On Monday, thousands of subreddits have gone “dark.” I was first made aware of this when the CrossFit forum that I have been following for the community observation assignment. I noticed that the Reddit post I clicked on last night suddenly gave me a message about being private, but I brushed it off. Third-party apps’ data access changes sparked the Reddit protest. This is a fitting subject for this week since our topic is privacy, ethics, and intellectual property. AP reported that over 8000 subreddits went dark. Reddit will instate a fee for use of it’s API starting July 1. The site even went down during the protest.
What are our rights on these social platforms? Who has access to our data? In most cases, this is all explained in the privacy policy no one read, but all agreed to. What data is available via the API? I knew they had an API but never thought about what data they are sharing. I’ll need to do some more investigating before I post on there.