Just deleted my 6 year old reddit account!
I stopped using it around when the blackouts started, now it's gone. Is there a way to get them to delete all my data after having my account deleted or did I have to do that before deleting my account
Reddit does not really have a reputation of fair-play. As you have deleted your account without deleting your data you might find it restored with a dummy handle "for consistency".
My advice to anyone: if you want to take your data back from reddit you should first edit your posts (to some "lorem ipsum suck fpez" gibberish) then delete them using tools like power delete suite or shreddit.
Then you should keep your account alive and regularly pay reddit a visit just to see if its content hasn't been restored. If you're in a country under GDPR regulation you can also ask for a GDPR archive of your data that should cover whatever they have on you including posts and comment. This is a good way of verifying what you deleted was actually deleted and not just "marked as" and yet available.
I have left reddit. As in, I do not engage further than discussing migration issues. But I keep an eye on my account and will do so until I'm sure it's been thoroughly cleaned up. Account deletion is not yet in order, it might be before they go public because I also want them to fall hard from that.
I could probably.just about understand them having [deleted] user maybe isn't personal but I am sure if you can link all my past comments you could get snippets about where I work, live, hobbies etc. And piece it back to me that is shocking. (Replacing my old anonymous user name with another is not removing it)
I deleted my account on the second day of the blackout. I didn't care about any of it because it wasn't personal. mostly good crosspost that got me to the front page 5x in 6 years lol. oh well
One interesting thing I discovered is that you can't truly delete link posts on reddit. The link can't be changed and stays, all deleting the post does is that your username off of it (shows up instead as "[deleted]").
There are a couple different post types, like image posts. I only ever made text and link posts (and then it was mostly text posts).
I guess that's okay, once the username is gone for that not-so-deleted link post, then it's just a random link shared by some unknown random person. No personal identifying information revealed.
Unless it's a link to like your blog bio or something like that. But then I guess the PII is on your blog rather than reddit and you can always delete it from there, so still no problem.
Unless the PII is encoded in the link itself - like someone makes a link post to http://example.com/john-smith-44-west-land-ave-london-uk-the-tardis-age-1-billion-call--07700-900461 or something.
But I'm sure that never happens. Certainly no GDPR issues from this.
Have you seen the prices for established Reddit accounts on eBay? I think I might sell mine when I'm ready to part with it.
Was that difficult? How do you feel about it now?
About the data, depending on the country you live in, Europe has this as far as know, you can rewire deletion of your data and they are bound by law to comply. You can still ask for the same referencing those laws and hope they don't check if you live somewhere else I guess.
What we are seeing is that reddit is requiring us to apply for a GDPR archive beforehand, and wait. Once we get it then we feed it to shreddit to manually delete it ourselves.
The word is that reddit doesn’t respect the deletion part and requires us to do it ourselves. They also seem to be claiming that after an account is deleted they have no way of finding which comments and posts belong to that account and so no way to do a GDPR archive post deletion.
I’m quite sure this is not GDPR compliant and quite a few folks have said they are now working to report reddit to their version of the ICO. However this is slow going and while I firmly expect reddit to get punished and sanctioned for it the process can take years.
I just deleted everything but still have the account. Tempted to try selling it to someone who wants a bunch of karma.
Not sure about Reddit, but many sites have a grace period where you can sign back into the account within x days to reactivate it. I tried it a few days ago and that wasn't the case, but maybe an email to support could get them to reinstate it. To make it more likely, tell them your account was hacked and you never wanted to delete it.
Looks like it's tough. This person did it successfully but also pointed out the admins made an exception due to some special circumstances (it was an actual hack, targeting an entire sub), https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/help/comments/avnts5/myaccountwashijackedthendeleted/
That said, there are a few more success stories more recently, for example on https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/help/comments/zk6985/ijustgotmyaccountdeletedbyonehackerhow/ we see that https://teddit.net/u/viola451901 appears to have successfully gotten https://teddit.net/u/irisgirl86 undeleted.
One less encouraging example though is https://teddit.net/r/help/comments/pql6bs/myaccountwashackedintoanddeleted/
Yeah, A few days ago I tried to log into an account right after I deleted it and it showed no signs of the account existing (nothing like, "To recover your account... "). Mentioning the account being hacked is probably the only way to deal with it, but they'll probably say no at first and require some discussion or they'll be so swamped with protest related messages that they'll ignore the request. Oh well. Sry, man.
You should have done it before deleting using something like shreddit to automate the process. Nevertheless, good that you have taken the step.
My account was younger than this and it was still a major effort to get everything.
I didn’t use shreddit because I didn’t want someone looking for advice/support to find “fuck spez” in place of an answer
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