8 ms·

I will never forget that the Christchurch shooting video was automatically deleted from users' PRIVATE Google Drive and Dropbox - no warnings were given and no

I will never forget that the Christchurch shooting video was automatically deleted from users' PRIVATE Google Drive and Dropbox - no warnings were given and no explanation was presented.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
They do the same thing for copyrighted material, they can match a hash and nuke a file off the service at the drop of a hat.
- pedro2 5y ago
  delete the file? not unshare it and keep it on the personal storage?
  - fknorangesite 5y ago
    fwiw the article says > These files will be flagged to their owner and restricted automatically, which means they can no longer be shared with other people, and access will be withdrawn from everyone but the owner.
    - pedro2 5y ago
      all articles always say that but non-verifiable comments around the internet say the file is removed from everywhere. I'm trying to confirm this comment: > They removed it after they began using GIFCT to ‘prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.’ All hashed versions of that video was removed from user accounts. > Page 16 : https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...
pedro2 5y ago
Whaaat? Link please
- deadalus 5y ago
  They removed it after they began using GIFCT to ‘prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.’ All hashed versions of that video was removed from user accounts. Page 16 : https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?cote=DSTI/CDEP(2019)15/FINAL&docLanguage=En https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...
  - yuliyp 5y ago
    I haven't had my coffee yet, but I'm having trouble understanding your claims (about Google Drive deleting TVEC content) and how they relate to the OECD document you linked. That document does not state that Google (except YouTube) is a member of GIFCT. Further, on page 124 (in "Policies") of the document it states that Google Drive will prevent sharing of files it finds violating, or maybe ban an entire account in some situations. Am I missing something here?
    - jart 5y ago
      The policy going back to at least 2014 does mention not being allowed to "store" violence and gore. They even say that if it's shocking enough, then no artistic, scientific, educational, or documentary exceptions will allow it to remain on their platforms. I assume that means deletion. It's a different Internet than what many of us grew up with. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505
srj 5y ago
Was it deleted or unshared?
snarf21 5y ago
I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.
- Zamicol 5y ago
  As long as Google is willing to serve binaries, encryption solves this.
  - rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
    Base64 would like to put in a word too. https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  There are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is what Apple does (or rather did) for their cloud scanner. Then there are other non-hash methods, similar to how Shazam determines a song in a noisy room. Poles, zeros, FFTs, there are many other strategies that are fault-tolerant.
  - snarf21 5y ago
    Sure but it becomes an arms race. There is also a lot of people that have shown that you can make images of dogs and cats that hash to Apple's hash detector. At some point a white hat is going to start making memes that cause hash collisions. When 300M all violate some hash trigger, it will cause a stir and restart the game.
  - kurthr 5y ago
    Sure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).
beachy 5y ago
Perhaps I'm sensitive as a NZer, but would you feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon etc? Though while giving a warning is clearly inappropriate, they should certainly have explained what they did.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  The video of the christchurch shooter is a primary source for a historical event, in the same way that combat footage is. When primary sources are not available to the public then lies have the same footing as truth.
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    Recently I have discovered that google has nuked hundreds of North Korean videos. This upsets me as needless destruction of the historical record. I wonder how people would feel if something like google was around after world war II and censored hundreds of videos of nazi atrocities. It is wrong for a public forum like Youtube or public resource like google drive to restrict content based on subject matter with very few limited exceptions. All political and war footage should be free from restriction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/14/youtube-has-shut-down-more-north-korean-channels-and-researchers-are-livid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/14... Stimme Koreas is now gone too.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      It's never too late to join the digital hoarding initiative.
      - morpheos137 5y ago
        Well it kind of is too late when the historical videos are pulled down and you do not have another source besides Youtube. I am sure that academic and even possibly open source intelligence researchers are similarly frustrated assuming they did not all download the videos many of which had been on the platform for many years.
mrweasel 5y ago
That eliminate both options for journalists and lawyers. There are professions which could have legitimate reasons for having the material and as terrible as it is, is it actually illegal?
- Meph504 5y ago
  From the legal standpoint, using those sort of services for storing sensitive case data like that is a bad call. too much media in those situations violate the terms and services of most platforms paid or not, and too many of those platforms have too many liberties with the usage policies on the media. If you are dealing with case data, you should be have those policies reviewed carefully, and should likely be encrypting before storing anywhere anyway. I say should because I almost never see case data stored to standard.
- chris1993 5y ago
  Possession of the Christchurch video is illegal in NZ. Not sure about elsewhere.
paganel 5y ago
It would have been interesting if any of those users who got their video file deleted would have been directly attached to the shooter (like an accomplice, let's say), afaik that would have meant that Google Driver and Dropbox had tampered evidence.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  Google don’t delete. They make unavailable. If a judge said that owning that video was probable cause or whatever, they could produce every user who used to have that file.
  - smueller1234 5y ago
    Apologies for directly contradicting you, but it's false that Google don't delete. Google do delete in a timely fashion (which is required by law in many places!), it's just that for technical reasons, it becomes unavailable or possibly also crypto erased* first. On an aside, such a setup is also a layer of defense-in-depth protection against a certain, uncommon class of bugs. I do work for Google, but don't, in any way, speak for the company. All of the above information can be found on the internet, eg. https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-really-delete-the-account-history-of-users-when-they-choose-to https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-really-delete-the-account-... about Google accounts themselves. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding
paulpauper 5y ago
as other mentioned, encryption solves this. Or scrambling, compression, etc.
api 5y ago
Not on your drives => not your data. Not encrypted (at rest and in transit) => not private. There are no exceptions.
- dhimes 5y ago
  Sadly true.
dokem 5y ago
I was actually trying to watch that video the other day. Google would not find it, Bing listed the actual video as the top result. Never thought I'd start to respect bing over google.
lern_too_spel 5y ago
Everything I've seen indicates it was a shared file. I haven't seen any reports that files that are actually private (not shared) get deleted.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Users? You mean Google's storage space that they allow people to use.
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  Yes users of a service, whether one is paying with one’s personal data, or whether one pays with their personal data AND a yearly fee for a bit more storage, as I do— they are users.
lamontcg 5y ago
This is probably the worst example to use. It is like arguing against capital punishment using Ted Bundy's case as example. Generally that works the other way with most people and that's the kind of person they enthusiastically support the state murdering. Similarly the reaction of most people to Google removing that video is going to be "good" and you're going to have a very uphill battle convincing them otherwise, and you're probably going to lose. If you talk about university researchers that study pornography and Google nuking their research or their ability to share their research with other institutions, you'd probably make more headway. It is only on a site like HN where the most upvoted commment is "OMG they deleted practically the worst video imaginable from a mass shooting incident can you believe those fascists?" and everyone votes it up to the top. The HN echo chamber bubble is real.
- mleonhard 5y ago
  I think the main point of your comment is insightful. The final two sentences are distracting and unnecessary. How about deleting them?
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    No, they're really accurate and to the point, its quite relevant that HN is an echo chamber.
- chii 5y ago
  it's not a bad example at all - the point is that even if the video is vile, it is not and should not be google's mandate to delete private files by applying some extra-judicial moral judgement. Let the law work - possession of illegal material should be enforced by the police, not by a corporation that the user cannot hold accountable.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    You will not convince anyone to agree with you who does not already agree with those principles already, and you will lose 90% of the rest of the people who find that video horrific and never get past it.

