this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Damn. I keep meaning to use one of those things that deletes all your reddit data. I doubt it'll actually do anything (reddit has no ethical framework so they won't think twice about indexing "deleted" data) but I still need to do that.
I'd bet a year of my salary that it only deletes it from public view so people can no longer get helped from Reddit's Google search results, but a copy (or more than one copy) is still retained on their internal servers.
The trick is to turn everything into randomized garbage and then delete it later. A lot of those purge services offer that feature. It just swaps the words with others; so on the surface it looks like proper written text, but it makes absolutely no sense.
Aside from removing your content that they're profiting from, it also feeds AI scrapers pure garbage in the event that your content is restored.
That's assuming they update their backups, or that if they do update their backups they don't keep historical versions.
IMO once the data has been shared it is no longer safe and there's nothing we can do.