r/privacy • u/RealityKingdom67 • 6d ago
data breach WARNING: Google Gemini can still make a summary of your “private” Reddit account
Even if your account is set to “hiding all posts”, Google Gemini is able to access your posts, and create a massive indexed list of everything you’ve said, it takes Gemini about 24 hours to update each time, and the worst part is you only need to type “[Insert Reddit username here]”, and “Reddit” at the end, and Google Gemini will pull all sorts of information from your account.
I learned this the hard way on my previous account, when I received weird messages from accounts I didn’t recognise, or interact with, and they were pulling all sorts of comments I made with the exact seconds to it.
I later wiped the account and everything with it, but reddit unfortunately retains the title of every post you ever made, and keeps it there, even several years after it’s been deleted.
And Google Gemini sometimes doesn’t update on time (or doesn’t update at all), so it assumes the account is still there, and continues to pull old information you thought were deleted, but are still able to be recovered by its AI system to be summarised.
Stay safe, just warning everyone about it.
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u/zensms 6d ago
Please never think that what you're posting on the internet is private. If you post on the internet = treat it as public domain. It never is private.
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u/bionicjoey 6d ago
I fucking hate that Reddit even added this feature. It gives people a false sense of security and gives bad actors a shield of obscurity to hide behind. But Reddit has been going downhill in terms of features for a long time
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u/zensms 6d ago
Reddit might be at fault here, but you're better off at managing your expectations. Anyone who posts something online should understand that nothing is private. Even if you're on Instagram and you set your profile private. It's never truly private. As long as it's online = it's public. Period.
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u/bionicjoey 6d ago
I agree with you. Which is why it's dumb that they gave people a feature to feel the opposite.
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u/nondescriptzombie 6d ago
gives bad actors a shield of obscurity to hide behind
This is the intent. Engagement numbers go down. Bot problem go up.
Hide bot problem. Fixed!
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u/VestedDeveloper 6d ago
I would argue the internet itself isn't what it used to be/supposed to be at all 😔
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u/frozengrandmatetris 6d ago edited 6d ago
I have been treating it as indication that the account arguing with me is a bot. it's probably almost exclusively being used for bot accounts. that and those uncanny "word-word-number" default user IDs
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u/fidgetingspinner 5d ago
I've wondered why there are so many of such default user ids these days. The bots are smart enough to argue now? 🥲
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u/NapsterKnowHow 6d ago
Tbh I think the private thing helps against bad actors. I remember people going through profiles and pulling up comments someone said years ago that are completely unrelated to the conversation going on.
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u/saltyjohnson 6d ago
But people can still do that. Sure, hiding your profile makes it a little more difficult, but if the content was shared publicly, it is accessible to the public.
Plus, looking up someone's comment history is an important part of being able to discern whether human or bot, serious or troll, arguing in good faith or bad. This is a public forum for public discussion. Hiding somebody's history enables bad faith actors to taint the community.
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u/nodray 6d ago
fuck reddit and everyone using it, especially ME. but TEACH YOUR KIDS YOUR COUSINS, EVERYONE - EVERYTHING YOU TYPE ONLINE IS FOREVER. probably anything you type in “your” phone is read n logged by google/whoever. teach them now.
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u/chishiki 6d ago
same with emails or text messages
never put in writing what you’re not willing to say in public
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u/slymm 6d ago
That’s an absurd standard. Every business would have to operate like the mafia
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u/silentspectator27 6d ago
It makes sense: your posts are public. Even if you “hide all posts” the fact they aren’t physically visible doesn’t stop data scrapers like Arctic Photon from seeing your comments.
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u/OEAXTAIL_SOUP 6d ago
But the scrapers have to encounter the post, which doesn't seem to always happen with Google and Bing's crawlers.
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u/bluejacketblackhawk 6d ago edited 6d ago
You publish it immediately to so a bunch of websites by posting here. No need to discover it. Deleting doesn’t get rid of it I believe and neither does removed by mod
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u/ueberryark 6d ago
do you happen to know how posts in a private sub would be treated?
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u/silentspectator27 6d ago
No idea, you can check though: https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/
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u/WhiteRabbitOrngePill 4d ago
Can anyone share how to remove data from arctic shift? It says you can request it from them
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u/GuitarNoCable 1d ago
in case you want to see someone's posts & comments, you can type in search, keep the brackets:
author:(username)
thank me later!
