[robbedpeter]

Web scraping is legal. Reddit users, like all other members of public forums, put their comments on the internet for the whole world to see. And collect, parse, process and manipulate. If you don't want the whole world to have access to your writing, you'd have to join a private forum.

Trying to shoehorn social media posts into some contorted post-hoc bastardization of the concept of privacy is ridiculous.

Shockingly, things that people post to publicly accessible websites are accessible by the public. We're starting to see social damage from this, with facial recognition and authoritarian governments using people's posts for tracking and oppression.

Decentralized services with strong legislation protecting personal data, and globally recognized content licensing will all be needed to prevent future abuse, but everyone currently in the planet over the age of 20 is more or less personally responsible for the massive and naive oversharing. We know better now, but 15+ years ago nobody except Sci-fi authors and fringe activists had a grasp of how badly unprotected globally shared streams of consciousness could go wrong.