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It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

657 points by harryh 9y ago

0xCMP 9y ago
In a lot of ways this kind of stuff is what we were warned about by many including the FSF. Cloud software you don't control, or which knows a lot about you, can be used to censor you. Always better to self-host and backup/distribute via the cloud as a secondary method. Easier said than done though.
- eltoozero 9y ago
  > Easier said than done though. Not by much, once you understand the consequences.
  - linuxps2 9y ago
    I don't see how the consequences make it any easier to do or harder to say - hosting your own content is not only incredibly difficult to do in a secure manner, it's damn expensive. Economies of scale will always make it easier for there to be a few large content hosts as opposed to smaller, federated hosting done on the individual level (well, until better P2P methods are adopted but even then, we're talking massive amounts of storage space)
- tpeo 9y ago
  Yeah, lots of people saw this coming light-years away. People really should stop ignoring the TOS.
  - drama-queen 9y ago
    Society really should stop tolerating this type of TOS.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      Society prefers cheap and available solutions. It so happens that this one comes with draconian ToS everyone ignores. (And via bandwagon so does all the credible competition.) The only way to deal with this is right regulation to make such terms illegal or forcibly breaking up such monopolies. Or running a cheap or free equivalent service by a big carrier, but government whatever is being ignored as a solution and nobody else has the clout to challenge Alphabet.
    - Natanael_L 9y ago
      Self hosting will always be the more reliable solution in cases like this
      - nextlevelwizard 9y ago
        Even then they just take your domain name away from you. You are always reliant on big corporations for your Internet connection, be it hosting provider, domain name registrar, search engine, or Internet service provider
        Natanael_L 9y ago
        Namecoin, Tor / I2P, CJDNS, whatever. It's still possible to be reached as long as you have internet connectivity.
  - labster 9y ago
    If I read every ToS I had to agree to, I'd have no free time. Much better to just click agree and hope contracts for my soul are legally unenforceable.
quuquuquu 9y ago
Help me understand- Alexa O'Brien has a Youtube account with many hours of video. She also has a google account, drive, etc. Some of her videos contained material that Google (being Google), didn't like. Despite the fact that it was all very important journalism, Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned. I would say that 5 years ago I would have been shocked and outraged, but lately I just absolutely am not surprised by Google anymore. I hope Alexa kept local copies but I'm imagining maybe she didn't. At the very least she is losing all of the views and PR associated with her channel. If you do have local copies, please try to publish elsewhere! Google is on a crusade to demonitize any video it doesn't like, so it can keep dwindling ad money flowing to only the people it chooses. Good luck, how can we help??
- soared 9y ago
  I don't like that google is doing this, but your argument doesn't help our cause. > Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned. The author admits the videos contain terrorist propaganda. Its not arbitrary, its literally the definition of extremism. If google doesn't want to host that content, they don't have to. They want to be vaguely family-safe. > Google is on a crusade to demonetize any video it doesn't like, so it can keep dwindling ad money flowing to only the people it chooses. Absolute bullshit. Google doesn't crusade - its a company not a religion. And are you really insinuating that google is somehow a plot to make the rich richer? Really? The platform where anyone can upload a video and monetize it, and countless joe-schmoes have become millionaires from?
  - quuquuquu 9y ago
    >Google doesn't have to host it if they don't want to. Completely agree (free market), however were it my website, I would make an effort to distinguish between journalism/commentary and actual propoganda. >They want to be vaguely family-safe. I agree they are trying, but look at Pewdiepie's video regarding Elsa/Disney videos where the actors were pissing on each other. These videos were NOT demonitized, and were marked family friendly. Why would Youtube permit and promote this content, but ban others? >anyone can upload and monetize In the past this was absolutely true. Now videos are being demonetized and DMCAd and censored left right and center. Not even really hyperbole. My opinion is that Youtube is hooking up the studios and corporate interests on the site with each passing day. Every indie creator that is making the really cutting edge content that is merely vaguely inflammatory is being pinched hard, while the corporate studios are getting a pass. Thank you for your comments :)
iampims 9y ago
Someone's gotta do something about Google. While they can't be responsible for someone putting all their eggs in the same basket, their terrible customer support policies can really ruin someone's work beyond repair.
- Clubber 9y ago
  The biggest problem with Google isn't that they can delete YouTube videos or your Google+ account, it's that they can virtually erase you from the web through their search domination.
  - soared 9y ago
    I mean technically yes, but that is pretty much fear mongering. That is like fearing the government because they could delete your social security number. Neither would ever do it, despite it being possible. The ramifications would be absurd.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      There was an article on here where the author said Google pushed a critical article they wrote down to the bottom of the charts. Found it. https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas-it-doesn-t-li-1798646437 https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas... the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      If the government did that I could sue them and win. If Google started censoring certain political ideas or certain people, there is zero recourse. There are zero ramifications, unless I am already someone important and powerful. A whole lot of our lives is controlled by unaccountable, powerful entities that could legally ruin your life because it is their platform. But apparently nobody cares about that because "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences".
gavanwoolery 9y ago
Normally I try to rule out conspiracy theories, but this one is pretty interesting. A video being removed I could understand, but deleting an entire Google account seems like a rather extreme measure, and I wonder who is really pulling the strings here. I could certainly think of motives for doing so.
- tyingq 9y ago
  It gets worse over time as well, as their product space expands. If she had a Chromebook, Chromecast, Google Home device, Android phone, etc...it would easily make $1k+ worth of purchases worth substantially less. You would have to either sell them, or lose all setup (contacts, configuration, purchased apps, etc) and history.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  > I wonder who is really pulling the strings here With 99.9% confidence, I'm saying an algorithm. It isn't unusual for a company to automatically delete accounts that seriously breach their ToCs; the unique problem with Google is that their ecosystem is so large and pervasive.
  - anotherbrownguy 9y ago
    The "algorithm" seems very much in bed with American military industry.
    - chippy 9y ago
      It is more in line with American foreign policy and their interior civil service (anti-extremism globally and pushing against the new right at home)
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Blame the code, don't blame the programmer!
KGIII 9y ago
Well, she is easier to defend than Nazis. So, here I go... Freedom of expression, not just free speech the legal concept, should be a societal goal. Google has every right, legally, to delete this stuff. However, in an ideal world, they'd do no such thing and would let people judge based on the merits of the message. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to work towards that ideal world. Maybe the solution is enabling people to realistically host content themselves, on their own property, and just ensuring the ISP is nothing but a dumb pipe? Maybe the solution is distributed content and P2P networks? Either way, the continued aggressive censorship by Google, while their legal right, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They can do it, but I don't have to like it. That said, if anyone can think of something that I can do to help, I'm all ears.