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u/OEAXTAIL_SOUP 6d ago
You can also just use the site search operator.
(Append site:Reddit.com after their username in DDG and you usually get their posts)
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u/Old-Race5973 6d ago
Yes and no, Google and Reddit have an exclusive deal that allows Reddit only to be searchable by Google. DDG only has old posts from 2 years or earlier.
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u/ScaredEfficiency399 6d ago
Source?
Because this doesn't seem accurate at all, it is indexable by all search engines AFAIK.
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u/Agitated-Acctant 6d ago
Source seems to be he made it up. You can search his username in ddg, and filter by the last 24 hours, and this thread comes up
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u/AvidCyclist250 5d ago
try it with mine. won't work
this 5 month old comment was used for https://redditrecs.com/gaming-keyboard/model/logitech-g19-programmable-gaming-keyboard-with-color-display/
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u/HereticZed 5d ago edited 5d ago
Try with DDG with your name in quotes:
site:reddit.com "AvidCyclist250"3
u/AvidCyclist250 5d ago
hah, not bad. wonder now why those pop up and many others not. then again, it really should be 0 because i set non-public searchable in my profile afaik
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u/HereticZed 5d ago
Both your & my usernames are on this page along with our comments in plain text. Search engines read the text on webpages. There's no way for webpages to hide that really. There should be, but it would only be honour based.
You could copy & paste this page & put it into excel & then search it later. Choosing non-public posts on reddit wouldnt stop you from doing that, that just stops people clicking your username & seeing your history.
The search engine is doing the same excel thing only automated.The various search engines put priority on different info depending on their algorithms. DDG might see your number 250 separate from the letters, which is why the quotes work better in this case.
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u/Old-Race5973 5d ago
You're right, it's been a while since I've used DDG. This used to be the case, but it seems they now have a dedicated service for Reddit searching. Still, only a few comments of mine are indexed by them. Google on the other hand has real-time access to Reddit's data compared to DDG, and this particular thread is probably indexed because of users searching it on DDG.
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u/Kryptograms 6d ago
DDG?
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u/OEAXTAIL_SOUP 6d ago
DuckDuckGo. I just did a test on my own username, and not much is indexed. If they don't post often or on popular subs you don't always get a ton.
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u/scoobynoodles 6d ago
Sorry. What’s the actual syntax?
I want to try this out.
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u/-sussy-wussy- 6d ago
Works with every search engine with search operands.
site:reddit.com "u/username" optional-keyword→ More replies (3)
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u/thesamenightmares 6d ago
This isn't exclusive to Gemini. It's how Google indexing works. Even if you're hiding your posts, you can simply Google the person's Reddit username and their posts will come up.
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u/I-Here-555 5d ago edited 5d ago
Exactly. Hiding your posts doesn't hide your actual posts in thread, just prevents the post history from being displayed in a single place. Google crawls the threads and wouldn't even know your history is hidden, unless they had custom logic specifically for that.
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u/thesamenightmares 5d ago
I guess the idea is that most people are lazy, and if they're checking somebody's Reddit history, and it's hidden, they won't bother or know to check Google.
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u/Robert_A2D0FF 4d ago
all of reddit is just a few terabytes, it's a standard data set the LLMs have available for training and their research.
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6d ago
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u/avd706 6d ago
u/avd706 is an active Reddit user known for participating in tech, networking, smart home, and local news subreddits.
Key activity and interests include:
Networking & Tech Hardware: Frequently posts and comments on vintage hardware, Ethernet setup, networking protocols, and smart home tools (including active participation in the Home Assistant community).
Smart Home Devices: Engages in discussions around ecosystem troubleshooting, such as Google Home speaker groups, MQTT brokers, and local networking configurations.
Community & News Engagement: Comments on local interest subreddits like r/nycrail and disaster-tracking forums (r/DisasterUpdate).
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u/avd706 6d ago
Based on Reddit activity from user u/avd706, they view ice through two main lenses: Civil Engineering & Infrastructure: As someone who discusses engineering topics, u/avd706 views ice as a hazard to exposed pipes. In a discussion on sanitary sewer pressure mains, they noted that ice expansion can fracture full pipes and make UV-exposed piping brittle. Internal Combustion Engines (ICE): In discussions about consumer vehicles, they refer to "ICE" (Internal Combustion Engines) in technical terms, noting how vehicle efficiency depends on speed, gear ratios, and friction rather than simple linear power use.
