Deleting a post is simply marking a piece of text so nobody sees it, but I think the text is still stored in their servers.
Furthermore, a large company like reddit, must backup regularly, meaning there must be several copies of my posts in several SSDs. If the backup once a day… some of my posts are 5 years old.
Companies exist to make money. I suspect they just marked my posts not to be readable by anyone, except staff and they can still monetize them.
Am I wearing a tinfoil hat way too often?
“In several SSDs”
Backups are usually done to slower HDDs (online backups) and then to tape archives (offline).
They’ve got it forever.
Would have been better to run the script that edits posts, just to fuck with the data.
China and Facebook would probably buy it for their own profile databases on every person on the planet.
Chances of that though are unlikely. Both are more worried about short term things. For China spotting dissent and trends on the fly. For Facebook selling ads more accurately.
You gave them an irrevocable license to basically use your content in any way they see fit. Them not showing posts you deleted is just them being nice, not being obligated to do so. They could simply ignore your request or restore posts later.
You should have thought about that when you gave them that license to your content.
Reddit is not going to look up your post amongst billions of others. Privacy nutjobs are so paranoid I swear.
It's not wrong to be concerned. Unfortunately it's all too common for privacy newcomers to decide their threat model is bigger than it really is.
In short, No. If they do so, sue them.
But the reality is much more complex than that. IANAL, but I do believe that they should likely avoid trying to monetize your data.
That doesn't stop people who buy reddit from attempting it, but as I said before...if they do so egregiously, sue them.
In an ideal world your data should not be monetized. They might have backups but your data should eventually get phased out of those backups over time. It's impractical for them to keep data forever, and old data is much less valuable.
I don't think so.
The postings of a specific individual are not important for great companies. Its the mass. They search for patterns and want to use this patterns for advertisment or to lead your use of the internet. The postings or information of one single individuum may be not even necessary after the analyis. And even if they could use them for some purpose, after 5 years or so, they arn't current anymore. In this time, there will be 1000s of users who spend their data.
Companies exist to make money.
Therfor, it isn't a great problem, tbh.
The gouverment my spyy on us just to have as much information as possible to get profiles but companies need you as possible customer. If you never use the side againt, they would not find any use of the data and to store it makes costs. So, they probable delete them after a certain time.