- mankyd 9y ago
  > Maybe the solution is enabling people to realistically host content themselves, on their own property, and just ensuring the ISP is nothing but a dumb pipe? For what it's worth, this is mildly achievable, but I doubt there's much of a market for it. It's (usually) not hard to convert one's internet connection to some sort of business-class connection, get a static ip, and have port 80/443 unblocked, (I've done it). Mind you, there's costs associated with all that. Then you have to setup and maintain a web server. Plenty of HN folks can do that on their distro of choice, but it's definitely a technical feat. I bet folks have tried to make a one-click install style thing before. I bet one even exists today, but I couldn't tell you what it is. Then there's maintenance on said server... Ultimately, people use 3rd parties because its a significantly lower barrier to entry in monetary cost, time, and complexity. I won't speak to Google's actions here, but no one has yet proven out your proposed solution. I'd love it if we could.
  - xf86alsa 9y ago
    Check out ZeroNet: https://zeronet.io https://zeronet.io Decentralized websites that are hosted by your users. Can be accessed over ZeroNet or without using a proxy.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
TwelveNights 9y ago
This is Google being Google... They really need to improve their customer support processes; especially when people have so much stake in their products. Losing a Youtube account sucks, losing an entire Google account is the nail in the coffin.
ben_jones 9y ago
CTRL + F "Disclaimer: I work at Google" Funny how that never comes up on these threads. I get it you can't discredit your employer. Even at Google.
- halfteatree 9y ago
  ^ Cynicism at its best.
- kop316 9y ago
  In all fairness, this has only been posted for an hour, and it was only at the top of HN for 20 minutes or so.
- donalhunt 9y ago
  Probably because employees are asked not to post on topics that could be controversial or where they are likely to only have a very small part of the picture. Googlers do read a lot of hackerne.ws articles and will flag cases like this internally for review where appropriate. :)
jack9 9y ago
Terabyte drives are very cheap. Since it's borderline stupid, to simply upload this volume of work to some third party service without backup, I have no sympathy or technical concern. This being an illustration of Google's terrible "progressively tyrannical" track record, the article is badly titled. More like Google the Oppressor of Truth. Good Luck to Alexa.
- vickyvicky 9y ago
  >"progressively tyrannical" Google was much worse back in the years. It's just that people are beginning to notice it more. Back in those days, for my school project I created an app that had to recognize the hollywood celebrity based on the drawing. Google shut down my android account and then everything else in few weeks citing "copyright and impersonation". Worse, it shut down my google apps for business account 7 years later because "all related accounts will be closed". Other people faced the same wrath : https://www.androidpit.com/forum/617883/google-suspend-my-account-yesterday https://www.androidpit.com/forum/617883/google-suspend-my-ac... It was a business account and everything including drive etc was gone. The appeal form has automated responses and there is no number to call.
- deathanatos 9y ago
  Ideally, I'd like to back up my data too. That's where it becomes much harder: I need a second location. (In case my house catches fire, or floods in a hurricane, etc.) AWS and GCE both provide raw disk space, and certainly, an encrypted backup could be uploaded to them. I would like to be able to put a cap on what I spend on service, in case something goes wrong with the system, which AFAIK, neither GCE/AWS provide, unfortunately. I would also like it to be remotely accessible, which a simple terabyte drive doesn't get directly. Now, most of the above (creating a backup, encrypting it, shipping it out to AWS/GCE, securely accessing a drive remotely) are all possible, but none are easy, and certainly not yet at the level of "my mother/father can do it". I try very hard to maintain a private "cloud", and I find it fairly difficult.
  - jack9 9y ago
    Video originals, soundclips, text, edited versions, become a tangled pipeline without experience (in the form of seeing it work in a large project context). I backup my multiple TB of data on Dropbox, some on Github (the code and production assets are committed to it), and external drives at least once a month. I think people have a tough time determining what's important (obviously) and are bad at organizing large amounts of data, conceptually more than technically. That being said, if you are going to generate a lot of data worth anything, even your publishing platform gives you an idea to how to structure it.
bane 9y ago
Put it on the internet archive.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- soared 9y ago
  The videos are widely available. Google isn't trying to hide the videos, they're trying to keep them off the platform.
colordrops 9y ago
My spidey sense is tingling here. With Assange's exposition of Google as an arm of the US State Department [1] and the US's ever changing alliances with various rebel groups in the middle east, including the Taliban and Al Qaeda [2] [3], it's not a stretch to believe that Google has an agenda beyond monetization in the particular content it hides. [1] http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_... [3] http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syrian-rebel-groups-glance-20140912-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syrian-rebel-g...
digdigdag 9y ago
Google seems to be doing a very fine job of showing that it is has reached monopoly status for way too many verticals. They're getting way comfortable in their success, and this is exemplified in the certain level of hubris they exemplify in their practices. Google Jigsaw is one such example. I really do hope the DOJ gets serious about the anti-trust implications and takes them to task at some point. I think we're in need of another Bell Systems-esque anti-trust breakup.
- andriesm 9y ago
  They don't like your vids, the delete your EMAIL account?????!!!!!
bostonvaulter2 9y ago
What are some good alternative email accounts to use? I should really start decreasing my dependence on Google.
- Tortoise 9y ago
  Fastmail.fm Not free; but you definitely get what you pay for.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Happy to second FastMail. Been there almost a year, and it's amazing how good their product is. Note that they just revised their TOS to get rid of the dreaded "can terminate your account at any time for any reason" common to most services, in exchange for a clear set of conditions. Aka, the CEO waking up one day and deciding to get rid of you isn't valid anymore, as it would be for most companies.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    Another happy Fastmail customer here. Push email on iOS/Mac, CalDAV and CardDAV to access calendar and contacts from anything, and I even host my little crappy website on their servers. I've never had deliverability problems and their spam filtering is (so far) sufficient.
  - jon_adler 9y ago
    I am still happy after 15 years of paying for Fastmail.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  Anything, so long as your e-mail address is on a domain name you own and you back up your inbox via IMAP. If both of those are in place, you're not really dependent on your mail provider at all, because you can switch just by changing a DNS record. If you lose the use of an e-mail address on someone else's domain, then you've got a serious problem.
Mtinie 9y ago
Resolved. https://mobile.twitter.com/carwinb/status/907778135957131265 https://mobile.twitter.com/carwinb/status/907778135957131265
- trendia 9y ago
  As always, the best way to get a big company to help you is to make it a public relations problem.
- uselpa 9y ago
  Time to move that data (or at least a copy of it) elsewhere.
- banned1 9y ago
  https://twitter.com/DeadPrecariat/status/907778635817521152 https://twitter.com/DeadPrecariat/status/907778635817521152 This person asks that she "demands answers." Since when are beggars choosers? Google is free. Did we really expect a different behavior from them?
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    Free in the most obvious sense, but they still profit off of you.
    - jldugger 9y ago