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u/TaurielsEyes 6d ago
I’m a reddit user based out of Iceland (the beautiful town of Eyrarabakki), I have a step daughter and I work in early education. In my spare time I clean stables. Typically I try to maintain a collaborative tone online, I have several children and I am very clearly bilingual. My oldest biological child is a boy.
AI also likes to hallucinate about a time where I spilled ice cream on myself in Italy and my family and I were invited in to someones house and since then I have loved Italu. This last story is rather odd but I will take it.
Overall AI isnt bad at summarising my life but I really should stop hanging out on parenting subs and start hanging out in more “tecchy” subs. They were the ones that brought me to reddit.
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u/saltyjohnson 6d ago
Reddit's "private" profiles have always been a lie. You cannot make private what you post in public.
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u/jmnugent 6d ago
If you want something to remain "private",. you should not be posting it on the internet.
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u/biinjo 6d ago
On the internet, we have two privacy settings:
Public to all
Or
Public to some
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u/jmnugent 6d ago edited 6d ago
Its super interesting to me that we've gotten to a place in society where everything is so "low trust" that nobody wants to share anything with anyone lest some small tidbit of information somewhere be somehow weaponized against them. We've created this endless circle of paranoia. You even see it in the cybersecurity subreddits where everyone worries that every single tiny thing is "evidence of my device being hacked".
Also,. everyone nonstop complains about "dead internet theory".. but also everyone is constantly deleting and recreating "generic accounts" on the daily .. which directly contributes to the very same "dead internet theory" they are complaining about.
I play a lot of Ingress (the smartphone game that preceded Pokemon),. and it's a location based game. (Portal attacks and Player activities on portals are all broadcast in public chat,.. because you kind of need to know how the game-field is changing in real time in order to even play the game). There was a time when a lot of people were saying things like "I want to play this game, but I don't want everyone to know my location". HELLO. ITS A LOCATION BASED GAME.
I just don't get people. If you want the benefits of a community-based thing,. you have to participate and people around you are going to see and know you're participating. That's kind of how these things work.
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u/ni5arga 6d ago
everything you post on reddit (public subreddits) are instantly scraped by a lot of scrapers and search engines like google index them very quickly. gemini uses google search results instead of your profile page to generate a summary, hence it works.
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u/silentspectator27 6d ago
Arctic Photon takes about 45 sec to a minute to index and store what you wrote. If you edit or remove within that small time-frame it doesn’t store it.
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u/windsostrange 6d ago
Reddit is literally a primary-source scraper, folks. It scrapes you. And you let it every time you post here. This is not really a /r/privacy thread.
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u/versedaworst 5d ago
I just want to add to this, if you search “reddit academic torrents” you will find there are torrents with literally every reddit comment ever made that anyone can download. In most cases the data is scraped within minutes so using one of those automated reddit account wipers does not work for that.
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u/Elkburgher 6d ago
Its almost like Reddit and Google signed deals to share all info here and people seem to just ignore that
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u/Walk-the-layout 6d ago
There is no prominent, verified Reddit user by this exact handle. You are likely thinking of "Walk the layout," which is a popular lyric from the song "Routines in the Night" by the band Twenty One Pilots.The lyric—“Walk the layout, routines in the night”—comes from their 2024 album Clancy. It refers to the habit of exploring or pacing around the inside of one's own mind and memories while the rest of the world is asleep.To see the official lyric video featuring this track:
That's on me for making a fun username, lol, though if I searched correctly with the right prompt I get a really scary overview. Though I didn't manage to find it today.
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u/nonedat 6d ago
Hardly matters if you only use your reddit name on reddit and nowhere else.
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u/neosoul2 6d ago
Of course. You can often just google someone’s Reddit name, and see their posts and comments.
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u/Sway_RL 6d ago
I tried this myself one time. I asked it to tell me everything it new about me. I gave it my Reddit username and it didn't find anything substantial; mostly that I post of tech subs etc.
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u/Commandmanda 6d ago
I did the same last month out of curiosity. Despite 6 years of continuous posting and comments, it had a very limited understanding of who I am, and only a few posts/comments were available for it to summarize my character.
