5 ms·

Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU

255 points by doener 1y ago

liveoneggs 1y ago
[flagged]
pessimizer 1y ago
Maybe get your government to do this, instead of expecting some random company to do it for free indefinitely? This article could well be entitled "Google were the only people bothering to record our history."
- dbspin 1y ago
  Unfortunately people cannot 'get' their government to do much - and certainly not something as specific as this. Given that electoral leverage is a blunt and broad tool indeed. Also this is an EU level issue, not one pertaining to a national government.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  How could the government do this? At best they could make an archive of the data Google chooses to publish but to do it themselves would require mandating Google to share the data with them to begin with.
  - weberer 1y ago
    The USA has https://data.gov https://data.gov. The EU could make something similar. >but to do it themselves would require mandating Google to share the data with them to begin with The data was already public
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      > The USA has https://data.gov https://data.gov Could you link specifically to the datasets about political advertising reach available via that website? I get no results > The data was already public Where?
      - weberer 1y ago
        >Could you link specifically to the datasets about political advertising reach available via that website? I get no results You asked "how could the government do this"? Come on, bro. >Where? The linked article explains where they were getting the data before.
        AlecSchueler 1y ago
        > You asked "how could the government do this"? Come on, bro. And you gave a generic link showing that they could share "data" in general. Not this kind of data. Like "come on bro" both Ireland and the EU already have generic data portals... > The linked article explains where they were getting the data before. Yes, from the company who choose to share the data. There's no way to get the date from inside the company. In order for the government to publish the data they need to rely on the very same private company to supply them with it indefinitely, don't they? Again, "come on bro"...
- grafmax 1y ago
  These businesses built what have become the commons, which they retain control over through mechanisms like network effects, which allow them to make unaccountable decisions on the one hand and profit from rentierism on the other. It would probably be in people’s interest for their governments to seize these assets and socialize them as public utilities.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Then I suggest electing a government that's interested in doing what's in the people's interest.
    - grafmax 1y ago
      Big tech effectively owns the government, at least in the US. If people really want to fix this mess we need mass strikes.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- netsharc 1y ago
  Meh, if your government then decides to make the country great again, it'll be deleting stuff that it thinks is not great...
- titzer 1y ago
  Missing in this analysis is that advertisers did not, in fact, put ads on Google for free. While it's surely not part of the terms of service that Google is going to "back up" your ads indefinitely, the calculus employed in this thread is very, very wrong. Google made huge profits on political ads and when it no longer suits them to spend paltry disk space on them, it's dropping them like a hot rock. Stop pretending like Google was somehow offering a platform that people were freeloading on. Rather, these political ads were 100% the funding that sustains the platform and makes them and all their shareholders money.
- tigerBL00D 1y ago
  This is a very naive comment IMHO. There are very few governments in the word, if any, which could be trusted with something like that.
cramcgrab 1y ago
[flagged]
FridayoLeary 1y ago
Disappointing but i don't see any foul play from google like the headline kind of insinuates. Anyway their product support is notoriously fickle so why would you expect anything more of them. TLDR a policy change at google made the authors hobby more difficult or impossible because he didn't make any contingencies. Specifically they deleted political ad history for the EU.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  Where was the insinuation of foul play? I re-read the article with your criticism in mind, but it seems that they are basically just saying "this happened" and 'these are the negative consequences."
  - olooney 1y ago
    The phrase "erased history" isn’t morally neutral. It carries a tone of judgment, even suggests censorship. If the author had wanted to appear neutral, they would have used "deleted" or "removed."
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      Neutrality, and the appearance of neutrality, are different things.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      Ah! I read the article twice but hadn't considered the headline. I guess some editor wanted it sexed up a bit before it was published, the article itself is quite matter of fact.
bitpush 1y ago
Why is it on Google to store political history?
- cess11 1y ago
  "But the ad archives were introduced 7 years ago for a reason - in no small part because of the chaos of the Brexit and Trump 2016 votes, and our own advocacy here in Ireland about interference in the 2018 8th amendment referendum. They were introduced to allow for scrutiny of campaigns, and also to provide a historical record so we could go back and look at what had been promised, and what had been spent, and to see if this lined up with what happened later. This erasure of our political past feels dangerous, for scrutiny, for accountability, for shared memory, for enforcement of our rules - for our democracy." It's a rather reasonable demand that they should keep a record of the political campaigns and psyops they make their dough from, at least if nuking Alphabet from orbit is not an option.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Reasonable demand from whom? The groups that have the power to demand they do this are the same ones involved in the chaos and have no onus to ensure that google keeps this data around, and as much as the US flip flops in political power it can go from they must keep this data one year to they must get rid of it the next. No, the only reasonable demand in a world that has already embraced insanity is that you keep the data and share it with others. Why not get together with others of the same mindset and form voluntary entities that keep this data safe. Trusting the government to keep the audit data on itself won't always work, and the 4th estate of the large media has been bought off by large companies that are much more apt to work in the governments interests to make as much profit as possible at the cost of democracy.