      When I checked a few years ago, Youtube was still not actually profitable. There's a reason it's owned by the company that spins off so much free cash it doesn't know what to do with it all, I guess.
      - wallace_f 9y ago
        Google's parent company, Alphabet is hugely profitable.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
soared 9y ago
I don't agree with Google's actions here, but this has to be somewhat expected. If your day-to-day is closely entwined with terrorism, extremism, etc. you have to know that some of your content or actions aren't going to be welcome everywhere. I mean, people in the porn industry surely take precautions because they know they're content isn't welcome everywhere, why wouldn't the author? IMO google is going too far, but I'd bet thats an automated system and this article will get enough press to stop it.
- tyingq 9y ago
  It is kind of odd that the whole Google account is wiped and canceled. I post a YouTube video big G doesn't like, then they close my whole Google account. So now my Android phone, all my contacts, call history, purchased apps + music, etc, are now gone? And my nest thermostat resets to factory defaults? And all my AdWords campaigns for my small sole proprietorship. And...so on.
  - magnetic 9y ago
    ...and what about all those services you used to "Log in with Google"...
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Which is why you never ever use the "log in with Google/Facebook" buttons.
cft 9y ago
New Google (after the founders retired to Alphabet) are trying to instill a simple notion: what you think is yours is actually ours, it doesn't belong to you. Post a YouTube video, expect it to be taken down. Do not embed third party YouTube videos: your website will be broken when Google takes them down. Do not develop Android apps as a small dev: they can be deleted from Play Store on a whim. Do not monetize your site with AdSense: you will lose revenue with no human recourse. Hopefully general public will get this notion sooner than later.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Dumb of them, good for us. I mean, the whole business of the cloud is based on your users/customers not realizing that...
donalhunt 9y ago
The following articles may be of help: 1) https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 2) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168?hl=en Despite claims in this thread that Google likes to do things without due process and clear guidelines, the reality is that something like an account deletion is both pretty rare and not done lightly (you'll see that in some of the language in support articles and T&Cs related to this course of action). Product managers and engineers put a lot of thought into how to identify accounts that only exist to provide content that break TOS vs a case like this. In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user. With regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this. When you're building systems that cater for billion+ users, you have to look at systematic ways to deal with incoming requests such that the set of requests that need human intervention is as small as possible (assuming you don't want a company with millions of employees). At the end of the day, it's a balancing act and I personally feel that Google's approach is sane. Unfortunately that means a small number of users do get a bad experience. Disclaimer: I worked at Google for over a decade. I am aware of some of the process and legality decisions that go into how these type of things are structured internally. I did not work in the area of abuse or policy.
- josephg 9y ago
  > In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user. We've heard a number of stories like this of people who have their youtube videos flagged for various reasons. The lived experience of people who go through it sounds hellish. Their entire digital life on google is suspended and held to ransom by some completely opaque, inscrutable, byzantine process that is not accountable to anyone. There is no real way to appeal, and once deleted there may or may not be any way to recover lost data or have emails sent to your old address forwarded to another account. If your account was suspended, would you really trust that the knowledge base answers are correct? If you're wrong you'd have no account, no access to your own email address, no power, and no way of contacting anyone at google to help. If my account was suspended by a machine and couldn't get in touch with a human to help fix it, there's no way I'd continue to trust google's automated processes to get everything figured out. Not when so much is at stake. As someone who's worked at google for over a decade if something happened to your account, you'd be fine - you'd be able to contact someone and get it fixed. But without that recourse, scared paranoia seems pretty reasonable.
whipoodle 9y ago
This should bother you a lot more than the firing.
aerotwelve 9y ago
Your data is not safe unless you have a local backup that you control. Don't trust Google (or any one cloud storage provider); they haven't earned it.
xupybd 9y ago
Wow I get they don't want the videos on their site but banning all of the users other services seems very over the top. They're a private company they can do what they want but this is not a good way to do business.
jedberg 9y ago
Google's remediation systems are terrible. If you can't convince their algorithm you're a good person, you're out of luck. My adwords account has been locked for 15 years despite my repeated appeals (they seem to let me appeal about once every five years). I have no idea why it's locked and no one will tell me nor fix it. So I have a separate adwords account which annoyingly I cannot tie to my primary gmail account because apparently at some point after it was locked they got tied together.
- Danihan 9y ago
  And you're someone with some SV credibility and savviness, imaging what it's like for a typical scrub.
patrickg_zill 9y ago
At some point an "internet death penalty" will have to called for Google's behavior, should they continue down this path . That will be very very interesting...
hedora 9y ago
I met Google's chief censor years ago. That department used to be proudly pushing the boundaries of minimum compliance (censor nothing, and work with foreign governments until that's legal). It is sad to see how far they have fallen.
andy_ppp 9y ago
I hope any Googlers here are attempting to help internally and at the very least 1) not to destroy all of her work 2) allow her to publish controversial things because of the context. As for my opinion I think this is horrendous, that Stallman is right and that Google and it’s staff should be ashamed at this attempt to destroy deep and important journalistic work. It’s hardly like it’s not in character. I will now attempt to not use Google services which is going to be a challenge.
tezza 9y ago
sorry to hear your predicament. sadly there is more of this type of thing in the pipeline and it is time to stop using google provided services 1) migrate videos to LiveLeak.com 2) migrate email services somewhere else. i don't have a specific recommendation, perhaps some other HNer would proffer a solid choice
shevy 9y ago
Well, no surprise - ever since Google turned fully evil, it has been working against mankind. It's a wonderful opportunity to stop using Google-related products and feed more evilness into Google.
Joeri 9y ago
While google should tread carefully here, I have to wonder why this stuff was hosted from a google account in the first place. It is easier and cheaper than ever to set up your own web hosting and host this stuff outside of a walled garden where it won't violate a TOS. Google accounts are for storing personal files in the cloud, not publishing important documents to the public.
londons_explore 9y ago
If your Google account is suspended, then deletion of the contents after a set number of days is required by various laws and legal precidents for your own privacy. Google cannot hold your private data on an ongoing basis without letting you access it. Your only chance will be getting the account unsuspended before the timer runs out.
- mnw21cam 9y ago
  > Google cannot hold your private data on an ongoing basis without letting you access it. Has anyone mentioned this to Facebook? I think they hold quite a lot of information about me, and because I don't have an account, I presumably can't access it.
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
    I think in the EU and USA you can request all information a company has about you. Not sure how this would work without an identifier, though. You could send all your personal information to them so they can check if they store something about but this feels icky.
NiklasMort 9y ago
