Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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I deleted all my post from my reddit account, can they still monetize them? (linux.community)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by vestmoria@linux.community to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] Melody@lemmy.one 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Endward23@futurology.today 2 points 6 months ago

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.