    - cess11 1y ago
      I wrote it so clearly it's from me. Is this your view on corporations having to keep and make public their accounting records as well? If not, what's the difference?
- 1y ago
Sayrus 1y ago
To people interested in archiving this, it's still in the 7 days time history in BigQuery Public Dataset: For instance: SELECT country FROM `bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads.geo_spend` FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 6 DAY) GROUP BY country;
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  Could someone get Archive Team on this? https://archiveteam.org https://archiveteam.org
  - Pikamander2 1y ago
    /r/DataHoarder as well https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
  - Sayrus 1y ago
    I dumped the all active tables (advertiser_declared_stats, advertiser_geo_spend, advertiser_stats, advertiser_weekly_spend, geo_spend, creative_stats) in CSV format. I'd prefer if someone did an archive where they are confident in the integrity of the dumped data but at least that version exists.
    - pabs3 1y ago
      Please upload those to archive.org.
      - Sayrus 1y ago
        https://archive.org/details/bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads-2025_09_23 https://archive.org/details/bigquery-public-data.google_poli...
- meindnoch 1y ago
  [flagged]
andrewstuart 1y ago
[flagged]
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  Why can't it be the fault of both parties?
  - andrewstuart 1y ago
    Because you’re responsible for your own data. It’s no one else’s job unless you pay them, which is you taking a backup. And when I say “a backup” I mean multiple backups different media different locations, different backup mechanisms depending on how much you really don’t want to lose the data.
    - b3lvedere 1y ago
      A very good backup has regular restore tests and the 3-2-1 system. An awesome backup has very regular restore tests and the 3-2-1-1 system.
      - andrewstuart 1y ago
        Don’t forget the backup system that backs up the AWS data to AWS using AWS backup systems that’s also a good approach. Or the decision not to backup your source code because “it’s on GitHub”. That’s also a ripper backup approach.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        That seems like an extremely poor approach. What if someone at Amazon accidentally deletes your account?
    - simonw 1y ago
      You seem to have misunderstood what is going on here. The data here is Google's data. They sell ads to political parties. They then make details of those ad sales available to researchers to let them understand how political ad spending is happening in different countries. This researcher is complaining that Google appear to have changed their mind about making that data available.
marginalia_nu 1y ago
Yeah hindsight is gonna be 20-20 as always, but in general if it's not on your hard drive, you have very little control over if and when it is deleted. First thing you should do if you find useful data is to archive it somehow.
helsinkiandrew 1y ago
The EU has new regulations on political ad transparency and targeting coming in this year with likely fines for non compliance. I imagine many of these old ads do not comply with the new rules so Google removed everything just to eliminate the risk of a fine or enforcement action. If these are important, people shouldn't rely on the ad agency archiving them.
- jrochkind1 1y ago
  I would think to reduce the risk of looking bad too, when people can see what was done on their ad network.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    The archive is still up for non-EU countries. They didn’t delete the entire archive. Only something specific to the EU, potentially due to some upcoming regulations there.
- wtcactus 1y ago
  Find me surprised the EU also has rules about this and everything else. No wonder we are getting left behind. We literally pay thousands of people out of our taxpayer money, to make life difficult for anyone that wants to do business. That’s all those bureaucrats in Brussels literally do: come up with yet more rules.
  - isodev 1y ago
    You really should inform yourself what "we" are paying exactly, is it "taxpayer" money and what it gets used for. You'd be surprised at the things around you that you take for granted are also driven by those same regulations.
  - notrealyme123 1y ago
    Protecting the free market is important for everyone doing business. The neo liberal dream of completely unconstrained markets leads to only monopolies and no competition.
fuzz_junket 1y ago
Archivist here. Google is not an archive. Neither is Tumblr or Flickr or any other platform that might delete your content at any time. They're companies and it's their job to make money. This is why my profession exists. We don't make money, which is why we're not well funded, but we have a whole lot of training, technical knowledge, and professional ethics around saving information and making it accessible. If you want to preserve your records, talk to an archivist because you can't assume some faceless corporation will do it for you.
- notachatbot123 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - api 1y ago
    You really want mandatory data retention laws? Think about the side effects of this. First of all, any such regulation is a regressive tax on small businesses. Small companies will find it harder to comply than large ones. The cost to Google would be trivial but for a small startup it might kill them, especially if retaining data isn't important to their business. Secondly, there are privacy implications. It's sometimes good when data is purged.
    - Fade_Dance 1y ago
      I agree with what you said here. I do think that with a slight modification, OP's statement can be improved in a practical way. "Regulations that allow consumers to export their data should be more comprehensive and standardized." I'll also note that many of these big services do allow you to export user data fairly easily.
    - squigz 1y ago
      Pretty sure GP was being sarcastic. But in any case, there's no reason we can't recognize that Google and other such massively-influential companies are hugely different from a small business and act accordingly.
    - 1y ago
deadbabe 1y ago
The audacity of people to think others should store data for them indefinitely is unbelievable. You had years to back this up if you really cared about it, and most probably don’t. Cry more. And history isn’t “erased”. It still happened. It’s up to you to remember it.
- __bjoernd 1y ago
  But they stored Google links! /s
