Cool, cool cool cool. Nothing dystopian about that at all.
What’s stopping them from lying about this? They lie about literally everything, why should anyone believe them about anything at all?
Lying that they have the Reddit comments that they showed everyone?
Anyway, Reddit is one of the most scraped sites on the internet. Be sure that everyone who wants an archive of Reddit has an archive of Reddit. Anything you put on the internet is forever.
I don’t exactly mean to say this is nothingburger, but it is one of the more boring bits of living in a dystopia and is too low on the list of evil shit Palantir is doing to care that much about.
In October 2025, various news outlets reported on past Reddit posts by Platner between 2013 and 2021 in which he called himself a “communist”, declared that “all” cops are “bastards”, and agreed with a post describing White people as “racist and stupid”.[36] In a 2013 Reddit discussion about anti-rape underwear, Platner commented that people worried about assault should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to”.[37] He also referenced political violence in multiple posts; in 2018, he wrote: “Fight until you get tired of fighting with words and then fight with signs, and fists, and guns if need be.” Platner also said that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice” and urged readers to "Get Armed, Get Organized. The Other Side Sure As Hell Is
Based?
Nothing here that makes mass surveillance justified.
Well, except for the rape shit. That is pretty jarring.
Depends - was the assault comment directed at assailants or victims?
I read that wrong. He was talking about victims. The comments are from 2013.
He also claims then ‘he was at his lowest point in life after 4 tours of Iraq, dealing with PTSD and didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about’.
well… at least he realizes that was bullshit…?
Also, remember that this is cherry-picking the worst possible way of phrasing the worst possible excerpts they can pick out from over ten years of random shitposting. You have no idea what the context was for any of this stuff. You don’t know if the part he “agreed” with was the same as the part of the whole other person’s message that said white people were racist and stupid. And so on.
Remimds me of when everyone was deleting their posts around the API blackout and suddenly the next day it was like Reddit did a restore from checkpoint and all of the edited posts and deleted posts came right back. I for one had to run the script that replaced then delete my posts twice, but that’s besides the point.
What script is this?
I used this in the past, not sure itll still work, it worked with old.reddit a few years back
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1870-delete-all-reddit-comments/code
there’s otherones that edit comments as opposed to deleting them, either way reddit keeps a copy, just fyi
Same, but then a bunch of mine popped up again sometime in the last few months. Not exactly sure when, and it wasn’t all of them.
I didn’t run the replace script tho, I wish I would’ve.
Indeed, replacing the posts with irrelevant jibberish was the way
Did they actually come back or did a bunch of comments not show up in your profile because the subs were private so they didn’t get deleted, then they reappeared when the subs reopened? I thought some of mine were restored too, but it was a combination of that and the tool I used only hitting the most recent 1000.
Not a bad guess, and it’s always possible there may have been a handful for which that were true, but no. The bulk of them were from subs that have been public for years and continue to be. I’d been at zero comments for pert near 2 years? A bit more. I would check every now and again after they all came back early on. Then suddenly I noticed a few thousand were back, all from 2011-2014 or thereabouts.
As a software engineer I was a little shocked when I learned our company treats “Delete” buttons as a means to toggle Archived = 1 in the DB. Nothing is actually deleted. Sure we will anonymise the data after a certain time to be GDPR compliant but it would be trivial I guess to actually link that back to people.
That’s basically how deleting data from a hard drive works too.
Not quite, deletion from a hard drive also unflags the space the data was located at as being in use, so it will be overwritten eventually so long as the drive continues to have things written to it. Simply flagging something as being archived means that information will remain on the server indefinitely, the exact opposite of what is intended by a delete button.
That’s why we use the shred command, then you get random data over it at the start.
Depending on your media that may not really destroy the data. SSDs do wear leveling and it might just write new blocks and reuse the old ones later.
So, what you’re saying is, to truly delete data from an ssd you need to do manual wear leveling with a belt sender.
My current workplace doesn’t have for foresight to do that. Delete fully deletes immediately and without confirmation. Oh and the backups have been broken for years
On the upside, recent changes in leadership and on the team made it so we finally have the political will and talent in the right places to actually put effort into fixing backups but they have a lot of technical debt to sift through in fixing the last folks’ mistakes and oversights
Psh I’m surprised you’re surprised. The only way to really get rid of data is microwave or magnet, no?