I will never forget that the Christchurch shooting video was automatically deleted from users' PRIVATE Google Drive and Dropbox - no warnings were given and no explanation was presented.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

They do the same thing for copyrighted material, they can match a hash and nuke a file off the service at the drop of a hat.

pedro2 5y ago
delete the file? not unshare it and keep it on the personal storage?
- fknorangesite 5y ago
  fwiw the article says > These files will be flagged to their owner and restricted automatically, which means they can no longer be shared with other people, and access will be withdrawn from everyone but the owner.
  - pedro2 5y ago
    all articles always say that but non-verifiable comments around the internet say the file is removed from everywhere. I'm trying to confirm this comment: > They removed it after they began using GIFCT to ‘prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.’ All hashed versions of that video was removed from user accounts. > Page 16 : https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...

pedro2 5y ago

Whaaat? Link please

deadalus 5y ago
They removed it after they began using GIFCT to ‘prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.’ All hashed versions of that video was removed from user accounts. Page 16 : https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?cote=DSTI/CDEP(2019)15/FINAL&docLanguage=En https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...
- yuliyp 5y ago
  I haven't had my coffee yet, but I'm having trouble understanding your claims (about Google Drive deleting TVEC content) and how they relate to the OECD document you linked. That document does not state that Google (except YouTube) is a member of GIFCT. Further, on page 124 (in "Policies") of the document it states that Google Drive will prevent sharing of files it finds violating, or maybe ban an entire account in some situations. Am I missing something here?
  - jart 5y ago
    The policy going back to at least 2014 does mention not being allowed to "store" violence and gore. They even say that if it's shocking enough, then no artistic, scientific, educational, or documentary exceptions will allow it to remain on their platforms. I assume that means deletion. It's a different Internet than what many of us grew up with. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505

srj 5y ago

Was it deleted or unshared?

snarf21 5y ago

I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.

