Reddit is a $30 billion public company that wants your ad dollars. They want to be the third pillar of social advertising behind Meta and Google. Cool. One problem.
Their support team is sharing your personal data with other advertisers.
I'm not speculating. I have the receipts. Three separate incidents across two support interactions, two different agents, one week. Let's walk through them.
Incident 1: Someone Else's Account in My Chat (Feb 14)
I opened a live chat with a Reddit Ads support agent named Sonam B about a routine account issue. Standard stuff. Then they sent me this:
Read that again. The agent associated my personal email with something called "No Panties Games Ad Account." That is not my account. That is not my ad account name. That is someone else's account data, pasted directly into my support session.
When I asked what the hell that was, the agent apologized and told me to "kindly ignore the above."
No. You don't get to "kindly ignore" another advertiser's account data showing up in my chat. That's not how data privacy works.
I pushed back. The agent insisted my account had no issues, then finally admitted the username was not associated with my ad account.
So whose account was it? Why did it end up in my chat? No answer. Moving on.
Incident 2: Another Advertiser's PII Pasted Into My Chat (Feb 20)
Six days later. Different agent, Naheeda M. I'm following up on the same unresolved issue. The agent asks me to wait a few minutes. Then drops this into the chat:
That's the email address and full legal business entity name of a completely different advertiser. Pasted directly into my chat window. Their identity, their business name, their email. Shared with a stranger.
I've redacted their information because, unlike Reddit's support team, I believe in protecting people's data.
Whether this was a clipboard mistake, a tool error, or something worse, the result is the same: another advertiser's PII landed in my chat.
Incident 3: Agent Says I'm Logged Into Someone Else's Account (Feb 20)
Minutes later. Same chat. Same agent. Things got worse.
While I was clearly logged into my own account, the agent told me:
"The ad account you're currently signed into is u/TeorikDeli, and ads are getting published with this username. Is that correct?"
That is not my account. That is not my username. I was logged into my own account the entire time. Whether the agent was looking at the wrong screen, the wrong ticket, or the tool itself was showing incorrect data, the outcome is the same: the agent believed I was someone else and acted accordingly.
Why This Matters
I don't know if this is a tooling problem, a training problem, or both. What I do know is the result.
Across two support interactions, Reddit Ads support agents shared other advertisers' data with me three times. Account names. Email addresses. Legal business names. Usernames. And in at least one case, an agent appeared to believe I was logged into a completely different advertiser's account.
That raises serious questions:
- If an agent thinks they're looking at my account but it's actually someone else's, could they make changes to the wrong campaigns?
- Could ad spend be attributed to the wrong accounts?
- Has my data been shared with other advertisers the same way theirs was shared with me?
Reddit Ads handles real money. Real business identities. Real billing information. Real campaign strategies that represent competitive intelligence.
Three Incidents. Two Chats. One Week.
Three incidents across two support chats. One week. Two different agents. The same type of failure each time: another advertiser's data ending up in my chat session.
Once is a mistake. Three times across two separate chats in a week is a pattern. Whether the root cause is the support tooling, the training, the process, or some combination, Reddit needs to figure it out.
Look, I get it. When you're scaling ad revenue as fast as Reddit is, things slip through the cracks. It happens. You're hiring fast, shipping fast, onboarding new advertisers faster than your support infrastructure can keep up. I've been in that exact position. I have empathy for it.
But this isn't a slow dashboard or a confusing UI. This is advertiser PII ending up in the wrong hands. That's a different category entirely.
Reddit went public in March 2024. They have a duty to their advertisers and their shareholders to get this right. Full stop.
What You Should Do
If you run ads on Reddit, screenshot every support interaction. Document everything.
And if a Reddit support agent has ever shown you data that didn't look like yours, it probably wasn't. Someone else might be looking at your data right now.
Disclosure: I am a Reddit shareholder.