I have always felt that personal privacy is very important and will gladly honor removal requests for people who have removed their content from Reddit or deleted their account. Although it's nice to have a complete dataset, that takes a backseat to personal privacy.

That said, there will be a slight modification to how removals are done in the future. When a removal request is made, all personally identifiable data will be stripped but the metadata will remain to help with research and activity analysis site wide.

For comments, that means the author value will change to [remove_requested]. The body of the comment will likewise reflect this. All flairs associated with the object will also be stripped. What will remain is basically a placeholder that a comment was made in a certain subreddit at a certain time (along with score / gilding data).

In certain situations, a reply to a comment that was requested to be removed will quote the original comment. If the information in the child comment contains personally identifiable information, that comment will also be removed (with metadata remaining). This will be handled on a case by case basis. Generally what might happen is that a child comment will quote the parent and within the quote will be someone's name or address -- that would definitely get pulled since it is PII.

For submissions, it is a bit more complicated because links to external resources could link to personal data. When a removal request is made for a submission (or all submissions for an author), the only fields that will remain will be the subreddit that the post was made in, the time that post was made, the score and number of comments within the submission and other metadata that can't be linked back to a person.

Comments or submissions that are removed by moderators WILL NOT be removed unless the original author requests it or that comment was removed due to the comment containing PII data. Again, those situations will also be handled on a case by case basis.

If anyone has an issue with this new policy, feel free to comment below.