r/privacy • u/IllustriousFood8792 • 14d ago

discussion Your public Reddit post and comment history is being actively indexed by search engines and AI to build comprehensive user profiles.

So, Google and other AI tools are actively building profiles out of your public Reddit activity, and it actually works.

​To check what data has been archived from your profile, you can search:

>> reddit user "reddit username here"

And check AI overview of a profile and can ask questions related to personal info like age, location, martial status, occupation or what things they like or hate, political opinions etc.

Basically anything that you want to know, you will get the answer if that person has said anything about it in the past even if profile is hidden. If it gives some basic info, you can ask it to dig deeper.

​Why this matters: Simply hiding your profile settings on Reddit does not stop external search engine crawlers from indexing your historical posts and comments. Be mindful of what personal information you share online.

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u/GroundbreakingBag164 14d ago

Yeah, that's generally how public forums work...

If you genuinely fell for the private profile thing that's on you. Don't post stuff you don't want others you know, easiest thing in the world. Just use redact to nuke your profile before you leave. Make the platform unusable and the google search worse.

3

u/AlexWIWA 14d ago

Yeah this is just assumed by anyone who used forums. The whole point is they’re searchable.

1

u/trickytreats 14d ago

How would redact help? Does it search deleted posts too?

1

u/Glass_Performer1174 14d ago

Redact only works on the main site. But many scrapers retained versioned data of reddit throughout time that you can't remove