Zamicol 5y ago
As long as Google is willing to serve binaries, encryption solves this.
- rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
  Base64 would like to put in a word too. https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271
SavantIdiot 5y ago
There are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is what Apple does (or rather did) for their cloud scanner. Then there are other non-hash methods, similar to how Shazam determines a song in a noisy room. Poles, zeros, FFTs, there are many other strategies that are fault-tolerant.
- snarf21 5y ago
  Sure but it becomes an arms race. There is also a lot of people that have shown that you can make images of dogs and cats that hash to Apple's hash detector. At some point a white hat is going to start making memes that cause hash collisions. When 300M all violate some hash trigger, it will cause a stir and restart the game.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Sure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).

beachy 5y ago

Perhaps I'm sensitive as a NZer, but would you feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon etc? Though while giving a warning is clearly inappropriate, they should certainly have explained what they did.

vorpalhex 5y ago
The video of the christchurch shooter is a primary source for a historical event, in the same way that combat footage is. When primary sources are not available to the public then lies have the same footing as truth.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Recently I have discovered that google has nuked hundreds of North Korean videos. This upsets me as needless destruction of the historical record. I wonder how people would feel if something like google was around after world war II and censored hundreds of videos of nazi atrocities. It is wrong for a public forum like Youtube or public resource like google drive to restrict content based on subject matter with very few limited exceptions. All political and war footage should be free from restriction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/14/youtube-has-shut-down-more-north-korean-channels-and-researchers-are-livid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/14... Stimme Koreas is now gone too.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    It's never too late to join the digital hoarding initiative.
    - morpheos137 5y ago
      Well it kind of is too late when the historical videos are pulled down and you do not have another source besides Youtube. I am sure that academic and even possibly open source intelligence researchers are similarly frustrated assuming they did not all download the videos many of which had been on the platform for many years.

mrweasel 5y ago

That eliminate both options for journalists and lawyers. There are professions which could have legitimate reasons for having the material and as terrible as it is, is it actually illegal?

Meph504 5y ago
From the legal standpoint, using those sort of services for storing sensitive case data like that is a bad call. too much media in those situations violate the terms and services of most platforms paid or not, and too many of those platforms have too many liberties with the usage policies on the media. If you are dealing with case data, you should be have those policies reviewed carefully, and should likely be encrypting before storing anywhere anyway. I say should because I almost never see case data stored to standard.
chris1993 5y ago
Possession of the Christchurch video is illegal in NZ. Not sure about elsewhere.

paganel 5y ago

It would have been interesting if any of those users who got their video file deleted would have been directly attached to the shooter (like an accomplice, let's say), afaik that would have meant that Google Driver and Dropbox had tampered evidence.

wodenokoto 5y ago
Google don’t delete. They make unavailable. If a judge said that owning that video was probable cause or whatever, they could produce every user who used to have that file.
- smueller1234 5y ago
  Apologies for directly contradicting you, but it's false that Google don't delete. Google do delete in a timely fashion (which is required by law in many places!), it's just that for technical reasons, it becomes unavailable or possibly also crypto erased* first. On an aside, such a setup is also a layer of defense-in-depth protection against a certain, uncommon class of bugs. I do work for Google, but don't, in any way, speak for the company. All of the above information can be found on the internet, eg. https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-really-delete-the-account-history-of-users-when-they-choose-to https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-really-delete-the-account-... about Google accounts themselves. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding

paulpauper 5y ago

as other mentioned, encryption solves this. Or scrambling, compression, etc.

api 5y ago

Not on your drives => not your data. Not encrypted (at rest and in transit) => not private. There are no exceptions.

dhimes 5y ago
Sadly true.

dokem 5y ago

I was actually trying to watch that video the other day. Google would not find it, Bing listed the actual video as the top result. Never thought I'd start to respect bing over google.

lern_too_spel 5y ago

Everything I've seen indicates it was a shared file. I haven't seen any reports that files that are actually private (not shared) get deleted.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Users? You mean Google's storage space that they allow people to use.

indigodaddy 5y ago
Yes users of a service, whether one is paying with one’s personal data, or whether one pays with their personal data AND a yearly fee for a bit more storage, as I do— they are users.

lamontcg 5y ago

This is probably the worst example to use. It is like arguing against capital punishment using Ted Bundy's case as example. Generally that works the other way with most people and that's the kind of person they enthusiastically support the state murdering. Similarly the reaction of most people to Google removing that video is going to be "good" and you're going to have a very uphill battle convincing them otherwise, and you're probably going to lose. If you talk about university researchers that study pornography and Google nuking their research or their ability to share their research with other institutions, you'd probably make more headway. It is only on a site like HN where the most upvoted commment is "OMG they deleted practically the worst video imaginable from a mass shooting incident can you believe those fascists?" and everyone votes it up to the top. The HN echo chamber bubble is real.

mleonhard 5y ago
I think the main point of your comment is insightful. The final two sentences are distracting and unnecessary. How about deleting them?
- lamontcg 5y ago
  No, they're really accurate and to the point, its quite relevant that HN is an echo chamber.
chii 5y ago
it's not a bad example at all - the point is that even if the video is vile, it is not and should not be google's mandate to delete private files by applying some extra-judicial moral judgement. Let the law work - possession of illegal material should be enforced by the police, not by a corporation that the user cannot hold accountable.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  You will not convince anyone to agree with you who does not already agree with those principles already, and you will lose 90% of the rest of the people who find that video horrific and never get past it.