Do not ever rely on services that are free of charge. Do not store data in services that are free of charge and expect it to be safe etc. etc. ...
wvh 9y ago
Right now most information dissemination seems to happen through commercial or state actors. Neither appears to be very reliable regarding neutrality and impartiality. There are also political and religious platforms that don't inspire much confidence either in that regard. Maybe academic platforms still have some independence, but those are mostly aimed towards scientific studies most so than contemporary news items. Where would one host "news" or data that most platforms aren't eager to support for one reason or another? Where do you publish an article critical of the state in countries where the media is state-owned, or critical of corporations that sponsor the media outlets? This bias problem might be one of the most tricky things for mankind to solve, even though it would seem it should turn out to be equally important for anybody regardless of one's position at either end of whatever spectrum.
pqs 9y ago
Google is in its own right to limit speech in its services. More work should be invested in making distributed networks (i.e. Bittorrent) easy to use to any user.
raverbashing 9y ago
Aren't Liveleak and Dailymotion still running? Aren't there other video services? I know it's convenient to upload stuff to YT but there are other services up there who won't be as arbitrary as YT
ksec 9y ago
While it was an unpopular opinion, that was what Cloudflare's Mathew Prince has been saying all along. When do you draw the line? How do you define xxxxx. I read in US, Police can take away your cash / processions if you are suspected of XXXX.I guess similar mentality is happening. HDD is Cheap, SoC is Cheap, We are only lacking the software to have a Personal Cloud where your Photo, Video, Email, or other Files are Stored on BOTH the cloud AND your Home Mini Server. I paid a small fees to have the data on cloud for being accessible and as backup. I was rather hoping Apple could do that with Time Capsule. Since OSX Server already caches your iCloud Files. But I guess most company are too deep rooted into this recurring "Subscription" model they dont actually want you to own anything.
gkanai 9y ago
It sounds like her blog post got her noticed by Google, so that's good. However, for cases like these, where you have videos that are probably outside of the terms & conditions of Google, you should be hosting those on your own servers that you purchase the bandwidth for, not relying on a 3rd party to host. Yes, Google has mutiple defacto monopolies that are very, very concerning. But one can still self-host on the Internet, and this person should have done that. She has her own domain, so she could have had the video on her own server.
EJTH 9y ago
Well just stop being a nazi who questions everything. Problem solved! Nazis like you don't belong on the internet.
- jamespo 9y ago
  mmm delicious false equivalence
EJTH 9y ago
Kind of strange that there is countless Nasheeds (islamic chants) calling to war against infidels etc. on youtube. But stuff like this gets deleted.
throw2016 9y ago
The kind of content required by researchers, documenting current events, relooking at historical events with current information is always going be hugely controversial according to different POVs. This kind of content will require its own network not reliant or subject to the whims of business interests or the rules of any single nation. Infact it's essential this content is not located on platforms offered by increasingly compromised and arbitrary SV companies prone to lip service to free speech when convenient. There is enough funding in the world to create this than rely on companies like Google and the content should simply move from youtube.
redm 9y ago
I'm sad for the user, but every time I read this type of story I'm hopeful it may be an inflection point; maybe people will wake up to Google, how integrated it is in our lives, and how big of a black box it is. If nothing else, its one more brick in the wall.
drderidder 9y ago
I'm afraid this is what happens when the exercise of democratic freedoms is cordoned within the platforms of corporations who have no duty to uphold them. Google's unilateral suspension of AdSense accounts without reason or recourse has brought this realization to lots of people on a less overt level.
gumby 9y ago
I know google's a private corporation and is free to delete what it wishes from its own databases, but I thought it's mission was to "organize the world's information"
Mugwort 9y ago
Censorship doesn't serve the interests of Google nor the government. If Google deactivates accounts then Google loses data. In big data it's best practice to keep everything, discard nothing. Government loses an opportunity for surveillance which could potentially be important. Why would we for example shut down White Supremacist accounts when doing so removes the possibility of keeping tabs on them. It makes them quieter, has a chilling effect and their activities go underground. Where's the benefit in that? By closing "bad" accounts like Right Wing white supremacy groups the public never sees their material which unless you happen to be one of them always discredits them. Censoring these unpopular groups only protects them from discrediting themselves from the larger public and we lose valuable clues or evidence in the event someone is plotting a crime or has already committed a crime. In this particular story involving Manning, Google shutting down an account with information critical of the government makes Google and the government look bad. It does more harm to their public image than good. This material has already been available for a very long time and nothing new is learned. Why bother to censor? Neither Google nor the government stand to gain anything and only open themselves up to lose. For all the censorship Google or the government engages in, in practice nothing of substance is ever covered up anyway.
hellbanner 9y ago
This is the frog in the boiling pot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429 "Youtube AI deletes war crime evidence as 'extremist material'"
Steeeve 9y ago
I know I may not have the most popular opinion here, but I support Google in it's apparent decision to disassociate itself from terrorist propaganda videos. Regardless of embedded blog-post context or newsworthiness, Google isn't an official government sanctioned free-speech haven. It's an advertising company. I'm already disturbed by the weird parts of youtube, and how easily they are to get to accidentally. It makes precious little sense to me that I allow my kids to use youtube to watch gamers and tutorials of all sorts when I know what they are a few clicks from material that will completely rob them of whatever innocence remains. If they are finally choosing to clean things up - even in an inconsequential way - I'm all for it. The argument exists that there is already a cesspool of disturbing material, and that this particular account is well-intentioned. I would argue back that if you want to push boundaries, be prepared to face the consequences. It's well known that account and video review processes are black holes. If you are putting yourself in a situation where you might lose your account, you should be prepared to lose it.
0x445442 9y ago
vid.me
debacle 9y ago
It would be highly advantageous for society if someone of knowledge of the utilification of telephone lines, railways, electricity, etc, could make an easily digestible timeline for that taking place.
lightedman 9y ago
There should be a law that once a company gets so big, it is automatically regulated as a public utility. That would put an end to most of our current problems with massive institutions like this.
eggs_and_avo 9y ago
People warned us. They told us so. Instead of building decentralized tools that protected and empowered user data we've spent the last 20 15 years uploading our entire lives to Google and Facebook.
stefantalpalaru 9y ago
> I would greatly appreciate it, if anyone could help me get in contact with the Wizard of Google, to help me make my case Sorry, you need to be very famous in order to be unscroogled through the PR department's damage control.
ElijahLynn 9y ago
I wonder if Google users should have a scheduled backup of https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout.
bukgoogle 9y ago
Google will delete accounts from people who's political opinion not "left", talk anything against google's "evil" ceo's.. I'm really tired of google's lies, politics, actions and ethos that they push by forcing. Lies lies just like facebook and twitter. Same for me.
bukgoogle 9y ago
Google really manifests freedom of speech.. honestly: LACK of it.