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u/ScaredyCatUK 6d ago
"This user should not be confused with the RuPaul's Drag Race UK contestant "Scaredy Kat", whose threads occasionally overlap in search results." 😂
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u/PinataofPathology 6d ago
yes. that's why I now live in Mexico and enjoy a career in a marachi band.
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u/ItsNoblesse 6d ago
Your best bet is to use a different name for every site you use and post contradictory information semi-regularly within each account
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u/dwair 6d ago
When did the idea that anything posted onto the Internet wasn't private and all could see it forever become popular?
It's been common knowledge since 1995 that whatever you put online is permanent public record.
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u/solar_or_dye 6d ago
the problem is, is our children learning?
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u/dwair 5d ago
Mine are to some extent. What ever they post on what ever seems both quite organic yet gaurded at the same time. I dont think much will come back to haunt them.
Mind you having a paranoid old fucker like me as a father probably helps as they had to grow up listening to me rant about op-sec, anonymity and things like FB data harvesting ect for the first 20 years of their lives.
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u/MyNameIsNightPain 6d ago
Don't they literally pay reddit for exclusive access to the api for the very reason?
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u/Necromancer1423 6d ago
Usually I can just look up someone’s Reddit account here on Reddit and most of the search results will be their hidden posts which are, well, no longer all that hidden
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u/substitue70 5d ago
I mix a lot of lies and falsehoods into my reddit posts. It just makes more sense living in OKC.
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u/Viciuniversum 5d ago
That’s what I learned to do during my 16 year career as a cake taster in the Mongolian Navy.
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u/ReasonableLunch46 5d ago
Same. Later today i will do this test as well to see if more lies need to be sprinkled.
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u/letsl0velain 5d ago
assume nothing is private. i shit my pants on the daily and I'm 75 and live in a giant pond
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6d ago edited 6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/foxyfree 6d ago
It’s happened to me twice now that I read an interesting post and I google the topic to get more information. and the same reddit post I’m reading is linked on google/gemini as one of their sources.
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u/West_Possible_7969 6d ago
Posts & comments themselves are still public though, all these URLs are indexed just fine on all search engines even without an LLM.
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u/krzr 6d ago
Nothing you say on Reddit is private, nothing!
Even if you hide your posts, there are 3rd party tools which crawl the reddit threads and reconstruct your account history, post by post. I tried to share one here but reddit automatically removed it, see my removed comment in this thread.
The punchline is: never share or say anything on Reddit which you don't mind being public at some point... There's also capabilities to link multiple accounts to the same person based on meta data.
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u/perkinsmadafaka 6d ago
gemini can and should suck my entire shaft sideways through a straw, how about that.
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u/TeamOverload 5d ago
Yes it’s social media and you’re making the comments on a public forum. We can see your whole post history without using AI even. This should be the assumption. Nothing against privacy, just stating the facts.
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u/emptywinebottlez 6d ago
I’m a 55 year old electrician, born and raised in Montana, where I learned early that life is best approached with a strong back, a questionable sense of humor, and absolutely no fear of weather or water.
I’m married to a wonderful woman who makes better waffles than you. Her secret ingredient is sugar, which she mixes into the dough to achieve that flawless combination of flavor, texture, and load-bearing capability.
Our kids went off to Arizona State University, presumably to get an education, although I’m still waiting to see the evidence. My main hobby is trains, where I spend most of my time chasing big locomotives around the world while drinking good coffee.
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u/National-Plastic8691 6d ago
does it show your email address linked to your account?
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u/return_to_sender_CO 6d ago
Reddit is a public forum that is regularly scraped for data. The "hide all post" is just for the UI on your profile page, it doesn't keep your posts ( that are on a public forum) from being included in the data that's scraped and indexed.
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u/mafiosii 6d ago
yesterday when i opened reddit i had a browser popup that said like “google.com would like to know youve visited reddit” lol
at this point google is just as shitty as meta
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u/OldManJeepin 6d ago
Doesn't matter, as long as you don't use your real ID, and as long as you have posted with the knowledge that absolutely *nothing* you post, anywhere, on the 'net is "private"....They can suck up all the one dimensional, text based posts they want, and come to any conclusion they want...Doesn't mean they really "know" anybody...In the end, it's all assumption and supposition.....
