7 ms·

The Blog That Disappeared

80 points by jakevoytko 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
d--b 10y ago
Mmmmh, as long as it's not clear what the violations were, it's useless to discuss whether or not Google was in their right to shut down the account. This is just a reminder that public publishing follows rules, and if you want to bend the rules one way or another, this is what may happen to your account...
- sandworm101 10y ago
  >> if you want to bend the rules one way or another, this is what may happen to your account... We don't know if the blogger did anything wrong or not. The blog is gone and we don't have a good statement from Google as to why. It may have been removed in error. It may have been a request of some sort by a third party that google is covering. We assume that Google thinks a rule was violated, but we don't know whether it was a proper decision by Google people, or a 5-second decision by a subcontracted moderator service. Or it may have been a completely automated decision not involving any human beings. All we can do is speculate. But that reliance on speculation, the lack of proper transparency, is a perfectly valid criticism of Google.
jake-low 10y ago
Some discussion here [0] from when the story appeared on Fusion [1] a couple weeks ago. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 [1]: http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-blog/ http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-...
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
Again we're in a sad state when people with tools at their fingertips can't see them and think if Google doesn't offer a blog service, there is nothing they can do.
Udo 10y ago
It doesn't really matter whether Google was "in the right" or what the backstory of this case is. It's also not a question of bringing this to the attention of the "right" people at Google. This is an issue inherent to the entire system. The problem is that people entrust their work and often their entire public persona to entities that are guaranteed not to act in their interest. I don't even think this is about access to decentralized alternatives, after all if you devote years of content to a platform you can probably manage to go through some technical setup pain. Gmail, Blogger, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook - there are self-hosted alternatives out there to all of them, but the big trade-off is that content creators have to shoot themselves in the foot on discoverability if they opt out of the big platforms. Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or we'll go further down the path we're already on. Our lives ruled arbitrarily by DRM and ToS. I do recognize that I'm personally part of the problem, it's really hard to opt out.
- DanBC 10y ago
  The other problem is that backups are too difficult for most people. (Until they lose all those photos of their child, or their dissertation, or their novel, or their business accounts.) We need some way to communicate the need for backups to people; and we need simple backup solutions. While it's not always a backup, the guy in submitted article would have been okay with Time Machine or similar.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or we'll go further down the path we're already on. It'll have to get a lot worse before it will get better. This is just another case of the pendulum swinging, and for me the reason to stay away from these centralized services as much as I can. This isn't always easy, especially not when for other people the web is now synonymous with Facebook and Google (and maybe one or two other websites). Over the years the trend has been a steady reduction in the number of websites that the average surfer uses on a daily basis, this is now < 10 for most people, with a shockingly low 90 or so websites visited per month. Silo-forming is a logical response to the messy free-for-all that we had (in part Facebooks success is the fact that it limited freedom of expression over HTML), but this has now far overshot the mark where dependency on these very large services is fast becoming an Achilles heel.
blowski 10y ago
Why don't they just give him the content, so he can host it somewhere else?
- flipp3r 10y ago
  Because distributing child porn is not legal?
paulpauper 10y ago
It bears repeating, always have back-ups of everything. Store a version on the 'cloud', on an external hd, and on the hard drive of your computer. maybe one of those 'ads' were underage or something Google is notoriously Orwellian and Kafkaesque in their TOS so I think he's out of luck. It would be a nice guesture if they just gave him back his data though. I don't think that's too much to ask
natecavanaugh 10y ago
I tend to take it for granted that third party services can and will delete everything you post whenever it suits them, or even just because whoever is running the data management is inept or uninterested in a sane backup policy. But that might just be because I "grew up", digitally speaking, in the era of self-hosted websites and blogs, of FTP and local development pushed remotely. It does seem that the entire system is now designed around always trusting some other service for managing our data, so I wonder if this will continually influence users to trust an illusion, and a far harder to understand mental model of what is "mine", "ours" and "yours". Maybe it'll all course correct itself, with services baking into their models personalized data recovery and management, or at least a more sane model of data ownership. But I do think it will take more issues like this, instead of just the "death by a thousand cuts" that is happening now when your spouse wipes out all of your playlists because they didn't know they affected every device, or not knowing which photos have been synced and which haven't because your cloud storage is full. Sometimes all the magic starts feeling a lot less like Harry Potter and more like Pee Wee's Big Adventure.
- rpgmaker 10y ago
  > But that might just be because I "grew up", digitally speaking, in the era of self-hosted websites and blogs, of FTP and local development pushed remotely. That's because you're technically proficient, hardly the case for most people. For example, the blog in question seemed to be art oriented. I think that today it's very easy for anyone to host and setup a blog for a couple of bucks a month but few things can beat the convenience of just signing up on blogspot.
bko 10y ago
I don't think it's in Google's interest to just indiscriminately delete someone's blog. Google rarely makes decisions on a human level and prefers not to intervene. They are getting a lot of bad press from this that the management would probably prefer to go away. I think the answer lies in this: > We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations are ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations I think the most likely scenario has to do with cp. IANAL, but I think in many jurisdictions cp has strict liability, meaning that if you are in possession, knowingly or not, you are criminally liable. If the author was hosting or somehow tied in to cp, the authorities would likely force Google to take it down and hand it over for investigation. The case is probably still being investigated so no action has been taken, but if Google hands over the archive, it would likely be liable for dissemination of cp. This seems to be a lot more reasonable explanation to the secrecy than the standard "Google is evil" argument. The main thing that makes me doubt this explanation is the authors vocal outcry. If he were involved in some nefarious activity, I would imagine he would just disappear into the shadows if he suspected his acts were close to being uncovered
- frogpelt 10y ago
  Your doubts may be well founded but there have been many examples of public figures who vocally and publicly denied any wrongdoing when mounds of evidence pointed to them being guilty. Jerry Sandusky comes to mind.
mxuribe 10y ago
Maybe to sandworm101's point there was automation occurring here. Google certainly dives into AI...maybe they have an experimental AI back-end service to try and catch things which might be considered "offensive"...and in this case perhaps it failed...but google does not want to publicize any failure of its AI to avoid whatever future promotional plans it has int store for such tech. But that of course is kind of a conspiracy theory. I guess/hope the real reason comes out into daylight.
joesmo 10y ago
“We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations are ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations.” Bullshit. They're lying like most other companies in similar positions (Amazon comes to mind). There is no TOS violation. Whatever their reason for closing the blog, it's certainly not because of anything written down. Neither the TOS or the TOS violation actually exist. That's why they won't say anymore. This is a classic Internet company technique. For no reason, just shut off access. The user has no recourse. I guarantee the money this guy spent on a lawyer is a waste. I just hope he can change the logins to sites that use that email so he doesn't lose all his other accounts because of this. Without regulations like we have for other utilities, these companies have free reign to fuck up people's lives for arbitrary, unknown reasons. Exactly as they like it.

