Bardfinn recently made yet another comment made bragging about how he maintains a SECRET database of what he claims are 40k+ accounts of wrongthinkers on Reddit:

I maintain a database that has more than 40,000 user accounts tagged from hate subreddits. I check up on likely candidates regularly to see what they're doing and the subreddits they're participating in.

https://archive.md/jAlTX#selection-3101.0-3101.203

Original: https://np.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/kxez2n/rtrufemcels_just_got_banned/gjbbk0b/

Compare this statement to his past statement where he claimed that he had a blacklist of, quote "30,000+ accounts".

FIY, whether it's 30k or this 40k+ figure, that figure is almost certainly a straight up lie. The fact is that Bardfinn has, by his own public admission, trawled and mirrored the entirety of large subreddits such as /r/The_Donald, a subreddit with millions of subscribers and flyby thread-participants at its peak. This means that Bardfinn has secretly profiled millions of Trump supporters on Reddit, with no prior notice or consent. However, /r/The_Donald was not the only subreddit that Bardfinn trawled and mirrored through the API. By his own public admission he has likewise mirrored thousands of other subreddits with numbers ranging from a couple of thousand to tens of thousands of subscribers.

On the basis of these public admission on his part, we can deduct that the total number of Reddits he has profiled is definitely not a mere 40k+ and is more likely in the millions.

Now why would Bardfinn all of a sudden try to understate the true number of people he has targeted and secretly profiled on Reddit? Obviously it's because he knows that he's breaking the law, specifically an EU law called the GDPR, by secretly profiling European Reddit users without prior notice or consent. He is now trying to downplay his law breaking by trying to make it seem like he's being specific in whom he chooses to profile. The truth is that Bardfinn is anything but specific in whom he uses to profile. Merely participating in a subreddit is reason alone for Bardfinn to profile you and "you get a tag"* as he likes to threaten Redditors with in public comments.

Another misleading comment Bardfinn made in the above post is the claim that certain subreddits on Reddit are honeypots (subreddits that exist for the sole reason of tricking all the wrongthinkers into congregating in one place so Bardfinn can get them all banned at once). Obviously these are not honeypot subreddits, as it would be completely unethical even of Reddit to subject their users unwittingly to honeypots. The reason why Bardfinn is using this term is because he wants Reddit to allow him to use certain subreddits as honeypots, but since he can't (at present), he imagines that certain subreddits (he hates and wants to see gone) can be instrumentalized as if these were honeypots because that's how he himself has viewed and used those subreddits to add accounts to his blacklists. This is only another admission on his part that he is never specific in whom he targets and that he considers participation in a certain subreddits as sufficient grounds for blacklisting a Redditor.

However, in the end it doesn't really matter whether Bardfinn maintains a database of 40k+ or millions of Redditors' accounts. "No prior notice" and "no prior consent" are the keywords here. Do not allow Bardfinn to distract you from the fundamental nature of his privacy violations here by downplaying the number. It's just a trick to distract.

• Many Redditors, especially newbies, probably don't even know what Bardfinn means with this phrase, so if you're new to all this: "you get a tag" basically means that Bardfinn has tagged you as a "white supremacists neo-nazi" in the browser plug-ins he uses in order to keep track of all the Redditors he wants to get banned on Reddit. Some of the browser plug-ins that Bardfinn is using to "tag" people on Reddit are Masstagger and RES. When he threatens Redditors on Reddit with the phrase "and you get a tag", he usually means that he has tagged them in RES, Masstagger and possibly some other programs as well. This tagging usually results in the hapless Redditor being pre-emptively banned from many subreddits that use RES and Masstagger to determine which accounts to ban. Keep in mind that Bardfinn also runs a number of spam bots on behalf of subreddits he moderates; AFAIK none of his bots are open source but you can basically guess that those tagged accounts are also fed into those bots' blocklists. Bardfinn has furthermore bragged about the fact that Reddit Admins themselves are now using Masstagger to determine whom to ban, so anytime Bardfinn "tags" someone, this tagging eventually makes its way to Reddit Admins themselves through Masstagger. The phrase "you get a tag" is thus an open threat to feed a certain Redditor's account into a stigmatization and ostriacization pipeline that eventually results in them being banned by Reddit Admins.