Tired of Reddit’s recent shenanigans and want to cause them a little bit of pain? Well now, my friends… why not add “request all of the things” to your Reddit exodus?
The link to the appropriate page is here:
https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy#policy-h2-2
So, why might you want to request a copy of your data?
First, the collection they (eventually) send to you will contain your entire post / comment history, allowing you to (in theory) use that collection to remove all of your posts versus the last 1000 or so of each. There’s no guarantee that Reddit won’t restore those posts, of course, but at least you tried!
Second, you can scour the data for personally identifiable information (PII.) Your local laws may entitle you to removal of PII, so if you’re inclined to purge the Reddit record of information that can identify your OMG real self… that dataset may help.
Third, you’ll have a copy of your Reddit history. All those epic ideas will be in your hands, not theirs, safe to share elsewhere as you please. While you may not have the right to revoke the license you gave Reddit by posting there, you can most assuredly re-use your post as you please, wherever else you please.
Fourth, and lastly? If everyone submits data requests, Reddit’s team has to spend the time (and money) to pull your data. it might be a small thing, but inundating Reddit with tens of thousands of data requests that they’re legally obligated to provide is both wise (for you) and at least a little bit costly (for them.)
Addendum: If you want to make things a little harder (at risk of them not responding) you can use their privacy email versus their form. That way, someone likely has to verify that X request is tied to Y account.
Easiest way to send a data request is with this direct link: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
It is reachable several clicks from the posted policy and I suppose it also appears in the “new” reddit settings page, but I use a Firefox extension to always redirect to old.reddit and it does not appear in this version.
Sent my data request a few days ago and got no answer yet. They have 30 days to do it, I suppose their plan is to delay a lot.
@b42 @Melpomene I requested mine the day Apollo broke the news on api changes, zero response thus far…
Same here. I’m kind of suspecting that Reddit isn’t going to be giving me my data anytime soon, if ever!
They have 30 days to fulfill the request, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re doing a little malicious compliance of their own by taking as long as they can to fulfill it. I actually requested my data about six months ago, just to see what was in it, and as I recall they got it to me within a day.
I hope it backfires with them finally checking on the last possible day and seeing there are far too many to meet it in time
Worth noting is that for those in the USA, some states have penalties for noncompliance. So if they fail to provide, well… there’s that too.
I also requested my export a week or so ago. If it’s not received within the 30 days I intend to report them to the ICO under the terms of the UK-GDPR
Thanks for the direct link! Yeah, I linked the top page so folk could check out the terms but the direct is good too. My experience with these requests is that they can take some time depending on the site. Some do push it to the deadline.