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Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can address?

adventured 5y ago
This is similar to leaving your personal property contents in a storage locker / unit / container that you don't own. Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately. No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an argument in favor of why they should. Use services of companies you can trust, and or host your own content. If the content is important, pay for its hosting, because that's the rational thing to do, buy the service level to match the value of your content. That's the correct solution to this problem. You can't trust YouTube in that sort of use case and we don't need a giant new federal agency to make YouTube host videos long-term against their will, it's absurd. Hosting those videos on Hetzner or DigitalOcean or similar would be inexpensive for a small business (or use a paid video hosting service, I'm sure there are several of those around). The content owner likely wanted to use YouTube because it's free. That turned out as one might expect.
- tanseydavid 5y ago
  It should be treated like an easement.
  - D13Fd 5y ago
    An easement is actually a very strong real property right. That term doesn't really apply in this context though. Here you just need a "right" to download your content before it is deleted.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  I don’t think this analogy is correct. Instead, I’d say the analogous case is more like loaning your art to a gallery. The gallery makes a profit from the thousands of people who pay to view the art that you provided at your own expense. Then, one day someone at the gallery decides that the art contains something that doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s a peach, in the background, that looks like a butt. So, to resolve the problem, they burn all of your art to the ground.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Bad analogy. Better would be that you have taken nice picture. You give this to art-gallery to show. As it is all digital they get a copy. And then you think oh art-gallery has it I can destroy my original. And then art-gallery thinks that it is not needed anymore and copy really has no extra value and destroys it. The fault is not with gallery destroying copy, but with destruction of the original.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
gruez 5y ago
>At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. FDA, youtube edition: alphabet is the only company approved to host videos for public consumption, because they're the only one that has an approved copyright/hate speech filter (regulated for safety, efficacy, ADA compliance, and to be non-discriminatory). All other sites are prohibited from operating unless they spend $5B to get their systems approved.
- belter 5y ago
  You raise a very important point, that I have seen at work in the Finance industry. It goes like this: Large consulting companies are structurally incompetent and keep running to the ground financial and government IT projects. After starting to see their lunch taken by small specialized and competent small operations, a underground operation starts to require the regulator to force companies working in the space to get certified as "Financial Services Provider". Regulations will make sure the number of required certified professionals, minimum capital etc...Are of a nature to drive out the competent small boutiques. Projects are of course still done, by forcing the small companies to subcontract on a 2nd and 3nd level via the now certified ( but still incompetent) large consulting companies.
  - doctor_eval 5y ago
    I saw the end result of this, after working on a proposal for a large Australian city council. After the presentation, I was told that while our ideas were awesome, unfortunately we were too small (ca. 15 people). We would have to have partnered with a large consultant (IBM was mentioned), or we would not be invited to continue our work. We were told explicitly that this was because council needed someone big enough to sue. To this day it makes no sense to me. But that’s how it was.
    - Daishiman 5y ago
      Sure it does; your 15 person company can go out of existence just by a fight between founders. Lead engineer gets run over by a bus and didn't document his work? You're done. Lose your other customer out of the 2 that were keeping you alive? You have to fire half of your staff. Whether the reason was made to justify the existence of some parasites doesn't change the fact that it's a real reason. A company that's been in business for over a century isn't going to go out in a year, and worst case someone will have the knowledge and certs to keep the ship running.
scarface74 5y ago
What could possibly go wrong with the government policing content stored by a private company? It’s a little late now. But the answer was for her to backup her videos on $60 USB hard drive and pay a service like Backblaze. Comparing an agency that is there to make sure people don’t die from bad food and drugs to wanting a government agency to regulate third party content storage that can easily be backed up is nonsensical.
jonwinstanley 5y ago