I guess I’m naive and believe people would be honest.
drill bit*
I’m pretty sure GDPR requires websites to abide to user requests to delete their data. You may wish to review that with your company.
There’s no independent audit for GDPR compliance so the only way to know would be if someone whistleblows. There are also so many loopholes that allows to keep the data like “to prevent further abuse” or “some legal reason”.
So if reddit bans your account they can keep all data and you can’t do anything about it even with GDPR.
Are you advising breaking the law just because nobody checks?
I’m saying corporations break the law if nobody checks - why wouldn’t they?
The org i used to work for had to develop a special process to delete user data upon request, it was not an easy process in dynamics365
if you want something deleted you best destroy the hard disk yourself lol
The requirement exists unless the company is under legal obligation to retain something. I had one case where I requested a GDPR data dump followed by a full deletion, and apparently whoever executed the request deleted first and then processed the dump, so I was able to see that what they did was change my email address from username@mail.tld to username#mail.tld@company.tld - meaning that login attempts, password resets etc. would clearly fail, and a further attempt to request my data revolving around my email address would be unsuccessful, but ultimately all my data was still accessible somewhere. Whether they’d then proceed to delete it after the retention period, who knows. I intended to follow up but forgot…
The GDPR applies to data pertaining to an identifiable person. Anonymised data is more or less equivalent to deleted data as far as the regulation is concerned. Source: I was a DPO for 5 years.
Oh, I see. Indeed anonymised data should be fine under GDPR. However it is often very difficult to anonymise data. Some things are easy to anonymise, other are very complex.
For a small company who does not mainly work with data, the easiest solution to comply with GDPR is indeed just deleting the data altogether.
Yes, there a concept of “pseudonymous” data in some of the guidance, which refers to anonymous data which, when taken together, could identify person - even if some of that data is not held by the data controller. Under those circumstances seemingly anonymous data can fall under the regulation although most companies are very unlikely to consider such nuance in their data policies.
At one point it was possible to download every reddit comment ever. I think it was around 10 years ago I had a copy of that. I can’t remember if it was from reddit directly or from some third party with scrapers. I recall the dataset being free… but it might have been free for me because I had an academic justification? Really don’t recall.
Anyways, point being that you’re delusional if you think anything you post online ever goes away. Secondly, you can be much less than palentir and have “deleted reddit account comments”. Anyone can get them.
Hot. Hot, hot, hot.
Convinced we somehow ended up in the darkest timeline.
Just in time for the genocide of free thinkers. Lucky us!
Oh great the second I become president my DeviantArt is getting leaked
So like internet archive? oooo spooky
The scary dystopian part is the ability to work out that the account belonged to someone who hadn’t used it for a decade rather than just that they could see what had been posted. The Internet Archive doesn’t let you ask it what someone’s Digg username was.
So you acknowledge that the data exists, what you are scared of is being able to search it? Spooky stuffs.
So you acknowledge that bullets exist, what you are scared of is being able to continuously fire them at an extremely high rpm? Spooky stuff.
You fucking knuckle dragger.
You never considered that bullets could be fired at a high rate until an article you saw on lemmy told you to be scared of it?
Jesus, it’s like you’ve melded with the idiot bus.
Haha dumbass
So you acknowledge that the data exists, what you are scared of is being able to search it?
Usually that’s the insurmountable mountain. Data collection is easy. Formatting, storing and querying the data so you can actually get useful information out of it in a time efficient manner is the extremely hard part.
For a real world example, the organization I work at does quarterly audits of all of the field offices to make sure all of the field offices are in compliance, checking required document retention, gear, etc. and when an audit finds a requirement that is out of compliance they’re given a task with a deadline to complete said task to bring them back into compliance, and these tasks have visibility all the way up the chain of command to where even the C-levels are reviewing them regularly. I’ve been working a project recently to flag repeated failures of the same audit requirement for the same location and it’s highlighting that some field offices are not actually coming into compliance once these high visibility assigned tasks are completed which when I presented it to leadership it was a revelation just how many field offices are continuously out of compliance.
Point is, this data is being actively collected and formatted for easy access and there’s still glaring issues being missed due to the difficulty of finding these trends buried in the hundreds of pages of data being generated each quarter per field office
Yea for sure more accountable reliable systems would be better than worse systems great point.
Uhhh I think you completely missed what I was saying. I was explaining that collecting data is easy, but actually making use of that data is really hard, and gave a real world example of a trend that should be obvious being buried in a mountain of data because there’s simply too much data to sift through
I’m going to say that this is actually spooky.
