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I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
That's pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I'm being notified about them now as "new" comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.
Yes, comments are being restored, but what they're saying is it's not something they're doing deliberately. The scripts people were running were basically failing and comments got restored automatically. That message literally encourages you to run them again or try different ones
Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.
Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.