A friend of mine had a similar problem in Google maps. He’d spent years adding photos and reviews and his photo views were in the millions, then Google flagged him as doing something that violated their terms. Within a week his whole account had been taken down and there’s no way to speak to a human about what happened. Never even received confirmation of which post was in violation and what the issue was. How did we get to a situation where the people that spend the most time using the platforms end up losing the most and having no way of getting support.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  You'd think that google is smart enough to give content a score based on popularity and sheer amount of content (and existence time) and allocate those to humans to review and handle.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    perhaps someone having setup the automated system should think, hmm, false positives are rare, but they happen on single items, meaning that people who have lots of items increase their chance of having a single false positive in their collection and thus we will have situations that will seem unfair and idiotic to people outside Google if we remove access to collections of data for a positive hit for violating content unless we put a process in to handle these false positives on large collections of data. But of course this would require the creators of the automated systems for detecting violating content to have a healthy measure of self-doubt regarding the perfection of what they build, which is the kind of thing Google's hiring process seems likely to weed out from what I've read. Thus my conclusion Google is unlikely to ever build an automated system that will take as a central precept that automation is imperfect.
    - Tozen 5y ago
      Very good points. The longer the person has been using YouTube and the more data accumulated, clearly the math shows the more likely they are to get hit with false positives. The flip side of this, is where YouTube/Google is finding excuses to conduct "purges" of data and older accounts. They know what they're doing is wrong, but it has plausible deniability to it. So easy to pull, "Don't blame us, blame the algorithm." As if it isn't people programming and supervising it, and there isn't loads of user complaints as to what's going on.
D13Fd 5y ago
Yes. Congress can pass a law saying that companies of a certain size that host user-generated multimedia media content (not text) must offer a reasonable opportunity for users to retrieve that content before it is deleted.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Why exclude text? Why shouldn't some spammer or like be able to get the textual content they have produced on that platform?
- Archelaos 5y ago
  The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) includes a "right to data portability" in art. 20. Its central part states: "The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided ..." Of course there is room for interpretation here what is included in "personal data". Nevertheless, I would recommend to any EU citizen who finds her/himself in a similar situation as the OP to inform the data protection authority with jurisdiction over her/his place of residence. [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02016R0679-20160504#tocId28 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
roenxi 5y ago
YouTube is a free service built by a company that is harvesting people's data to make a profit off it. The real & lasting solution is to not try and build a business on something that unreliable. It is up there with storing emergency supplies for a flood in the low point of a floodplane. Any level of thoughtful contingency planning will reveal that storing all your videos on a YouTube channel with no personal backups is going to be a disaster if anything goes wrong, ever. As has been revealed, this woman had no control over her (very valuable) data. Y'know, whoopse. Lots of sympathy but this is a potential ending to giving all your data to Google.
ksec 5y ago
>Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. I know It is easy to say to own your own things / Video. In reality a reliable storage system is not easy nor cheap. A BTRFS / ZFS system that is Turn Key solution with drive redundancy and error correction by default. And that is ignoring other things like security. My dream solution would be something like an Apple TimeCapsule that also works for iOS. And may be a bundled subscription that give you offsite backup and snapshots.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap. A 2-bay model with drives costs <€500 and protects against drive failure. You need a bit of technical knowledge, but all the big manufacturers have relatively user-friendly GUIs. It's not a highly redundant enterprise solution, but it's decent for home and small business users, especially since the alternative is usually 'nothing'.
  - ksec 5y ago
    >I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap Only Qnap offers ZFS and Synology offer BTRFS. And none of these file system are default option. ( I dont think they do scheduled scrubbing by default either ) They are also only available on mid range model. Qnap had third or forth security issues with Bitcoin ransomeware. Synology requires lot of work to turn off All internet facing features. To the point they dont want you to do it because all Internet facing features are their product differentiation. I think most user want more like a DAS ( Direct Attached Storage ), or NAS that is only accessible via Intranet. Once you have that setup, a DS220+ with two 4TB NAS Drive and a usable 4TB storage cost $500. ( Or $400 if you use non NAS / Long Warranty Drive ) I am not sure if $500 / $400 for 4TB is cheap or affordable to average consumers.
    - baash05 5y ago
      Seems to me a DVD burner would work wonder here. Make a vid, upload it to Youtub, burn a copy, put it in a sleeve, and you have a very reliable backup system. I've got DVD's that I made over 15 years ago, that are still watchable.. I've got a CD that I burned 21 years ago (wedding music). It's in my car right now.

