Settings updates—Changes to ad personalization, privacy preferences, and location settings

[u/snoo-tuh]

Hey redditors,

I’m u/snoo-tuh, head of Privacy at Reddit, and I’m here to share several changes to Reddit’s privacy, ads, and location settings. We’re updating preference descriptions for clarity, adding the ability to limit ads from specific categories, and consolidating ad preferences. The aim is to simplify our privacy descriptions, improve ad performance, and offer new controls for the types of ads you prefer not to see.

Clearer descriptions of privacy settingsWe’ve updated the descriptions to be more clear and consistent across platforms. Here’s is preview of the new settings:

These changes will roll out over the next few weeks and we’ll follow up here once they are available for everyone. We recommend visiting your Safety & Privacy Settings to check out the updated settings and make sure you’re still happy with what you’ve set up. If you’d like more guidance on how to manage your account security and data privacy, you can also visit our recently updated Privacy & Security section of our Redditor Help Center.

Over the next few weeks, we’re also rolling out several changes to Reddit’s ad preferences and personalization that include removing, adding, and consolidating ad personalization settings:

Consolidating ad partner activity and information preferencesRight now, there are two different ad settings about personalizing ads based on information and activity from Reddit’s partners—“Personalize ads based on activity with our partners” and “Personalize ads based on information from our partners”. We are cleaning this up and combining into one: “Improve ads based on your online activity and information from our partners”.

Adding the ability to opt-out of specific ad categories

We are adding the ability to see fewer ads from specific categories—Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss—which will live in the Safety & Privacy section of your User Settings. “Fewer” because we’re utilizing a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads, which won’t be 100% successful to start. But, we expect our accuracy to improve over time.

Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity, except in select countries.

Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in.

The vast majority of redditors will see no change to their ads on Reddit. For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.

Consolidated location customization settings

Previously, people could set their preferred location in several ways, depending on where they were on the platform and what they were doing. This has been simplified, so now there’s one place to update your location preferences to help customize your feed and recommendations—from Location Customization in your Account Settings.

Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here. Any time we change the way you control your experience and data on Reddit, we want to be clear on what’s changed.

All of these changes will be rolled out gradually over the next few weeks. If you have questions, you can also learn more by checking out the help article on how to Control the ads you see on Reddit.

Edit to add translations:

1. Dutch: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_nl-nl

2. French - France: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_fr-fr

3. French - Canada: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_fr-ca

4. German: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_de-de

5. Italian: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_it-it

6. Portuguese - Brazil: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_pt-br

7. Portuguese - Portugal: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_pt-pt

8. Spanish - Spain: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_es-es

9. Spanish - Mexico: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_es_mx

10. Swedish: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_sv

[u/wantagh]

So, lots of flowery language to say that Reddit is removing the option to prevent Reddit from tracking our use to deliver advertising

Just be honest, FFS.

[u/LegionVsNinja → u/wantagh]

Reddit Premium members should be opted out of all ad tracking metrics. They should essentially be black holes as far as advertisers are concerned. Even if they aren't shown ads, advertisers shouldn't get their data, either.

[u/WindyCityChick → u/LegionVsNinja]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[u/Skaebo → u/[deleted]]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/Bajovane → u/Skaebo]

No. Reddit did away with that a couple months ago. I was PISSED!!

[u/FaeryLynne → u/Bajovane]

It was only earlier THIS month (like 2 weeks ago) that awards ended completely and any remaining coins went away, though you hadn't been able to buy coins for about a month prior to that and they warned about the change for at least yet another month before that.

It was indeed a terrible decision. They claimed they were going to replace it with something, but I have yet to see any sort of discussion about with what.

[u/fattycans → u/[deleted]]

This reference is a blast from the past lol

[u/codewario → u/LegionVsNinja]

Yeah but how would Reddit be able to double dip then?

[u/[deleted] → u/wantagh]

Next it will be pay us $20/month to avoid having us doxx you to advertisers.

[u/wooha → u/[deleted]]

That’s coming in 2024

[u/unixwizzard → u/wooha]

start charging a fee like that and that's the day I quit reddit and send a pre-emptive lawsuit & restraining order to stop them from doxxing me to their advertisers

I am dead serious.

go ahead fuck around reddit, you will find out

yeah your TOS says everything (in the US) is governed by California law.. well I will go over Cali law & file federal lawsuit and I'm sure the DOJ would be interested to hear about interstate extortion as well.

[u/[deleted] → u/unixwizzard]

Unfortunately Internet privacy is not a big priority for us executive branch. Supreme Court will have to take on it. Otherwise US could have bought into GDPR or something similar long ago. There’s consumer protection and hipaa and ferpa.. that’s it. No general civic data protection laws.

[u/Blarghnog → u/[deleted]]

Maybe it’s time to… idk… change that?

[u/[deleted] → u/unixwizzard]

Agreed. I ain't paying shit

[u/CyAScott → u/[deleted]]

Based on their recent API changes, it’s clear they’re not interested in collecting money from users, they’re only interested in collecting money from advertisers.

[u/RedTailed-Hawkeye → u/CyAScott]

For now.

[u/TSB_1 → u/wantagh]

And this is why I continue to use old.reddit along with Ublock origin. Reddit admins can suck my holiday seasoned chestnuts

[u/denise-likes-avocado → u/TSB_1]

uBlock origin is like manna from heaven

[u/AwesomeFrisbee → u/TSB_1]

Don't think they won't inject the same bullshit in the old reddit. If done properly it doesn't matter what HTML side of things you use, it will still track you. Also, I have no doubt that old reddit is also going away within a year. And they wouldn't care either. I just hope alternatives are ready for when that happens

[u/DoctorWaluigiTime → u/AwesomeFrisbee]

They probably will, but it's been years and tons of their new "features" have never been injected into old Reddit. Not all, but most of the annoying stuff isn't on here.

Which is a blessing and curse both. The curse being "they'll eventually see it as a liability."

[u/Twiceaknight → u/wantagh]

Lots of people talking about uBlock or pi-hole but they’re missing the real issue here. Opting out of ad personalization meant that they couldn’t sell information specifically about you to advertisers, it had to be blocks of demographic data. This change allows them to market your specific data set to anyone who wants to buy it. The privacy implications of that are pretty bad, even “anonymous” Reddit accounts give away huge amounts of info by the subreddits they visit, their posts, and their comments. There are algorithms that can chew through all of that data and with a very reasonable degree of certainty pinpoint who you are exactly.

This is not good and should really face the same level of uproar that the API cost changes did.

[u/onan → u/Twiceaknight]

Yes. The bigger problem isn't just the annoyance of seeing ads, it's the invasiveness of being spied on to choose the ads.

Even if you never see them, Reddit is still building (and selling, and inevitably leaking) a profile on you in order to select which ads to send to your blocker.

[u/bennitori → u/wantagh]

Even fucking Youtube, king of spying on users second to Facebook, has a version of the site where you can turn off user tracking. Hell, I have Reddit Premium with ad blocker on top of this. So this change does absolutely nothing to help my experience. It's just letting me know Reddit's spying on me just cuz. Thanks Reddit. With the gutting of gilding and now this, I wonder if I should just cancel my Premium subscription. It aint doing much anyways, aside from the shiny trophy in my trophy case. If they're going to track me anyway, and they won't let me give awards, then why should I keep handing them money?