80 points by jakevoytko 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

d--b 10y ago

Mmmmh, as long as it's not clear what the violations were, it's useless to discuss whether or not Google was in their right to shut down the account. This is just a reminder that public publishing follows rules, and if you want to bend the rules one way or another, this is what may happen to your account...

sandworm101 10y ago
>> if you want to bend the rules one way or another, this is what may happen to your account... We don't know if the blogger did anything wrong or not. The blog is gone and we don't have a good statement from Google as to why. It may have been removed in error. It may have been a request of some sort by a third party that google is covering. We assume that Google thinks a rule was violated, but we don't know whether it was a proper decision by Google people, or a 5-second decision by a subcontracted moderator service. Or it may have been a completely automated decision not involving any human beings. All we can do is speculate. But that reliance on speculation, the lack of proper transparency, is a perfectly valid criticism of Google.

jake-low 10y ago

Some discussion here [0] from when the story appeared on Fusion [1] a couple weeks ago. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 [1]: http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-blog/ http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-...

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

Again we're in a sad state when people with tools at their fingertips can't see them and think if Google doesn't offer a blog service, there is nothing they can do.

Udo 10y ago

It doesn't really matter whether Google was "in the right" or what the backstory of this case is. It's also not a question of bringing this to the attention of the "right" people at Google. This is an issue inherent to the entire system. The problem is that people entrust their work and often their entire public persona to entities that are guaranteed not to act in their interest. I don't even think this is about access to decentralized alternatives, after all if you devote years of content to a platform you can probably manage to go through some technical setup pain. Gmail, Blogger, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook - there are self-hosted alternatives out there to all of them, but the big trade-off is that content creators have to shoot themselves in the foot on discoverability if they opt out of the big platforms. Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or we'll go further down the path we're already on. Our lives ruled arbitrarily by DRM and ToS. I do recognize that I'm personally part of the problem, it's really hard to opt out.

