GDPR is no joke. Storing a handful of comments is not worth the penalty if they get caught.
Note that I speak from experience as part of a company that needs to comply with the regulations. We do it because the risk of violation is 10000000% not worth it no matter how annoying and arduous it is to comply.
That's true but it's far easier to globally implement rather than trying to segment. Very difficult to accurately prove a user isn't EU resident across an entire userbase.
Sometimes all you can do is make a symbolic gesture that really does nothing, and even if it does nothing, you should still do it.
Probably leaving and supporting lemmy by paying for some developer fees (i'm on the patreon), posting and commenting, probably 100x more damaging to Reddit.
FWIW, I requested an old reddit accounts data the other day under CCPA and all the contamination was in there. My guess is their backend updates every so often. i guess i made a good call to edit my comments and leave them there to simmer before i deleted them along with the account. perhaps this is the way?
Mass edits made rapidly are obviously suspect, too... If the same user edits anything more than a dozen comments in, say a minute, you have to ask what's going on
Not necessarily true. I overwrote several thousand comments with a different tool and used three different quotes on greed. I have periodically checked and about two dozen came back. I just manually changed them at that point.
A tool like that would almost definitely require api access to function. If that was still possible, most of us wouldn't be here having this conversation.
A tool like that would almost definitely require api access to function. If that was still possible, most of us wouldn’t be here having this conversation.
No it didn't use the API. You had to run it in browser and be logged in to reddit.
The tool I used had an extension for Firefox. You then used that Reddit extension so you could get more scrolling on your post history. Then you pressed a button and it would insert gibberish for all comments and posts. Then you’d go next page and do it again.
I think Reddit caught on to this. I tried destroying my comment history (~7 years with 600k karma) with a few of the available tool on GitHub.
Found my account permabanned next time trying to login. People should attempt to eliminate/poison as much as possible, but Reddit has all the comments and modifications in a database somewhere to sell it all to whatever AI is the highest bidder.
They have to do something to make money after taking away awards. The advertising is absolute shit and not worth the $100 entry fee.
I used a tool that edited my comments to replace it with gibberish. Supposedly Reddit still retains deleted comments but if you edit them, it only keeps the latest version. So by editing it you make the comments worthless.
I also edited my comments to be basically a Lemmy ad and completely deleted the posts except in a few communities where it could be helpful in the future.
Just redacted 5 years worth of comments with this. Now to let my account sit for a few months so their backups have only my latest masterpieces. Thanks!!!
I ran a script over all of my comments (through my browser) to edit them into something about how spez had back stabbed the community. I had tens? hundreds of thousands? of comments.
It took several hours to run, but I did a forward pass (newest to oldest) and a backwards pass (oldest to newest). It bugged out because it had to run so long but I think I got it all.
I'm not sure this will really do anything because you could pretty easily statistically isolate any one who did what I did, and roll their account history back to a prior state in the training data.
Regardless, it was the least I could do on the way out the door.