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Asked Reddit support to give me API key so I can delete my data. They refused

3 points by leoriq ↗ HN
Asked reddit support to give me API key so I can securely delete my data via ereddicator. I was honest, filling all the required fields, stating my purpose explicitly.

Here's their response: We have reviewed your request for access. Unfortunately, we cannot grant approval because the submission is not in compliance with Reddit’s Responsible Builder Policy and/or lacks necessary details.

22 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] thread
borplk
I guess you'll have to do it with browser automation. I assume that's possible?
kay_o
If you are caught midway, you get banned for abuse/ToS, and you are not allowed to delete/edit your comments-account if you are unable to sign in. (I am guessing they are retaining data under some bullshit about gdpr legitimate interest in preventing abuse)

Rate limits are also quite low so it might take weeks to delete. Many subs will automatically ban you if you edit a comment to say something like 'redacted by' (ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/1t1fekj/redact_...)

red-iron-pine
nah i do it all the time

log in, click on my profile, press f-12, go to console, run some script i found a while ago.

get to watch em go, one at a time. slow process compared to a API key but it's nice to see what I wrote 6 months ago and what the final karma score was.

probably gonna stop using the site in a month or so tho. site has gone down hill

copper-float
I'm very glad I wiped all my comments on Reddit before they became so stingy and idiotic about API keys. What a horrible company, can't wait until they go under.
BruceNCNP
Why doesn't deleting an account come with an option to wipe all personal data?
al_borland
Because the value of the site is in the user data. Even before they went public, they asked that people deleting accounts don’t delete their posts/comments before leaving, to avoid broken conversation threads.
stevekemp
A similar on this very site too, of course.
onel
You can. But it's a more manual process. Under gdpr you can request total deletion of your data
bbor
Their stance on APIs truly baffle me. Ok, I get it, you don't want people using an app without ads. And you, for some reason, think that trying to wall off the public commons from scientists and sell them snippets piecemeal is going to be a valid longterm strategy -- dumb, but coherent.

But to spend buckets of money getting 3p devs to build stupid little games in-app while also actively banning the huge suite of tools that people actually care about because they can access your actual reddit data and do actual things...

Just baffling. I blame the corrupting influence of YC, personally.

And yes, their copy around basically everything is just insultingly, laughably bad. Presumably because they refuse to hire enough people to provide details with any sort of reliability.

brudgers
[delayed]
bbor
Woah, YC divested completely?! Thank you for the correction, I associate them so closely in this Sam Altman world in which we live in that I completely forgot. If they're still invested its through intermediaries -- Tencent and Blackrock both hold bigger portions.
dalekirkwood
I feel like Reddit has just become such a toxic place.

Surely they have to comply with EU laws. They can't leave your data up without permission?

stackghost
>I feel like Reddit has just become such a toxic place.

The more I learned about reddit's early history, the more I realized it was always rather toxic. Alexis and Steve (and Jeremy) were totally fine with Michael Brutsch (/u/violentacrez) promoting lots of gross shit (jailbait, pics of dead kids etc.) until they caught some bad publicity and it started to affect their bottom line.

I guess everyone has their price, and money talks, but it really seemed (and still seems) like reddit is happy to host all kinds of horrific content until said content results in negative press, and then suddenly it's about "protecting users", those same users that the reddit staff clearly didn't give two shits about the week prior. They care about privacy, except when it's about targeting ads to users or selling user data to advertisers. They care about the integrity of the platform, except when Steve Huffman was editing user comments for funsies.

The hypocrisy galls me more than anything.

benoau
The best advice I've seen for conclusively deleting your account is to get it banned.
bjourne
Alas. it's not enough. My account got banned ages ago but all my comments are still there. Apparently, the only way to delete your comments is to delete them one by one. Undoubtedly that only hides them and they still live on in Reddit's comments database to be sold to every paying data broker.
noman-land
I recommend writing a little bit of javascript you can paste into the browser console of your logged in session that will page through all your messages and delete them one by one, with a sensible delay to avoid rate limits. Then let it run overnight. No API needed.

Other ideas include pulling the auth token from your logged in cookie and using it outside the browser. Don't forget to use a standard Chrome user agent.