Any pointers on how to report them?

As requested, I’m posting the full text of the email into this post body. I hope it’s screen reader friendly:

u/USERNAME,

tl;dr – you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) email has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.

As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it’s happening.

And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.

We’re offering a Directed Share Program (“DSP”) that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering (“IPO”). (Including you!) Program Requirements While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit’s control. Bear with us here…

To be eligible for the DSP, you must: • Be a current U.S. resident; o You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data. o Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions. • Be at least 18 years old; • Provide your full legal name and an email address; • Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE). When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility. How to pre-register The number of people who can participate in the DSP is limited; we will offer this opportunity to as many redditors as we are able to accommodate. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist. Based on demand, we may also limit the number of shares available.

If you are interested in being part of Reddit’s DSP, please go to https://reddit.com/dsp on desktop to complete the pre-registration form. If you are one of the confirmed participants, we will follow up with an email with more details in the coming weeks. You can also refer to the Frequently Asked Questions for more information. Due to regulatory restrictions (yeah… we know…) we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.

Pre-registering does not guarantee that you will be invited or able to participate in the DSP; it also does not obligate you to purchase shares.

As with any investment opportunity, you should make an individual decision based on your own personal circumstances and risk tolerance. Therefore, we urge you to review the preliminary prospectus, when available, before deciding whether to invest in Reddit.

The deadline for pre-registering for the DSP is March 5, 2024. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist. What happens next? While there won’t be a confirmation email immediately after you pre-register, everyone who pre-registers will receive an email in the coming weeks from “noreply@redditmail.com”, telling them whether they can proceed with the next steps for the DSP.

This is an automated message (beep, boop, beep) and does not receive replies. Please refer to the FAQ for more information. Per our lawyercats, we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions. Prospectus and Important Disclosures The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. When available, a copy of the preliminary prospectus related to the offering may be obtained from: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, New York, New York 10014, or email: prospectus@morganstanley.com; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, New York 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316, or email: prospectus-ny@ny.email.gs.com; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention:c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, telephone: 1-866-803-9204, or email: prospectus-eq_fi@jpmorgan.com; and BofA Securities, Inc., NC1-022-02-25, 201 North Tryon Street, Charlotte, North Carolina 28255-0001, Attention: Prospectus Department, telephone: 1-800-294-1322, or email: dg.prospectus_requests@bofa.com.

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This notification shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

No offer to buy the securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the registration statement has become effective, and any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time prior to the notice of its acceptance given after the effective date. An indication of interest in response to this notification will involve no obligation or commitment of any kind.

You are receiving this email because a Reddit account, USERNAME, is registered to this email address. 548 Market St., #16093, San Francisco, CA 94104–5401

310 points

Sounds like you need to contact your nation’s data protection authority

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46 points

Wasnt it only for us residents? Gdpr is european

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141 points

That’s true, but if OP is European and received this Mail, it is a GDPR violation regardless of if the content is relevant or not. As far as I know, not a lawyer.

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45 points
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Just checked my old empty (now) account i didnt get such an email and im european. Maybe they do a send all in steps or something and see who bites. Anyway if ppl want to file a compllaint here is a link with countries and departments to file a gdpr complaint:

https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en

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31 points

You also had to be over (what appears to be) an overall karma threshold to get the invite. It wasn’t sent to all users (I have a dormant second account that did not receive this notice). I received this message about 2 days ago.

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1 point

I’m not sure how they pick their IPO scam emails.

I had a ton of Reddit accounts. Only my oldest one from like 14 years ago got the special email.

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5 points

Not if they provided incorrect info during signing up. Which is very likely if they received an email only US accounts have been getting.

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7 points

Aussie here with deleted accounts getting the email.

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1 point

There isn’t even an option to select the Country of residence when creating a reddit account.

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1 point

But did they have anything or selected listed that they were from Europe, I wonder? Like, I tend to bounce around on my ip address with my vpn.

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27 points

Reddit may not track that, which isn’t a defense against GDPR violations.

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5 points

That would not surprise me

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19 points
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On purpose GDPR violation is 4% of global yearly revenue fine for the company, which in reddit’s case would be 32M USD.

Still I assume OP has not actually done “forget me” request for reddit, just deleted the account. Delete is not same thing, as requesting to destroying all identifiable data of you.

GDPR doesn’t care were company is located, if you handle European citizens data, you must comply.

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1 point
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Delete is not same thing, as requesting to destroying all identifiable data of you.

This is what I don’t get. How are Reddit accounts not pseudo/anonymous? Back when I had an account (~5+ years ago at latest) they had nothing personally identifiable on me, in which case there are no GDPR rights to speak of. Even if I were to make an Art.17 request and go above and beyond by supplying a copy of my ID card with the request, Reddit would have no way to even verify that my ID is associated to the acct.

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12 points

I got this email in the UK guessing they are just Feering it at every account with a verified email against it

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5 points

I’m in Europe and have gotten this message too through Reddit.

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15 points

I got the email in the UK. I don’t think Reddit was looking at what countries users were from when sending it.

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9 points
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I received one for a dormant account, but am Canadian so I couldn’t use their IPO insider advantage even if I wanted to

Makes me think this thing is gonna Drill immediately after launch, take everyone’s lunch, and eventually rebound (or get bought by Meta/Alphabet/Microsoft/Apple on the cheap)

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3 points

Its a bad bet imo too. The enshitification of reddit excelerates on an exponential curve, like a shitty inverse of the tech it is based on.

How good is an app if you feel better the less you use it?

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120 points

Does the GDPR have teeth against this kind of violation? Could Reddit be hit hard with violation fees?

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161 points

If the user resides in Europe then yeah. This means they didn’t follow GDPR and still retain data on user(s).

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14 points
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It’s in the GDPR jurisdiction but Reddit accounts are anonymous AFAIK. IMO the GDPR does not protect anonymous data.

/cc @Gork@lemm.ee

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31 points
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E-mail counts as user identifying (it’s a bit more complicated) information per the GDPR, so clearly they have kept user identifying information so the GDPR applies.

EDIT: as pointed out by @coffeeClean@infosec.pub and from reading recommendation wp136 provided by him in a different post, the e-mail, unless it contains the full user name is user idenfityable information - because it can be crossed with other data (not necessarilly the IP address) to identify a person - rather than identifying information. Either way, it is considered “personal data” by the GDPR, as said very explicitly in that document which gives e-mail as an example of such. The same applies to IP address (mentioned below).

Even an IP address is user identifying information per the GDPR, which is why if for example a website wants to be compliant without obtaining explicit user authorization, it needs to do things like not maintain logs with IP addresses for longer than it would be necessary to track down problems with the website or intrusion attempts.

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3 points

oh shit me too i think lol

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