Not that it’s unreasonable, but that the scale of what AI can surveil is so vast that there’s no more personal security-via-obscurity.
It used to be that unless someone had a reason to start looking at you, anything you did online or off was effectively impossible to search. You might be caught on some store’s CCTV, Or your cell provider might have location pings, but that wasn’t online for anyone and needed a warrant to have the police use it to track your activities. Now cities are using Flock and similar tools to enable tracking vehicles across the country without any reason, and stores are using cloud-service AI cameras to attempt to track your mood as you move through the store. These tools can and have been abused.
Now, due to the harvesting of this data for AI, anything that’s ever been recorded (video footage, social media posts, etc) and used as training data can be correlated much more easily, long after it occurred, and without needing to be law enforcement with a warrant.
I’d call that spooky.
So you think private and opensource intelligence spontaneously came into existence in the last 5 years because of AI?
No, that’s not what I said. Widespread data collection and searching used to be something only state actors could accomplish and there were at least theoretically guard rails. Now the barrier of entry has been seriously reduced, the data is owned by a corporation, and being fed to AI. That has a chilling effect as well as being ripe for abuse.
I don’t see an upside.
Widespread data collection and searching used to be something only state actors could accomplish and there were at least theoretically guard rails
So you just make shit up as you go? You are projecting how you think things should work into reality as if it were fact. But now you are learning how it actually works and what really scares you is the shattering of the illusion you sold yourself. I mean it should be pretty apparent Google and Facebook are tools of the US government they always have been.
“Anyone could already do this, so why bother being worried that it’s easier now” they said.
I still don’t get your angle. Why are you defending this, or at the very least downplaying it’s impacts? You seem to also be aggravated by this data collection and spying, so why are you so mad that other people are catching on?
“Oh, I’m so smart” they said. Enjoy your useless internet points?
The situation is actually different now, in the last few years. This is less relevant to the OP, but we/they are building automated snitches that will tattle on you, and more importantly be wrong with a statistical significance. See Flock mistaking license plates and calling the police on innocent people. Sure, we might catch a few violent criminals, but when your government decides that your online activity complaining about them is now criminal, your data can be correlated in real time in a way that wasn’t possible in our parent’s time.
Your dismissal of this seems insane. Stop arguing with me about how long it’s been possible and help me/us fight against it.
Like, they’ve been able to do this for 25 odd years.
There were gov data centers with thousands of petabytes when I was in college. Prism had the gov archiving every phone call and all internet traffic back in '08…
This is not news.
As soon as the quantum cryptography tech gets there, they’ll start decrypting the signal and matrix chats you had yesterday.
Privacy is illusory and temporary.
The
stasigovernment would never use my data against me. I’ve got nothing to hide. Hey I think I’ll go buy this doadd for no reason at all no subliminal advertisingThe US government is temporary. Not our privacy.
Depends on what the people organize to fight to protect.
Unfortunately, I don’t have confidence in the American people to fight for the correct option.
OP is learning about archive.org for the first time?
Don’t just be mad at palantir.
The American government funded palantir.
Palantir couldn’t exist without the helping hand of the American government.
The time to give a fuck was long before Snowden made his leaks.
All the dystopian stuff people fear the government will do is already being done by a framework of companies funded by our government.
The real enemy inside is the government, not the people.
People need to keep their government under more surveillance than the government does its people.
Once you put anything on the public internet these days, it will be harvest by corporations and used against you eventually
I think we all should keep speaking up.
Be unpredictable
There was a browser extension back in the day that ran junk searches to poison whatever data they were harvesting on you. Sounds like it needs to make a comeback.
There’s a browser addon called Meta Random Search which sends your queries randomly through google, bing, ddg, yahoo and other search engines so that nobody has a full history. Paired with a user agent switcher (personally using Chameleon on Firefox) with a high frequency of change (1 min or so) and disabled browser telemetry it might throw them off already even without poisoning results. Especially since every query consumes natural resources I’m not really a fan of this approach.
Well, I’m cooked.
For some time now, I have written stuff on the internet under the assumption that one day, my identity will be publicly tied to everything I wrote. Surely in the future it will be easy to give an example of my writing to an AI bot, perhaps combined with some facts about my life, and the bot would be able to find anonymous posts that were likely written by me, across the internet.