657 points by harryh 9y ago

In a lot of ways this kind of stuff is what we were warned about by many including the FSF. Cloud software you don't control, or which knows a lot about you, can be used to censor you. Always better to self-host and backup/distribute via the cloud as a secondary method. Easier said than done though.

eltoozero 9y ago
> Easier said than done though. Not by much, once you understand the consequences.
- linuxps2 9y ago
  I don't see how the consequences make it any easier to do or harder to say - hosting your own content is not only incredibly difficult to do in a secure manner, it's damn expensive. Economies of scale will always make it easier for there to be a few large content hosts as opposed to smaller, federated hosting done on the individual level (well, until better P2P methods are adopted but even then, we're talking massive amounts of storage space)
tpeo 9y ago
Yeah, lots of people saw this coming light-years away. People really should stop ignoring the TOS.
- drama-queen 9y ago
  Society really should stop tolerating this type of TOS.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Society prefers cheap and available solutions. It so happens that this one comes with draconian ToS everyone ignores. (And via bandwagon so does all the credible competition.) The only way to deal with this is right regulation to make such terms illegal or forcibly breaking up such monopolies. Or running a cheap or free equivalent service by a big carrier, but government whatever is being ignored as a solution and nobody else has the clout to challenge Alphabet.
  - Natanael_L 9y ago
    Self hosting will always be the more reliable solution in cases like this
    - nextlevelwizard 9y ago
      Even then they just take your domain name away from you. You are always reliant on big corporations for your Internet connection, be it hosting provider, domain name registrar, search engine, or Internet service provider
      - Natanael_L 9y ago
        Namecoin, Tor / I2P, CJDNS, whatever. It's still possible to be reached as long as you have internet connectivity.
- labster 9y ago
  If I read every ToS I had to agree to, I'd have no free time. Much better to just click agree and hope contracts for my soul are legally unenforceable.

quuquuquu 9y ago

Help me understand- Alexa O'Brien has a Youtube account with many hours of video. She also has a google account, drive, etc. Some of her videos contained material that Google (being Google), didn't like. Despite the fact that it was all very important journalism, Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned. I would say that 5 years ago I would have been shocked and outraged, but lately I just absolutely am not surprised by Google anymore. I hope Alexa kept local copies but I'm imagining maybe she didn't. At the very least she is losing all of the views and PR associated with her channel. If you do have local copies, please try to publish elsewhere! Google is on a crusade to demonitize any video it doesn't like, so it can keep dwindling ad money flowing to only the people it chooses. Good luck, how can we help??

soared 9y ago
I don't like that google is doing this, but your argument doesn't help our cause. > Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned. The author admits the videos contain terrorist propaganda. Its not arbitrary, its literally the definition of extremism. If google doesn't want to host that content, they don't have to. They want to be vaguely family-safe. > Google is on a crusade to demonetize any video it doesn't like, so it can keep dwindling ad money flowing to only the people it chooses. Absolute bullshit. Google doesn't crusade - its a company not a religion. And are you really insinuating that google is somehow a plot to make the rich richer? Really? The platform where anyone can upload a video and monetize it, and countless joe-schmoes have become millionaires from?
- quuquuquu 9y ago
  >Google doesn't have to host it if they don't want to. Completely agree (free market), however were it my website, I would make an effort to distinguish between journalism/commentary and actual propoganda. >They want to be vaguely family-safe. I agree they are trying, but look at Pewdiepie's video regarding Elsa/Disney videos where the actors were pissing on each other. These videos were NOT demonitized, and were marked family friendly. Why would Youtube permit and promote this content, but ban others? >anyone can upload and monetize In the past this was absolutely true. Now videos are being demonetized and DMCAd and censored left right and center. Not even really hyperbole. My opinion is that Youtube is hooking up the studios and corporate interests on the site with each passing day. Every indie creator that is making the really cutting edge content that is merely vaguely inflammatory is being pinched hard, while the corporate studios are getting a pass. Thank you for your comments :)

iampims 9y ago

Someone's gotta do something about Google. While they can't be responsible for someone putting all their eggs in the same basket, their terrible customer support policies can really ruin someone's work beyond repair.

Clubber 9y ago
The biggest problem with Google isn't that they can delete YouTube videos or your Google+ account, it's that they can virtually erase you from the web through their search domination.
- soared 9y ago
  I mean technically yes, but that is pretty much fear mongering. That is like fearing the government because they could delete your social security number. Neither would ever do it, despite it being possible. The ramifications would be absurd.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    There was an article on here where the author said Google pushed a critical article they wrote down to the bottom of the charts. Found it. https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas-it-doesn-t-li-1798646437 https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas... the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    If the government did that I could sue them and win. If Google started censoring certain political ideas or certain people, there is zero recourse. There are zero ramifications, unless I am already someone important and powerful. A whole lot of our lives is controlled by unaccountable, powerful entities that could legally ruin your life because it is their platform. But apparently nobody cares about that because "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences".

gavanwoolery 9y ago

Normally I try to rule out conspiracy theories, but this one is pretty interesting. A video being removed I could understand, but deleting an entire Google account seems like a rather extreme measure, and I wonder who is really pulling the strings here. I could certainly think of motives for doing so.

tyingq 9y ago
It gets worse over time as well, as their product space expands. If she had a Chromebook, Chromecast, Google Home device, Android phone, etc...it would easily make $1k+ worth of purchases worth substantially less. You would have to either sell them, or lose all setup (contacts, configuration, purchased apps, etc) and history.
jdietrich 9y ago
> I wonder who is really pulling the strings here With 99.9% confidence, I'm saying an algorithm. It isn't unusual for a company to automatically delete accounts that seriously breach their ToCs; the unique problem with Google is that their ecosystem is so large and pervasive.
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  The "algorithm" seems very much in bed with American military industry.
  - chippy 9y ago
    It is more in line with American foreign policy and their interior civil service (anti-extremism globally and pushing against the new right at home)
- cm2187 9y ago
  Blame the code, don't blame the programmer!