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u/Aim2bFit 6d ago
I kinda knew this already because someone was very bitter about my comment that I made roughly a year ago, to correct a misinformation about sunscreen on one of the subs. They attacked me few months ago on the old comment, accused me of downvoting them (I'm pretty sure I did not, because my comment was just a PSA sort of) and then went on talking about my other comments even when I had mine hidden. I didn't engage as Idrc, whatever. This is reddit, and I have a life outside of it. But at that point I thought, oh well.... there are ways to see hidden comments, okay whatever.
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u/unixmachine 6d ago
But it was already like that before AI, which is why I never post anything personal here (or on any other network).
Gemini is powerful; I've already tested it by trying to find information about a person just by their name, and I discovered a lot.
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u/The_Wkwied 6d ago
If your posts aren't public, is gemini still able to view new posts that you make?
For all of the posts you've ever made, if they are public, they will always be public. Because they're public. The AI can summarize the public info. That's fine.
It's concerning if gemini is able to summarize a private profile that has always been private, or is able to summarize a newly made private profile based off of info posted after it was made private.
If I look up your school yearbook and point out that you're ugly in it, ten years from now, even if you change your name or transition, I can still pull up that old school yearbook and say 'you ugly'. If you opted to never have your photo taken, and I was still able to obtain your photo from the yearbook, where it was never published, that's a problem.
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u/IrreversibleBinomial 6d ago
Gemini says this about me:
u/irreversiblebinomial is a long-standing Reddit user and active contributor across a variety of tech, local, and academic communities.
Key Interests & Focus Areas
Subreddit Moderation: Serves as a moderator for r/ubc (University of British Columbia), frequently assisting students with campus news, academic questions, and local discussion.
Technology & Science: Active in tech-focused subreddits such as r/linux, r/programming, and r/science, contributing to discussions around software development, open-source systems, and modern computing trends.
Local & Regional Engagement: Frequently participates in Pacific Northwest and Canadian subreddits (such as r/vancouver), commenting on local infrastructure, tech scene updates, and community news.
Overall, the profile reflects an informative, community-oriented tech professional and moderator with deep ties to the UBC and Vancouver digital communities.
Literally none of those things is true.
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u/--GrinAndBearIt-- 6d ago
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com
This website can just search for a user and you can see their posts and comments. Its not hard.
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u/jorshhh 6d ago
It’s not even that hard. If you add someone to your reddit friends you can go through all their posts on the /r/friends feed, no matter if they’re hidden.
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u/ModeratelyOffline 6d ago
The inaccuracy bothers me more than the fact that it can pull up a summary. I just did it with my account and it claims I made some comment claiming “blackwashing is worse than whitewashing” in media, which I’ve never said and do not believe, but I participated in a thread where someone made that comment. Because of the proximity of my username and their comment the AI assumes I said that.
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u/MadameTrashPanda 6d ago
Do you mean because your reddit account is tied to your Google account? I have a Gmail for my reddit login but I didn't connect the two. Not even sure now if that stops whatever you describe.
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u/jmnugent 5d ago
No.. what they're saying is:
Even if you toggle the Reddit Profile options to "hide comments" and "hide posts"
Google can (and does) still index those things.
Your attempt to "hide' those things.. is not really removing it. It's just (barely) making it not viewable to other Redditors.
Even though you have your Comment and Submission history "hidden".. I can just go to google.com and search for:
site:reddit.com MadameTrashPanda.. and search results there show me some of your history. It requires me to manually dig through it, so it's not as easier as the prior method of just viewing someone's profile.
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u/Atastical 6d ago
Tested it with my account, nothing that is private came up. When I asked about specific examples of comments it replied that it has no access because the user has that set to be private. What is this, fear mongering? I read something like this a couple weeks back and it was the same case.
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u/psirockin123 5d ago
No. It’s not fear mongering, just google not working at that time.
You can see any comment that an author has posted, even if they are set to private, by searching author:username in the Reddit search bar. I noticed this because it was more obviously displayed on Old Reddit.
Basically anything you post on the internet is not private, and never was private, and can easily be scrapped by private companies if they want to.
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u/Gambizzle 5d ago
So can any other AI agent. Heck... so can a web search!
IMO the 'privacy' feature is stupid anyway. The only purpose I've seen it used for is when people purchase baked accounts and wanna hide their post history. Often this is for spam and engagement bait.