ppetty 1y ago
Is the historical aspect of the archive coincidental? It seems like Google archived ads; and those ads provided historical context. How does this information get supplemented by other historical data? I wonder if it will be relevant to know that an ad in the US talked about people eating their pets, not trying to be sarcastic it is a real part of history.
jwald33 1y ago
Guys, this isn't Twitter, we don't have to be obtuse just to ramp up engagement. Right or wrong (evidently wrong), the common assumption has historically been that the Internet giants like Google assumed the mantle of facilitating, and to a lesser degree, preserving, the digital commons. Having your own backups and general data practices is still going to be the best strategy, but I don't think it's fair or good faith to act like everyone who got bit by this and similar instances is just an idiot.
- user3939382 1y ago
  Agree totally. I don’t agree with the requirement that we naively treat all corporations of all sizes from 5 people to 500,000 by the same rules. When your profits are socialized across the entire world you have special obligations. Sorry not sorry. How to correctly specify those obligations to avoid unintended consequences is a separate matter, maybe not even possible but it’s an orthogonal question.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    > When your profits are socialized across the entire world What does this mean?
- Finnucane 1y ago
  Platforms like Google, Meta, Xitter, and so on, have an incentive to save data, because mining that data is how they make money. So they save as much as they can for as long as they can. But if a mine is tapped out, it gets closed.
- jrmg 1y ago
  I’m willing to bet the reaction here would be different (not from everyone, but in aggregate) if the headline was “Sourceforge just erased years of free software history” or “Google Scholar just erased years of scientific history” because they’d just taken down all old repos or search results for old papers without any notice.
  - 1y ago
Rebuff5007 1y ago
Everyone here is commenting on the fact that you cannot depend on a big company to store backups for you. This is generally fair, but the company in question specifically has the following mission statement: > Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful At the very least, google has some responsibility in helping out web archivists...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- liveoneggs 1y ago
  "Don't be evil"
Cytobit 1y ago
This article reports on the removal of access to the ad archive. No where does it claim the onus is on Google to maintain this data. Most of top level comments here are arguing against a straw man.
refurb 1y ago
This erasure of our political past feels dangerous, for scrutiny, for accountability, for shared memory, for enforcement of our rules - for our democracy. My goodness, I wonder how long it took them to think this statement up? I imagine they revised it again and again asking the editor "does this sound scary enough?" to the point it bears little resemblance to reality. Google didn't delete your political history, it deleted it's own. You lost something that was given for free, thus could be taken away at any time. Apparently it was so important that it would be "dangerous" if it went away but the author couldn't put in a minimal amount of effort to make a copy of it.
niam 1y ago
I mostly agree with comments here saying this is kind of silly to malign Google for. I'm grateful for the piece regardless if only to inform me that the service exists (and, well — now doesn't for some countries).
mediumsmart 1y ago
They wouldn’t. You just can’t access it anymore. And there is a reason for that.
wtcactus 1y ago
It’s not Google’s responsibility to keep an archive of data a few people find important. If they find important to keep those ads get funding for their project and store it themselves. Ideally without further burdening taxpayers.
throwaway984393 1y ago
[dead]
titzer 1y ago
This thread is full of comments that miss the fact that political ads are not uploaded to Google for free. Advertising is 99% of the funding that sustains the platform and makes Google oodles of money, and when it no longer suits them (read: doesn't generate profit and might be risky), they're dropping the content. It'd be one thing if it was 20 petabytes of cat videos, but this is content that Google was literally paid to serve to people. The whole discussion is cosmically ironic.
- raincole 1y ago
  TV ads are not free either. But I don't think many people expect TV stations to archive every single ad forever. Stadium ads are not free either. But (ditto).
  - albumen 1y ago
    We're talking political advertising, not all ads. And 'broad'cast advertising is a different beast from hyper-targeted advertising that nobody but the intended recipient sees. In the latter case, political advertising archives offer insight into otherwise hidden advertising.
fedeb95 1y ago
no way, something on the internet disappeared?
dangoodmanUT 1y ago
It would be foolish to let Google (or any other company) be YOUR archivist
Aurornis 1y ago
There must be more to this story given that the political ad archive is still available for many other non-EU countries: > Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below): Is there some sort of EU data retention law at play here?
renegat0x0 1y ago
I maintain my own link meta archive. Just because I know that it will stay, but I am aware of link rot. I know also that internet archive exists, and also I know that it works painfully slow. I want to be able to at least browse headlines and titles about Jeffrey Epstein after 20 years, when they start erasing all history about him. Links: https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - Year 2025 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024 - Year 2024 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - Year 2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2022 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2022 - Year 2022 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2021 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2021 - Year 2021
wback100 1y ago
The Meta Ad Library may be next - possibly in a week or so. Creating an archive is a much bigger exercise than the Google one, particularly if the media files are part of the exercise. If anyone had the skill/resources to pull it off (27 EU countries, plus any UK data before they left the EU, all the way back to 2018), that would be an enormous public service.
wback100 1y ago
Meta will likely to the same next week. Anyone with the skills to create a copy for the EU back to 2018 would be doing an enormous public service. Particularly if they can get the media files too.

