Reddit will be introducing a new policy on Thursday that seeks to strike a balance between safeguarding user privacy and allowing it to license its content to bigger internet firms like Google. The recently published “Public Content Policy,” which joins Reddit’s current privacy and content policies, will now direct how commercial companies and other partners access and utilize Reddit’s data. To align with this, the company recently launched a subreddit specifically for researchers utilizing Reddit’s data.
Reddit made the statement soon after the firm debuted on the stock market, positioned to increase income from its corpus of data as well as from the advertisements that run on its platform and API use by developers. In its IPO prospectus, the business claimed to have already generated $203 million from data licensing agreements and to anticipate future growth in that amount.
Last year, after previously not restricting access to its data for AI training, Reddit changed direction. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced the business’s intention to enter the data licensing market when he told The New York Times that it didn’t make sense for the company to keep providing “all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The new Public Content Policy will restrict access to Reddit’s data without an agreement, since those efforts are already well underway. (Reddit claims it is just making the internal policy it has been using for some time public; it is not imposing additional limitations.)
“Unfortunately, we see more and more commercial entities using unauthorised access or misusing authorised access to gather public data in bulk, including Reddit public content,” the company notes on its blog. Moreover, these organisations believe they are unrestricted in using such data and disregard user rights and privacy, disobeying legitimate legal, safety, and user removal requirements. We need to do more to limit access to Reddit public material at scale to reliable actors who have committed to follow our rules, even as we will keep working to ban known bad actors. We must, however, also keep making sure that users, moderators, researchers, and other sincere, non-commercial players have access.
Otherwise, Reddit data will remain available for research and other non-commercial reasons; nevertheless, organisations wishing to utilise Reddit data for other purposes, such as AI training, will be required to pay. Reddit clearly states in a graphic on the site that companies seeking to use Reddit data to “power, augment, or enhance your product for any commercial purposes” need to secure a contract.
Advertisers handle campaigns and track their results using an advertisement API in the interim.
This new policy seeks to protect user rights while securing Reddit information from any illegal gathering, since the firm is really just a big website that search engines can scan.
Reddit, for example, claims that partners will need to submit user judgements to remove material. Users should thus be able to choose not to have their personal posts used as material for future AI engines. The new policy also forbids partners from exploiting Reddit content to identify people or their personal information, including for ad targeting. Furthermore, the policy prohibits partners from using Reddit material for “background checks, facial recognition, government surveillance, or helping law enforcement do any of the above” or for spamming or harassing its users.
The policy also specifies that Reddit will not sell the personal information of its users and limits access to pornographic material. Among other things, the business says it would never license non-public material like private messages or non-public account information like users’ emails or browsing history.
The business created Reddit4researchers, a new subreddit, to support academics who wish to use Reddit data for non-commercial purposes. The business claims to be collaborating with OpenMined to create a program that will direct and expand academics’ interactions with Reddit.