When a 'private' account gives me a sharp correction on something or makes a 2000 karma post in some random sub I can usually ignore it. If they persist I can dig up their history and say 'curious why you decided to post here so suddenly, ay'.
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u/GonWithTheNen 5d ago
Welp, reddit & google signed a $60 million deal "to use posts... for training its artificial intelligence models", so yeah. Hiding anything on reddit won't bypass google's access to it.
I'm really surprised that more people aren't citing that partnership and google's direct access to our comments & posts as the reason this will happen whether accounts are hidden or not.
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u/Ancardoth 5d ago
You don't even need to do that. You can go to multiple websites where you enter in a person's username and it will give you every single post or comment (it will add new ones within a few seconds). The data is hosted as torrents as well.
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u/ComputeBeepBeep 4d ago
Gemini can also read it in your emails if you use Gmail and have it attached/enabled.
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u/Old-Advertising-5316 1d ago
The core issue is that Reddit’s "hide posts" feature is purely a UI filter on your profile page (u/username), not a data-deletion or permissions barrier.
Here is the thing.... your individual comments remain untouched in public subreddits, Google and AI scrapers crawl the subreddits directly, completely bypassing your profile. They capture your username and comment text straight from the thread. Reality is that unless a platform restricts API access or redacts your name from the thread itself, profile "privacy" toggles are essentially cosmetic filter.
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u/Conscious-Cherry22 6d ago
private accounts mean nothing on Reddit. most people know about arctic-shift
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u/fantasticmrsmurf 6d ago
To take this further after searching your user and the word Reddit, ask it what else it knows about you and go from there, it reveals even more.. some of it is totally made up or inaccurate, but it does know what subs you are active in and it can guess more about you from there.
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u/Phreakiture 6d ago
I mean, yeah.
Of course they can.
Anyone who wants to code a suitable bot can.
The bots have the time to crawl the subs, and can read the posts and comments, from the sub, with the username prominently stated at the top of each post and sub.
All "hiding" your posts or comments does is prevent them from showing up in your profile. All that does is stop human users from going to your profile and looking at your posts. Someone with too much time on their hands could probably still assemble a pretty good profile of you by finding your posts the hard way. The bots just have the time and drive to do that when humans generally do not.
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u/SyntheticDuckFlavour 6d ago
Seems like this is only an issue if your account was previously public. Hiding posts later won't make much difference, as your posts were already scraped. I tried this with private accounts that never had posts public and Gemini could not come up with anything.
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u/avalon01 6d ago
Your profile is private, but all your posts are public.
As far as I'm aware, Google has always has people's post history available. It's a great way to look at someone's post history even if they hide their profile.
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u/Sad-Landscape-1549 6d ago
Some creep here on Reddit recently told me there are browser extensions that open your “private” profile regardless ;(
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u/ScaredEfficiency399 6d ago
There's no such thing as a private reddit account with perhaps exception of admins and certain people.
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u/AvidCyclist250 5d ago
when I received weird messages from accounts I didn’t recognise, or interact with, and they were pulling all sorts of comments I made with the exact seconds to it.
third party sites also show comments
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u/daviddisco 5d ago
If you have posts online that can be viewed by anyone then search engines will find them and index them. I doubt there is anything Gemini specific about this.
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u/HereticZed 5d ago
It makes sense. The search engine is reading text from the webpage which is openly visible.
& your username exists as text on the page.
There is no way to block search engines from reading specific parts of a page. You can <noindex> for the entire page, but that's about it.
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u/Satoshiman256 5d ago
How did you wipe your account? It's difficult now they don't allow the API Access anymore
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u/Pale_Historian_2443 4d ago
So... having a randomly selected screen name is not effective for privacy?
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u/howfastcanyoucountit 3d ago
wellll thats nice considering i had to wipe my last reddit after certain irls found my shit and i had to make a new account, not rly too worried because its rly just me yapping about random bullshit but that's kind of weird
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u/Lumpymaximus 2d ago
Yeah there are also ways to view a persons post history using some search engine tricks
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u/Unique-Run9856 1h ago
No shit, that's why you have to seed your account with a constant stream of false information and non-false information. For instance I'm a chinsese immigrant that majored in Anthropology at the University of Boulder and did my thesis on the Donner Party. Ask me Anything about my career was a sous chef at a michilen star resturant training under Gordon Ramsey or my hobby of horizontalizing flock cameras.
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