255 points by doener 1y ago

[flagged]

Maybe get your government to do this, instead of expecting some random company to do it for free indefinitely? This article could well be entitled "Google were the only people bothering to record our history."

dbspin 1y ago
Unfortunately people cannot 'get' their government to do much - and certainly not something as specific as this. Given that electoral leverage is a blunt and broad tool indeed. Also this is an EU level issue, not one pertaining to a national government.
AlecSchueler 1y ago
How could the government do this? At best they could make an archive of the data Google chooses to publish but to do it themselves would require mandating Google to share the data with them to begin with.
- weberer 1y ago
  The USA has https://data.gov https://data.gov. The EU could make something similar. >but to do it themselves would require mandating Google to share the data with them to begin with The data was already public
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    > The USA has https://data.gov https://data.gov Could you link specifically to the datasets about political advertising reach available via that website? I get no results > The data was already public Where?
    - weberer 1y ago
      >Could you link specifically to the datasets about political advertising reach available via that website? I get no results You asked "how could the government do this"? Come on, bro. >Where? The linked article explains where they were getting the data before.
      - AlecSchueler 1y ago
        > You asked "how could the government do this"? Come on, bro. And you gave a generic link showing that they could share "data" in general. Not this kind of data. Like "come on bro" both Ireland and the EU already have generic data portals... > The linked article explains where they were getting the data before. Yes, from the company who choose to share the data. There's no way to get the date from inside the company. In order for the government to publish the data they need to rely on the very same private company to supply them with it indefinitely, don't they? Again, "come on bro"...
grafmax 1y ago
These businesses built what have become the commons, which they retain control over through mechanisms like network effects, which allow them to make unaccountable decisions on the one hand and profit from rentierism on the other. It would probably be in people’s interest for their governments to seize these assets and socialize them as public utilities.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Then I suggest electing a government that's interested in doing what's in the people's interest.
  - grafmax 1y ago
    Big tech effectively owns the government, at least in the US. If people really want to fix this mess we need mass strikes.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
netsharc 1y ago
Meh, if your government then decides to make the country great again, it'll be deleting stuff that it thinks is not great...
titzer 1y ago
Missing in this analysis is that advertisers did not, in fact, put ads on Google for free. While it's surely not part of the terms of service that Google is going to "back up" your ads indefinitely, the calculus employed in this thread is very, very wrong. Google made huge profits on political ads and when it no longer suits them to spend paltry disk space on them, it's dropping them like a hot rock. Stop pretending like Google was somehow offering a platform that people were freeloading on. Rather, these political ads were 100% the funding that sustains the platform and makes them and all their shareholders money.
tigerBL00D 1y ago
This is a very naive comment IMHO. There are very few governments in the word, if any, which could be trusted with something like that.

