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Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world
gedaliyah @lemmy.world

Reddit Undeleted all my posts and comments

Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn't planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I'm not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that's a bit concerning. There's no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail's-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.

155 comments

  • Every time this gets brought up, I go back to a thread where my most popular comment was (since I no longer have an account to check back on and it's the only one I know for sure I can find). To this day, it luckily still remains deleted. If it does get restored, I wonder if it becomes the original comment or the generic [deleted in protest of the Reddit API change] or whatever I set them to be edited to before deletion.

  • It's one of the reasons I never deleted my account there every time my stuff pops back up I trounce it down again.

    Speaking of which, I just checked and YEAH, not everything I ever posted is back, not even all the highest rated stuff, but a lot has come back and deleting more than a few at a time starts throwing errors :)

  • I find it very funny to think of how aggressively Reddit was banning people, particularly back in 2016. And how algorithmic they got in censoring and shadowbanning certain comments and accounts.

    But now that real human interactions are more valuable than gold, they're trying to reverse it all again.

  • I edited and deleted my comments, and then got banned. I figure they're not going to resurrect potentially tainted comments for training AIs.

  • If you live in the EU at least, I’m pretty sure much of this outright evil stuff Reddit is doing is illegal. If you want to delete your account and comments, they have to let you.

  • If you're concerned about particular comments or posts linking your Reddit account to your real-world identity, and you know have a pretty good idea what those are, can you just delete or modify those?

    I think that there are some other issues here, though.

    That will help if you're worried about someone doxxing an account via just casually doing Web searches, maybe.

    But people have already archived copies of Reddit's comment and post history. So if you're worried about someone likely to be digging through such a database, this won't help.

    And I have no idea whether Reddit actually purges deleted comments internally, or whether they or any partners or future purchasers might have access to deleted text. I haven't looked at their privacy policy, so I don't know what they do.

    • It's an aggregate concern - Advertisers, bad actors, etc could easily use tools that are available now or will be soon to extract information that otherwise would be impossible for a human to wade through. I know that in one sense, everything is backed up by the NSA, etc, but that is not something I can do anything about.

      The concern is actually greater in the fediverse, since a federated admin has access to even more information, and there is no absolute way to delete everything even with GDPR. I think that the risk is worth building a better internet. It's also a part of why blocking Threads is important.

      • So, I'm gonna be honest. I don't think that mass deanonymization via text analysis is in the immediate future.

        Is it a theoretical risk? Yes. It's not because I don't think that it's technically doable. It's for a rather-more-depressing reason: because there's lower-hanging fruit if someone is trying to build a deanonymized database. I just don't think that it's presently worth the kind of effort required to mass-deanonymize text, in general.

        Any time you have an account with some company that persists for a long time, if they retain a persistent IP address log, then whenever you log in, you're linking your identity and the IP address at that time. Especially if one cross-correlates logs at a few companies, and a data-miner could do a reasonably reliable job of deanonymizing someone. Maybe it's not perfect, maybe there are several people in a household or something, maybe some material is suspect. But if you're watching cookies in a browser on a phone crossing from one network to another and such, my guess is that you can typically probably map an IP address to a fairly limited number of people.

        I mean, there are ways to help obfuscate that, like Tor. But virtually nobody is doing that sort of thing. And even through something like Tor, browsers tend to leak an awful lot of bits of unique information.

        And if someone's downloading an app to their phone that's intentionally transmitting a unique identifier, then it's pretty much game over anyway, absent something like XPrivacyLua that can forge information. Companies want to get people using their phone apps.

        An individual person might be subject to doxxing from someone who wants to try to identify their real-life persona from an online persona. But I don't think that companies will generally likely be going that route in the near future to try to deanonymize users en masse, because they've already got easier, more-reliable ways to track people that people are vulnerable to.

        All that being said, once text is out there, it's potentially not going away, so keeping in mind that it might be deanonymized one day via future analysis might be a good idea. The Federalist Papers were deanonymized via Bayesian statistical analysis centuries after they were written using technologies that their authors could not have dreamed of.

        Robert Hanssen -- a Soviet mole in the FBI who had counterintelligence expertise and could reasonably expect to be dealing with state-level intelligence agencies going after him -- was caught because he used the unique phrase "the purple-pissing Japanese" on two occasions; once where his real-life identity wasn't known but that he was a spy was, and once where his real-life identity was known but not that he was a spy. That deanonymization was done manually, via human effort, but if you figure that the same sorts of approaches could be used to link accounts at different services and across accounts on one service...shrugs I mean, I just don't have the tools to try to resist something like that, to keep what I'm saying intact but present ideas in a way that I'd be confident would be strong against that kind of analysis.

155 comments