KGIII 9y ago

Well, she is easier to defend than Nazis. So, here I go... Freedom of expression, not just free speech the legal concept, should be a societal goal. Google has every right, legally, to delete this stuff. However, in an ideal world, they'd do no such thing and would let people judge based on the merits of the message. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to work towards that ideal world. Maybe the solution is enabling people to realistically host content themselves, on their own property, and just ensuring the ISP is nothing but a dumb pipe? Maybe the solution is distributed content and P2P networks? Either way, the continued aggressive censorship by Google, while their legal right, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They can do it, but I don't have to like it. That said, if anyone can think of something that I can do to help, I'm all ears.

mankyd 9y ago
> Maybe the solution is enabling people to realistically host content themselves, on their own property, and just ensuring the ISP is nothing but a dumb pipe? For what it's worth, this is mildly achievable, but I doubt there's much of a market for it. It's (usually) not hard to convert one's internet connection to some sort of business-class connection, get a static ip, and have port 80/443 unblocked, (I've done it). Mind you, there's costs associated with all that. Then you have to setup and maintain a web server. Plenty of HN folks can do that on their distro of choice, but it's definitely a technical feat. I bet folks have tried to make a one-click install style thing before. I bet one even exists today, but I couldn't tell you what it is. Then there's maintenance on said server... Ultimately, people use 3rd parties because its a significantly lower barrier to entry in monetary cost, time, and complexity. I won't speak to Google's actions here, but no one has yet proven out your proposed solution. I'd love it if we could.
- xf86alsa 9y ago
  Check out ZeroNet: https://zeronet.io https://zeronet.io Decentralized websites that are hosted by your users. Can be accessed over ZeroNet or without using a proxy.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago

TwelveNights 9y ago

This is Google being Google... They really need to improve their customer support processes; especially when people have so much stake in their products. Losing a Youtube account sucks, losing an entire Google account is the nail in the coffin.

ben_jones 9y ago

CTRL + F "Disclaimer: I work at Google" Funny how that never comes up on these threads. I get it you can't discredit your employer. Even at Google.

halfteatree 9y ago
^ Cynicism at its best.
kop316 9y ago
In all fairness, this has only been posted for an hour, and it was only at the top of HN for 20 minutes or so.
donalhunt 9y ago
Probably because employees are asked not to post on topics that could be controversial or where they are likely to only have a very small part of the picture. Googlers do read a lot of hackerne.ws articles and will flag cases like this internally for review where appropriate. :)

jack9 9y ago

Terabyte drives are very cheap. Since it's borderline stupid, to simply upload this volume of work to some third party service without backup, I have no sympathy or technical concern. This being an illustration of Google's terrible "progressively tyrannical" track record, the article is badly titled. More like Google the Oppressor of Truth. Good Luck to Alexa.

vickyvicky 9y ago
>"progressively tyrannical" Google was much worse back in the years. It's just that people are beginning to notice it more. Back in those days, for my school project I created an app that had to recognize the hollywood celebrity based on the drawing. Google shut down my android account and then everything else in few weeks citing "copyright and impersonation". Worse, it shut down my google apps for business account 7 years later because "all related accounts will be closed". Other people faced the same wrath : https://www.androidpit.com/forum/617883/google-suspend-my-account-yesterday https://www.androidpit.com/forum/617883/google-suspend-my-ac... It was a business account and everything including drive etc was gone. The appeal form has automated responses and there is no number to call.
deathanatos 9y ago
Ideally, I'd like to back up my data too. That's where it becomes much harder: I need a second location. (In case my house catches fire, or floods in a hurricane, etc.) AWS and GCE both provide raw disk space, and certainly, an encrypted backup could be uploaded to them. I would like to be able to put a cap on what I spend on service, in case something goes wrong with the system, which AFAIK, neither GCE/AWS provide, unfortunately. I would also like it to be remotely accessible, which a simple terabyte drive doesn't get directly. Now, most of the above (creating a backup, encrypting it, shipping it out to AWS/GCE, securely accessing a drive remotely) are all possible, but none are easy, and certainly not yet at the level of "my mother/father can do it". I try very hard to maintain a private "cloud", and I find it fairly difficult.
- jack9 9y ago
  Video originals, soundclips, text, edited versions, become a tangled pipeline without experience (in the form of seeing it work in a large project context). I backup my multiple TB of data on Dropbox, some on Github (the code and production assets are committed to it), and external drives at least once a month. I think people have a tough time determining what's important (obviously) and are bad at organizing large amounts of data, conceptually more than technically. That being said, if you are going to generate a lot of data worth anything, even your publishing platform gives you an idea to how to structure it.

bane 9y ago

Put it on the internet archive.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
soared 9y ago
The videos are widely available. Google isn't trying to hide the videos, they're trying to keep them off the platform.

colordrops 9y ago

My spidey sense is tingling here. With Assange's exposition of Google as an arm of the US State Department [1] and the US's ever changing alliances with various rebel groups in the middle east, including the Taliban and Al Qaeda [2] [3], it's not a stretch to believe that Google has an agenda beyond monetization in the particular content it hides. [1] http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_... [3] http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syrian-rebel-groups-glance-20140912-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syrian-rebel-g...

digdigdag 9y ago

Google seems to be doing a very fine job of showing that it is has reached monopoly status for way too many verticals. They're getting way comfortable in their success, and this is exemplified in the certain level of hubris they exemplify in their practices. Google Jigsaw is one such example. I really do hope the DOJ gets serious about the anti-trust implications and takes them to task at some point. I think we're in need of another Bell Systems-esque anti-trust breakup.

andriesm 9y ago
They don't like your vids, the delete your EMAIL account?????!!!!!

bostonvaulter2 9y ago

What are some good alternative email accounts to use? I should really start decreasing my dependence on Google.

Tortoise 9y ago
Fastmail.fm Not free; but you definitely get what you pay for.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Happy to second FastMail. Been there almost a year, and it's amazing how good their product is. Note that they just revised their TOS to get rid of the dreaded "can terminate your account at any time for any reason" common to most services, in exchange for a clear set of conditions. Aka, the CEO waking up one day and deciding to get rid of you isn't valid anymore, as it would be for most companies.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- jakebasile 9y ago
  Another happy Fastmail customer here. Push email on iOS/Mac, CalDAV and CardDAV to access calendar and contacts from anything, and I even host my little crappy website on their servers. I've never had deliverability problems and their spam filtering is (so far) sufficient.
- jon_adler 9y ago
  I am still happy after 15 years of paying for Fastmail.
jdietrich 9y ago
Anything, so long as your e-mail address is on a domain name you own and you back up your inbox via IMAP. If both of those are in place, you're not really dependent on your mail provider at all, because you can switch just by changing a DNS record. If you lose the use of an e-mail address on someone else's domain, then you've got a serious problem.