cramcgrab 1y ago

[flagged]

FridayoLeary 1y ago

Disappointing but i don't see any foul play from google like the headline kind of insinuates. Anyway their product support is notoriously fickle so why would you expect anything more of them. TLDR a policy change at google made the authors hobby more difficult or impossible because he didn't make any contingencies. Specifically they deleted political ad history for the EU.

AlecSchueler 1y ago
Where was the insinuation of foul play? I re-read the article with your criticism in mind, but it seems that they are basically just saying "this happened" and 'these are the negative consequences."
- olooney 1y ago
  The phrase "erased history" isn’t morally neutral. It carries a tone of judgment, even suggests censorship. If the author had wanted to appear neutral, they would have used "deleted" or "removed."
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    Neutrality, and the appearance of neutrality, are different things.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    Ah! I read the article twice but hadn't considered the headline. I guess some editor wanted it sexed up a bit before it was published, the article itself is quite matter of fact.

bitpush 1y ago

Why is it on Google to store political history?

cess11 1y ago
"But the ad archives were introduced 7 years ago for a reason - in no small part because of the chaos of the Brexit and Trump 2016 votes, and our own advocacy here in Ireland about interference in the 2018 8th amendment referendum. They were introduced to allow for scrutiny of campaigns, and also to provide a historical record so we could go back and look at what had been promised, and what had been spent, and to see if this lined up with what happened later. This erasure of our political past feels dangerous, for scrutiny, for accountability, for shared memory, for enforcement of our rules - for our democracy." It's a rather reasonable demand that they should keep a record of the political campaigns and psyops they make their dough from, at least if nuking Alphabet from orbit is not an option.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Reasonable demand from whom? The groups that have the power to demand they do this are the same ones involved in the chaos and have no onus to ensure that google keeps this data around, and as much as the US flip flops in political power it can go from they must keep this data one year to they must get rid of it the next. No, the only reasonable demand in a world that has already embraced insanity is that you keep the data and share it with others. Why not get together with others of the same mindset and form voluntary entities that keep this data safe. Trusting the government to keep the audit data on itself won't always work, and the 4th estate of the large media has been bought off by large companies that are much more apt to work in the governments interests to make as much profit as possible at the cost of democracy.
  - cess11 1y ago
    I wrote it so clearly it's from me. Is this your view on corporations having to keep and make public their accounting records as well? If not, what's the difference?
1y ago

Sayrus 1y ago

To people interested in archiving this, it's still in the 7 days time history in BigQuery Public Dataset: For instance: SELECT country FROM `bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads.geo_spend` FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 6 DAY) GROUP BY country;

wizzwizz4 1y ago
Could someone get Archive Team on this? https://archiveteam.org https://archiveteam.org
- Pikamander2 1y ago
  /r/DataHoarder as well https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
- Sayrus 1y ago
  I dumped the all active tables (advertiser_declared_stats, advertiser_geo_spend, advertiser_stats, advertiser_weekly_spend, geo_spend, creative_stats) in CSV format. I'd prefer if someone did an archive where they are confident in the integrity of the dumped data but at least that version exists.
  - pabs3 1y ago
    Please upload those to archive.org.
    - Sayrus 1y ago
      https://archive.org/details/bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads-2025_09_23 https://archive.org/details/bigquery-public-data.google_poli...
meindnoch 1y ago
[flagged]

andrewstuart 1y ago

[flagged]

happytoexplain 1y ago
Why can't it be the fault of both parties?
- andrewstuart 1y ago
  Because you’re responsible for your own data. It’s no one else’s job unless you pay them, which is you taking a backup. And when I say “a backup” I mean multiple backups different media different locations, different backup mechanisms depending on how much you really don’t want to lose the data.
  - b3lvedere 1y ago
    A very good backup has regular restore tests and the 3-2-1 system. An awesome backup has very regular restore tests and the 3-2-1-1 system.
    - andrewstuart 1y ago
      Don’t forget the backup system that backs up the AWS data to AWS using AWS backup systems that’s also a good approach. Or the decision not to backup your source code because “it’s on GitHub”. That’s also a ripper backup approach.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
        That seems like an extremely poor approach. What if someone at Amazon accidentally deletes your account?
  - simonw 1y ago
    You seem to have misunderstood what is going on here. The data here is Google's data. They sell ads to political parties. They then make details of those ad sales available to researchers to let them understand how political ad spending is happening in different countries. This researcher is complaining that Google appear to have changed their mind about making that data available.

