Reddit has some big privacy policy changes in the works

Reddit has announced that it’ll be making some big changes to its privacy policy in a few weeks, with CEO Steve Huffman going into detail about the changes on the official r/announcements subreddit. One of the biggest changes will be how long the website stores the IP addresses of users, which will be increasing from 90 days to 100 days in order to measure user statistics across an entire quarter. More significant than that, however, is the fact that Reddit will begin supporting Do Not Track, which will allow users to protect themselves from third-party trackers on the website.

In a little over a month we’ll be updating our Privacy Policy. We know this is important to you, so I want to explain what has changed and why. Keeping control in your hands is paramount to us, and this is our first consideration any time we change our privacy policy. Our overarching principle continues to be to request as little personally identifiable information as possible. To the extent that we store such information, we do not share it generally. Where there are exceptions to this, notably when you have given us explicit consent to do so, or in response to legal requests, we will spell them out clearly. The new policy is functionally very similar to the previous one, but it’s shorter, simpler, and less repetitive. We have clarified what information we collect automatically (basically anything your browser sends us) and what we share with advertisers (nothing specific to your Reddit account). One notable change is that we are increasing the number of days we store IP addresses from 90 to 100 so we can measure usage across an entire quarter. In addition to internal analytics, the primary reason we store IPs is to fight spam and abuse. I believe in the future we will be able to accomplish this without storing IPs at all (e.g. with hashing), but we still need to work out the details.