Mtinie 9y ago

Resolved. https://mobile.twitter.com/carwinb/status/907778135957131265 https://mobile.twitter.com/carwinb/status/907778135957131265

trendia 9y ago
As always, the best way to get a big company to help you is to make it a public relations problem.
uselpa 9y ago
Time to move that data (or at least a copy of it) elsewhere.
banned1 9y ago
https://twitter.com/DeadPrecariat/status/907778635817521152 https://twitter.com/DeadPrecariat/status/907778635817521152 This person asks that she "demands answers." Since when are beggars choosers? Google is free. Did we really expect a different behavior from them?
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Free in the most obvious sense, but they still profit off of you.
  - jldugger 9y ago
    When I checked a few years ago, Youtube was still not actually profitable. There's a reason it's owned by the company that spins off so much free cash it doesn't know what to do with it all, I guess.
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      Google's parent company, Alphabet is hugely profitable.
- FussyZeus 9y ago

soared 9y ago

I don't agree with Google's actions here, but this has to be somewhat expected. If your day-to-day is closely entwined with terrorism, extremism, etc. you have to know that some of your content or actions aren't going to be welcome everywhere. I mean, people in the porn industry surely take precautions because they know they're content isn't welcome everywhere, why wouldn't the author? IMO google is going too far, but I'd bet thats an automated system and this article will get enough press to stop it.

tyingq 9y ago
It is kind of odd that the whole Google account is wiped and canceled. I post a YouTube video big G doesn't like, then they close my whole Google account. So now my Android phone, all my contacts, call history, purchased apps + music, etc, are now gone? And my nest thermostat resets to factory defaults? And all my AdWords campaigns for my small sole proprietorship. And...so on.
- magnetic 9y ago
  ...and what about all those services you used to "Log in with Google"...
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Which is why you never ever use the "log in with Google/Facebook" buttons.

cft 9y ago

New Google (after the founders retired to Alphabet) are trying to instill a simple notion: what you think is yours is actually ours, it doesn't belong to you. Post a YouTube video, expect it to be taken down. Do not embed third party YouTube videos: your website will be broken when Google takes them down. Do not develop Android apps as a small dev: they can be deleted from Play Store on a whim. Do not monetize your site with AdSense: you will lose revenue with no human recourse. Hopefully general public will get this notion sooner than later.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Dumb of them, good for us. I mean, the whole business of the cloud is based on your users/customers not realizing that...

donalhunt 9y ago

The following articles may be of help: 1) https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 2) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168?hl=en Despite claims in this thread that Google likes to do things without due process and clear guidelines, the reality is that something like an account deletion is both pretty rare and not done lightly (you'll see that in some of the language in support articles and T&Cs related to this course of action). Product managers and engineers put a lot of thought into how to identify accounts that only exist to provide content that break TOS vs a case like this. In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user. With regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this. When you're building systems that cater for billion+ users, you have to look at systematic ways to deal with incoming requests such that the set of requests that need human intervention is as small as possible (assuming you don't want a company with millions of employees). At the end of the day, it's a balancing act and I personally feel that Google's approach is sane. Unfortunately that means a small number of users do get a bad experience. Disclaimer: I worked at Google for over a decade. I am aware of some of the process and legality decisions that go into how these type of things are structured internally. I did not work in the area of abuse or policy.

josephg 9y ago
> In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user. We've heard a number of stories like this of people who have their youtube videos flagged for various reasons. The lived experience of people who go through it sounds hellish. Their entire digital life on google is suspended and held to ransom by some completely opaque, inscrutable, byzantine process that is not accountable to anyone. There is no real way to appeal, and once deleted there may or may not be any way to recover lost data or have emails sent to your old address forwarded to another account. If your account was suspended, would you really trust that the knowledge base answers are correct? If you're wrong you'd have no account, no access to your own email address, no power, and no way of contacting anyone at google to help. If my account was suspended by a machine and couldn't get in touch with a human to help fix it, there's no way I'd continue to trust google's automated processes to get everything figured out. Not when so much is at stake. As someone who's worked at google for over a decade if something happened to your account, you'd be fine - you'd be able to contact someone and get it fixed. But without that recourse, scared paranoia seems pretty reasonable.

whipoodle 9y ago

This should bother you a lot more than the firing.

aerotwelve 9y ago

Your data is not safe unless you have a local backup that you control. Don't trust Google (or any one cloud storage provider); they haven't earned it.

xupybd 9y ago

Wow I get they don't want the videos on their site but banning all of the users other services seems very over the top. They're a private company they can do what they want but this is not a good way to do business.

jedberg 9y ago

Google's remediation systems are terrible. If you can't convince their algorithm you're a good person, you're out of luck. My adwords account has been locked for 15 years despite my repeated appeals (they seem to let me appeal about once every five years). I have no idea why it's locked and no one will tell me nor fix it. So I have a separate adwords account which annoyingly I cannot tie to my primary gmail account because apparently at some point after it was locked they got tied together.

Danihan 9y ago
And you're someone with some SV credibility and savviness, imaging what it's like for a typical scrub.

patrickg_zill 9y ago

At some point an "internet death penalty" will have to called for Google's behavior, should they continue down this path . That will be very very interesting...

hedora 9y ago

I met Google's chief censor years ago. That department used to be proudly pushing the boundaries of minimum compliance (censor nothing, and work with foreign governments until that's legal). It is sad to see how far they have fallen.

andy_ppp 9y ago

I hope any Googlers here are attempting to help internally and at the very least 1) not to destroy all of her work 2) allow her to publish controversial things because of the context. As for my opinion I think this is horrendous, that Stallman is right and that Google and it’s staff should be ashamed at this attempt to destroy deep and important journalistic work. It’s hardly like it’s not in character. I will now attempt to not use Google services which is going to be a challenge.

tezza 9y ago

sorry to hear your predicament. sadly there is more of this type of thing in the pipeline and it is time to stop using google provided services 1) migrate videos to LiveLeak.com 2) migrate email services somewhere else. i don't have a specific recommendation, perhaps some other HNer would proffer a solid choice

shevy 9y ago

Well, no surprise - ever since Google turned fully evil, it has been working against mankind. It's a wonderful opportunity to stop using Google-related products and feed more evilness into Google.

Joeri 9y ago

While google should tread carefully here, I have to wonder why this stuff was hosted from a google account in the first place. It is easier and cheaper than ever to set up your own web hosting and host this stuff outside of a walled garden where it won't violate a TOS. Google accounts are for storing personal files in the cloud, not publishing important documents to the public.

londons_explore 9y ago

If your Google account is suspended, then deletion of the contents after a set number of days is required by various laws and legal precidents for your own privacy. Google cannot hold your private data on an ongoing basis without letting you access it. Your only chance will be getting the account unsuspended before the timer runs out.

mnw21cam 9y ago
> Google cannot hold your private data on an ongoing basis without letting you access it. Has anyone mentioned this to Facebook? I think they hold quite a lot of information about me, and because I don't have an account, I presumably can't access it.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  I think in the EU and USA you can request all information a company has about you. Not sure how this would work without an identifier, though. You could send all your personal information to them so they can check if they store something about but this feels icky.