DanBC 10y ago
The other problem is that backups are too difficult for most people. (Until they lose all those photos of their child, or their dissertation, or their novel, or their business accounts.) We need some way to communicate the need for backups to people; and we need simple backup solutions. While it's not always a backup, the guy in submitted article would have been okay with Time Machine or similar.
jacquesm 10y ago
> Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or we'll go further down the path we're already on. It'll have to get a lot worse before it will get better. This is just another case of the pendulum swinging, and for me the reason to stay away from these centralized services as much as I can. This isn't always easy, especially not when for other people the web is now synonymous with Facebook and Google (and maybe one or two other websites). Over the years the trend has been a steady reduction in the number of websites that the average surfer uses on a daily basis, this is now < 10 for most people, with a shockingly low 90 or so websites visited per month. Silo-forming is a logical response to the messy free-for-all that we had (in part Facebooks success is the fact that it limited freedom of expression over HTML), but this has now far overshot the mark where dependency on these very large services is fast becoming an Achilles heel.

blowski 10y ago

Why don't they just give him the content, so he can host it somewhere else?

flipp3r 10y ago
Because distributing child porn is not legal?

paulpauper 10y ago

It bears repeating, always have back-ups of everything. Store a version on the 'cloud', on an external hd, and on the hard drive of your computer. maybe one of those 'ads' were underage or something Google is notoriously Orwellian and Kafkaesque in their TOS so I think he's out of luck. It would be a nice guesture if they just gave him back his data though. I don't think that's too much to ask

natecavanaugh 10y ago

I tend to take it for granted that third party services can and will delete everything you post whenever it suits them, or even just because whoever is running the data management is inept or uninterested in a sane backup policy. But that might just be because I "grew up", digitally speaking, in the era of self-hosted websites and blogs, of FTP and local development pushed remotely. It does seem that the entire system is now designed around always trusting some other service for managing our data, so I wonder if this will continually influence users to trust an illusion, and a far harder to understand mental model of what is "mine", "ours" and "yours". Maybe it'll all course correct itself, with services baking into their models personalized data recovery and management, or at least a more sane model of data ownership. But I do think it will take more issues like this, instead of just the "death by a thousand cuts" that is happening now when your spouse wipes out all of your playlists because they didn't know they affected every device, or not knowing which photos have been synced and which haven't because your cloud storage is full. Sometimes all the magic starts feeling a lot less like Harry Potter and more like Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

rpgmaker 10y ago
> But that might just be because I "grew up", digitally speaking, in the era of self-hosted websites and blogs, of FTP and local development pushed remotely. That's because you're technically proficient, hardly the case for most people. For example, the blog in question seemed to be art oriented. I think that today it's very easy for anyone to host and setup a blog for a couple of bucks a month but few things can beat the convenience of just signing up on blogspot.

bko 10y ago

I don't think it's in Google's interest to just indiscriminately delete someone's blog. Google rarely makes decisions on a human level and prefers not to intervene. They are getting a lot of bad press from this that the management would probably prefer to go away. I think the answer lies in this: > We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations are ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations I think the most likely scenario has to do with cp. IANAL, but I think in many jurisdictions cp has strict liability, meaning that if you are in possession, knowingly or not, you are criminally liable. If the author was hosting or somehow tied in to cp, the authorities would likely force Google to take it down and hand it over for investigation. The case is probably still being investigated so no action has been taken, but if Google hands over the archive, it would likely be liable for dissemination of cp. This seems to be a lot more reasonable explanation to the secrecy than the standard "Google is evil" argument. The main thing that makes me doubt this explanation is the authors vocal outcry. If he were involved in some nefarious activity, I would imagine he would just disappear into the shadows if he suspected his acts were close to being uncovered

frogpelt 10y ago
Your doubts may be well founded but there have been many examples of public figures who vocally and publicly denied any wrongdoing when mounds of evidence pointed to them being guilty. Jerry Sandusky comes to mind.

mxuribe 10y ago

Maybe to sandworm101's point there was automation occurring here. Google certainly dives into AI...maybe they have an experimental AI back-end service to try and catch things which might be considered "offensive"...and in this case perhaps it failed...but google does not want to publicize any failure of its AI to avoid whatever future promotional plans it has int store for such tech. But that of course is kind of a conspiracy theory. I guess/hope the real reason comes out into daylight.

joesmo 10y ago

“We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations are ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations.” Bullshit. They're lying like most other companies in similar positions (Amazon comes to mind). There is no TOS violation. Whatever their reason for closing the blog, it's certainly not because of anything written down. Neither the TOS or the TOS violation actually exist. That's why they won't say anymore. This is a classic Internet company technique. For no reason, just shut off access. The user has no recourse. I guarantee the money this guy spent on a lawyer is a waste. I just hope he can change the logins to sites that use that email so he doesn't lose all his other accounts because of this. Without regulations like we have for other utilities, these companies have free reign to fuck up people's lives for arbitrary, unknown reasons. Exactly as they like it.