Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

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This is definitely unwise.

I run forums and have done for +20y.

Reddit may have a user agreement that allows them to use the data forever, but historical versions that were not visible (effectively soft-deleted on edit) puts this into a risk area as it removes the ability for someone to control the data thus transferring ownership far more explicitly to Reddit.

Reddit should be very cautious here... you only get a lot of protections (EU eCommerce Act, etc) but being mere conduit. Arguably volunteer moderators took on a lot of the liability by their act of moderating, and Reddit were able to distance themselves from a lot of the content on the platform.

But once Reddit go intervening in the content, choosing to make some old revisions public, they're now taking editorial decisions that strip them of a lot of the things that protect them.

This is an incredibly naive move in the big picture.

They already apparently provided a 2TB data dump of everything up to march of this year.

That's shockingly small. Like, can we just build some retro love-child of unison and NNTP, and just keep a copy of all the news groups on our laptops / the ones we care about on our phones?

Anyway, from a liability perspective, undeleting stuff older than that seems to be a moot point.

GDPR request to request your data and then one to delete all data about you.

If they don’t comply, they’ll get fined, and I have the feeling it will not be a small one given how they handle things

I think Reddit, like most U.S. web based companies aren't overly concerned with GDPR in many situations, and they are focused on what looks best for their IPO.

Doesn't matter. They operate in the EU therefore they can still be fined. They can of course decide block access from EU countries.

Firstly operating in the EU doesn't mean your entire global operation has to conform to EU regulations. Unless the user in question is in the EU, I think they would be hard pressed to apply fines.

But Reddit is a bit off the rails right now, I mean it is clear they aren't making good or smart choices, so even if this is solely bound to the confines of the EU, I don't think they are going to follow the rules, until they are made to.

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