adventured 5y ago

This is similar to leaving your personal property contents in a storage locker / unit / container that you don't own. Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately. No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an argument in favor of why they should. Use services of companies you can trust, and or host your own content. If the content is important, pay for its hosting, because that's the rational thing to do, buy the service level to match the value of your content. That's the correct solution to this problem. You can't trust YouTube in that sort of use case and we don't need a giant new federal agency to make YouTube host videos long-term against their will, it's absurd. Hosting those videos on Hetzner or DigitalOcean or similar would be inexpensive for a small business (or use a paid video hosting service, I'm sure there are several of those around). The content owner likely wanted to use YouTube because it's free. That turned out as one might expect.

tanseydavid 5y ago
It should be treated like an easement.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  An easement is actually a very strong real property right. That term doesn't really apply in this context though. Here you just need a "right" to download your content before it is deleted.
doctor_eval 5y ago
I don’t think this analogy is correct. Instead, I’d say the analogous case is more like loaning your art to a gallery. The gallery makes a profit from the thousands of people who pay to view the art that you provided at your own expense. Then, one day someone at the gallery decides that the art contains something that doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s a peach, in the background, that looks like a butt. So, to resolve the problem, they burn all of your art to the ground.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Bad analogy. Better would be that you have taken nice picture. You give this to art-gallery to show. As it is all digital they get a copy. And then you think oh art-gallery has it I can destroy my original. And then art-gallery thinks that it is not needed anymore and copy really has no extra value and destroys it. The fault is not with gallery destroying copy, but with destruction of the original.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

gruez 5y ago

>At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. FDA, youtube edition: alphabet is the only company approved to host videos for public consumption, because they're the only one that has an approved copyright/hate speech filter (regulated for safety, efficacy, ADA compliance, and to be non-discriminatory). All other sites are prohibited from operating unless they spend $5B to get their systems approved.

belter 5y ago
You raise a very important point, that I have seen at work in the Finance industry. It goes like this: Large consulting companies are structurally incompetent and keep running to the ground financial and government IT projects. After starting to see their lunch taken by small specialized and competent small operations, a underground operation starts to require the regulator to force companies working in the space to get certified as "Financial Services Provider". Regulations will make sure the number of required certified professionals, minimum capital etc...Are of a nature to drive out the competent small boutiques. Projects are of course still done, by forcing the small companies to subcontract on a 2nd and 3nd level via the now certified ( but still incompetent) large consulting companies.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  I saw the end result of this, after working on a proposal for a large Australian city council. After the presentation, I was told that while our ideas were awesome, unfortunately we were too small (ca. 15 people). We would have to have partnered with a large consultant (IBM was mentioned), or we would not be invited to continue our work. We were told explicitly that this was because council needed someone big enough to sue. To this day it makes no sense to me. But that’s how it was.
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    Sure it does; your 15 person company can go out of existence just by a fight between founders. Lead engineer gets run over by a bus and didn't document his work? You're done. Lose your other customer out of the 2 that were keeping you alive? You have to fire half of your staff. Whether the reason was made to justify the existence of some parasites doesn't change the fact that it's a real reason. A company that's been in business for over a century isn't going to go out in a year, and worst case someone will have the knowledge and certs to keep the ship running.

scarface74 5y ago

What could possibly go wrong with the government policing content stored by a private company? It’s a little late now. But the answer was for her to backup her videos on $60 USB hard drive and pay a service like Backblaze. Comparing an agency that is there to make sure people don’t die from bad food and drugs to wanting a government agency to regulate third party content storage that can easily be backed up is nonsensical.

