ever made with something like. "This comment was removed in retaliation of reddit's 3rd party api strategy. I suggest using alternatives like lemmy,etc " On a 10 year old acount and 1000's of comments, a lot of people are going to see that when coming across old threads.