Technically it’s the “edit” they ban for, not the “delete”.
The Reddit history deletion tools like to edit every comment before deleting them.
This was (is?) a privacy “best practice” based on the understanding that Reddit, Inc. can recover the text of deleted comments, but not the edit history. Just what the comment said at the time of deletion.
Quoting reddit Admin u/alienth:
We will still have access to a deleted comment. So, yes, if you’d like to ensure that something is completely removed, editing would accomplish that.
Edit: to clarify, the delete button does delete the content from public view on the site. The differentiator with the edit button is that we simply don’t store old edits. People can choose to take advantage of this by editing away the text.
In the case of deleting your comments to protest Reddit’s decision, I’m not sure editing is really helpful. It’s technically possible but very unlikely IMO that they would do something like a mass undelete just to keep your content on their site.
Yea, nothing prevents them from fetching the pre-edited content from their daily or weekly database backups. Media such as images and video might be harder to restore, but “soft” deletes on that type of storage are common, and editing a comment to remove an embed won’t delete the embed source.
Yes, it’s obviously technically possible to recover from a backup whether or not you edit. If anything, alienth was probably sharing that they can see deleted comments with no extra work required at all.
My point was that “editing before deleting” is done by these shredding tools because of the comment I quoted. It does nothing to prevent third parties from keeping their own copy, and is at worst an inconvenience to Reddit, Inc.
Therefore I’m not sure there’s any real value to it for this kind of use.
I’m pretty sure that’s not an option once they receive a GDPR Data removal request.
Yeah it would probably be illegal to use the data for anything in the event of a GDPR removal.
They do technically still have it in their backups, most likely. It should be covered in Reddit’s ToS.
According to France’s GDPR supervisory authority, CNIL, organisations don’t have to delete backups when complying with the right to erasure.
Nonetheless, they must clearly explain to the data subject that backups will be kept for a specified length of time (outlined in your retention policy).
If you decide to go down this route, you should bear in mind that other supervisory authorities might be stricter and that you must be able to demonstrate that it’s impractical to delete backup data.
https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/the-gdpr-how-the-right-to-be-forgotten-affects-backups-2