NiklasMort 9y ago

Do not ever rely on services that are free of charge. Do not store data in services that are free of charge and expect it to be safe etc. etc. ...

wvh 9y ago

Right now most information dissemination seems to happen through commercial or state actors. Neither appears to be very reliable regarding neutrality and impartiality. There are also political and religious platforms that don't inspire much confidence either in that regard. Maybe academic platforms still have some independence, but those are mostly aimed towards scientific studies most so than contemporary news items. Where would one host "news" or data that most platforms aren't eager to support for one reason or another? Where do you publish an article critical of the state in countries where the media is state-owned, or critical of corporations that sponsor the media outlets? This bias problem might be one of the most tricky things for mankind to solve, even though it would seem it should turn out to be equally important for anybody regardless of one's position at either end of whatever spectrum.

pqs 9y ago

Google is in its own right to limit speech in its services. More work should be invested in making distributed networks (i.e. Bittorrent) easy to use to any user.

raverbashing 9y ago

Aren't Liveleak and Dailymotion still running? Aren't there other video services? I know it's convenient to upload stuff to YT but there are other services up there who won't be as arbitrary as YT

ksec 9y ago

While it was an unpopular opinion, that was what Cloudflare's Mathew Prince has been saying all along. When do you draw the line? How do you define xxxxx. I read in US, Police can take away your cash / processions if you are suspected of XXXX.I guess similar mentality is happening. HDD is Cheap, SoC is Cheap, We are only lacking the software to have a Personal Cloud where your Photo, Video, Email, or other Files are Stored on BOTH the cloud AND your Home Mini Server. I paid a small fees to have the data on cloud for being accessible and as backup. I was rather hoping Apple could do that with Time Capsule. Since OSX Server already caches your iCloud Files. But I guess most company are too deep rooted into this recurring "Subscription" model they dont actually want you to own anything.

gkanai 9y ago

It sounds like her blog post got her noticed by Google, so that's good. However, for cases like these, where you have videos that are probably outside of the terms & conditions of Google, you should be hosting those on your own servers that you purchase the bandwidth for, not relying on a 3rd party to host. Yes, Google has mutiple defacto monopolies that are very, very concerning. But one can still self-host on the Internet, and this person should have done that. She has her own domain, so she could have had the video on her own server.

EJTH 9y ago

Well just stop being a nazi who questions everything. Problem solved! Nazis like you don't belong on the internet.

jamespo 9y ago
mmm delicious false equivalence

EJTH 9y ago

Kind of strange that there is countless Nasheeds (islamic chants) calling to war against infidels etc. on youtube. But stuff like this gets deleted.

throw2016 9y ago

The kind of content required by researchers, documenting current events, relooking at historical events with current information is always going be hugely controversial according to different POVs. This kind of content will require its own network not reliant or subject to the whims of business interests or the rules of any single nation. Infact it's essential this content is not located on platforms offered by increasingly compromised and arbitrary SV companies prone to lip service to free speech when convenient. There is enough funding in the world to create this than rely on companies like Google and the content should simply move from youtube.

redm 9y ago

I'm sad for the user, but every time I read this type of story I'm hopeful it may be an inflection point; maybe people will wake up to Google, how integrated it is in our lives, and how big of a black box it is. If nothing else, its one more brick in the wall.

drderidder 9y ago

I'm afraid this is what happens when the exercise of democratic freedoms is cordoned within the platforms of corporations who have no duty to uphold them. Google's unilateral suspension of AdSense accounts without reason or recourse has brought this realization to lots of people on a less overt level.

gumby 9y ago

I know google's a private corporation and is free to delete what it wishes from its own databases, but I thought it's mission was to "organize the world's information"

Mugwort 9y ago

Censorship doesn't serve the interests of Google nor the government. If Google deactivates accounts then Google loses data. In big data it's best practice to keep everything, discard nothing. Government loses an opportunity for surveillance which could potentially be important. Why would we for example shut down White Supremacist accounts when doing so removes the possibility of keeping tabs on them. It makes them quieter, has a chilling effect and their activities go underground. Where's the benefit in that? By closing "bad" accounts like Right Wing white supremacy groups the public never sees their material which unless you happen to be one of them always discredits them. Censoring these unpopular groups only protects them from discrediting themselves from the larger public and we lose valuable clues or evidence in the event someone is plotting a crime or has already committed a crime. In this particular story involving Manning, Google shutting down an account with information critical of the government makes Google and the government look bad. It does more harm to their public image than good. This material has already been available for a very long time and nothing new is learned. Why bother to censor? Neither Google nor the government stand to gain anything and only open themselves up to lose. For all the censorship Google or the government engages in, in practice nothing of substance is ever covered up anyway.

hellbanner 9y ago

This is the frog in the boiling pot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429 "Youtube AI deletes war crime evidence as 'extremist material'"

Steeeve 9y ago

I know I may not have the most popular opinion here, but I support Google in it's apparent decision to disassociate itself from terrorist propaganda videos. Regardless of embedded blog-post context or newsworthiness, Google isn't an official government sanctioned free-speech haven. It's an advertising company. I'm already disturbed by the weird parts of youtube, and how easily they are to get to accidentally. It makes precious little sense to me that I allow my kids to use youtube to watch gamers and tutorials of all sorts when I know what they are a few clicks from material that will completely rob them of whatever innocence remains. If they are finally choosing to clean things up - even in an inconsequential way - I'm all for it. The argument exists that there is already a cesspool of disturbing material, and that this particular account is well-intentioned. I would argue back that if you want to push boundaries, be prepared to face the consequences. It's well known that account and video review processes are black holes. If you are putting yourself in a situation where you might lose your account, you should be prepared to lose it.

0x445442 9y ago

vid.me

debacle 9y ago

It would be highly advantageous for society if someone of knowledge of the utilification of telephone lines, railways, electricity, etc, could make an easily digestible timeline for that taking place.

lightedman 9y ago

There should be a law that once a company gets so big, it is automatically regulated as a public utility. That would put an end to most of our current problems with massive institutions like this.

eggs_and_avo 9y ago

People warned us. They told us so. Instead of building decentralized tools that protected and empowered user data we've spent the last 20 15 years uploading our entire lives to Google and Facebook.

stefantalpalaru 9y ago

> I would greatly appreciate it, if anyone could help me get in contact with the Wizard of Google, to help me make my case Sorry, you need to be very famous in order to be unscroogled through the PR department's damage control.

ElijahLynn 9y ago

I wonder if Google users should have a scheduled backup of https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout.

bukgoogle 9y ago

Google will delete accounts from people who's political opinion not "left", talk anything against google's "evil" ceo's.. I'm really tired of google's lies, politics, actions and ethos that they push by forcing. Lies lies just like facebook and twitter. Same for me.

bukgoogle 9y ago

Google really manifests freedom of speech.. honestly: LACK of it.