jonwinstanley 5y ago

A friend of mine had a similar problem in Google maps. He’d spent years adding photos and reviews and his photo views were in the millions, then Google flagged him as doing something that violated their terms. Within a week his whole account had been taken down and there’s no way to speak to a human about what happened. Never even received confirmation of which post was in violation and what the issue was. How did we get to a situation where the people that spend the most time using the platforms end up losing the most and having no way of getting support.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
You'd think that google is smart enough to give content a score based on popularity and sheer amount of content (and existence time) and allocate those to humans to review and handle.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  perhaps someone having setup the automated system should think, hmm, false positives are rare, but they happen on single items, meaning that people who have lots of items increase their chance of having a single false positive in their collection and thus we will have situations that will seem unfair and idiotic to people outside Google if we remove access to collections of data for a positive hit for violating content unless we put a process in to handle these false positives on large collections of data. But of course this would require the creators of the automated systems for detecting violating content to have a healthy measure of self-doubt regarding the perfection of what they build, which is the kind of thing Google's hiring process seems likely to weed out from what I've read. Thus my conclusion Google is unlikely to ever build an automated system that will take as a central precept that automation is imperfect.
  - Tozen 5y ago
    Very good points. The longer the person has been using YouTube and the more data accumulated, clearly the math shows the more likely they are to get hit with false positives. The flip side of this, is where YouTube/Google is finding excuses to conduct "purges" of data and older accounts. They know what they're doing is wrong, but it has plausible deniability to it. So easy to pull, "Don't blame us, blame the algorithm." As if it isn't people programming and supervising it, and there isn't loads of user complaints as to what's going on.

D13Fd 5y ago

Yes. Congress can pass a law saying that companies of a certain size that host user-generated multimedia media content (not text) must offer a reasonable opportunity for users to retrieve that content before it is deleted.

Ekaros 5y ago
Why exclude text? Why shouldn't some spammer or like be able to get the textual content they have produced on that platform?
Archelaos 5y ago
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) includes a "right to data portability" in art. 20. Its central part states: "The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided ..." Of course there is room for interpretation here what is included in "personal data". Nevertheless, I would recommend to any EU citizen who finds her/himself in a similar situation as the OP to inform the data protection authority with jurisdiction over her/his place of residence. [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02016R0679-20160504#tocId28 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

roenxi 5y ago

YouTube is a free service built by a company that is harvesting people's data to make a profit off it. The real & lasting solution is to not try and build a business on something that unreliable. It is up there with storing emergency supplies for a flood in the low point of a floodplane. Any level of thoughtful contingency planning will reveal that storing all your videos on a YouTube channel with no personal backups is going to be a disaster if anything goes wrong, ever. As has been revealed, this woman had no control over her (very valuable) data. Y'know, whoopse. Lots of sympathy but this is a potential ending to giving all your data to Google.

ksec 5y ago

>Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. I know It is easy to say to own your own things / Video. In reality a reliable storage system is not easy nor cheap. A BTRFS / ZFS system that is Turn Key solution with drive redundancy and error correction by default. And that is ignoring other things like security. My dream solution would be something like an Apple TimeCapsule that also works for iOS. And may be a bundled subscription that give you offsite backup and snapshots.

Tijdreiziger 5y ago
I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap. A 2-bay model with drives costs <€500 and protects against drive failure. You need a bit of technical knowledge, but all the big manufacturers have relatively user-friendly GUIs. It's not a highly redundant enterprise solution, but it's decent for home and small business users, especially since the alternative is usually 'nothing'.
- ksec 5y ago
  >I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap Only Qnap offers ZFS and Synology offer BTRFS. And none of these file system are default option. ( I dont think they do scheduled scrubbing by default either ) They are also only available on mid range model. Qnap had third or forth security issues with Bitcoin ransomeware. Synology requires lot of work to turn off All internet facing features. To the point they dont want you to do it because all Internet facing features are their product differentiation. I think most user want more like a DAS ( Direct Attached Storage ), or NAS that is only accessible via Intranet. Once you have that setup, a DS220+ with two 4TB NAS Drive and a usable 4TB storage cost $500. ( Or $400 if you use non NAS / Long Warranty Drive ) I am not sure if $500 / $400 for 4TB is cheap or affordable to average consumers.
  - baash05 5y ago
    Seems to me a DVD burner would work wonder here. Make a vid, upload it to Youtub, burn a copy, put it in a sleeve, and you have a very reliable backup system. I've got DVD's that I made over 15 years ago, that are still watchable.. I've got a CD that I burned 21 years ago (wedding music). It's in my car right now.