marginalia_nu 1y ago

Yeah hindsight is gonna be 20-20 as always, but in general if it's not on your hard drive, you have very little control over if and when it is deleted. First thing you should do if you find useful data is to archive it somehow.

helsinkiandrew 1y ago

The EU has new regulations on political ad transparency and targeting coming in this year with likely fines for non compliance. I imagine many of these old ads do not comply with the new rules so Google removed everything just to eliminate the risk of a fine or enforcement action. If these are important, people shouldn't rely on the ad agency archiving them.

jrochkind1 1y ago
I would think to reduce the risk of looking bad too, when people can see what was done on their ad network.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  The archive is still up for non-EU countries. They didn’t delete the entire archive. Only something specific to the EU, potentially due to some upcoming regulations there.
wtcactus 1y ago
Find me surprised the EU also has rules about this and everything else. No wonder we are getting left behind. We literally pay thousands of people out of our taxpayer money, to make life difficult for anyone that wants to do business. That’s all those bureaucrats in Brussels literally do: come up with yet more rules.
- isodev 1y ago
  You really should inform yourself what "we" are paying exactly, is it "taxpayer" money and what it gets used for. You'd be surprised at the things around you that you take for granted are also driven by those same regulations.
- notrealyme123 1y ago
  Protecting the free market is important for everyone doing business. The neo liberal dream of completely unconstrained markets leads to only monopolies and no competition.

fuzz_junket 1y ago

Archivist here. Google is not an archive. Neither is Tumblr or Flickr or any other platform that might delete your content at any time. They're companies and it's their job to make money. This is why my profession exists. We don't make money, which is why we're not well funded, but we have a whole lot of training, technical knowledge, and professional ethics around saving information and making it accessible. If you want to preserve your records, talk to an archivist because you can't assume some faceless corporation will do it for you.

notachatbot123 1y ago
[flagged]
- api 1y ago
  You really want mandatory data retention laws? Think about the side effects of this. First of all, any such regulation is a regressive tax on small businesses. Small companies will find it harder to comply than large ones. The cost to Google would be trivial but for a small startup it might kill them, especially if retaining data isn't important to their business. Secondly, there are privacy implications. It's sometimes good when data is purged.
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    I agree with what you said here. I do think that with a slight modification, OP's statement can be improved in a practical way. "Regulations that allow consumers to export their data should be more comprehensive and standardized." I'll also note that many of these big services do allow you to export user data fairly easily.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Pretty sure GP was being sarcastic. But in any case, there's no reason we can't recognize that Google and other such massively-influential companies are hugely different from a small business and act accordingly.
  - 1y ago

deadbabe 1y ago

The audacity of people to think others should store data for them indefinitely is unbelievable. You had years to back this up if you really cared about it, and most probably don’t. Cry more. And history isn’t “erased”. It still happened. It’s up to you to remember it.

__bjoernd 1y ago
But they stored Google links! /s

ppetty 1y ago

Is the historical aspect of the archive coincidental? It seems like Google archived ads; and those ads provided historical context. How does this information get supplemented by other historical data? I wonder if it will be relevant to know that an ad in the US talked about people eating their pets, not trying to be sarcastic it is a real part of history.

jwald33 1y ago

Guys, this isn't Twitter, we don't have to be obtuse just to ramp up engagement. Right or wrong (evidently wrong), the common assumption has historically been that the Internet giants like Google assumed the mantle of facilitating, and to a lesser degree, preserving, the digital commons. Having your own backups and general data practices is still going to be the best strategy, but I don't think it's fair or good faith to act like everyone who got bit by this and similar instances is just an idiot.

user3939382 1y ago
Agree totally. I don’t agree with the requirement that we naively treat all corporations of all sizes from 5 people to 500,000 by the same rules. When your profits are socialized across the entire world you have special obligations. Sorry not sorry. How to correctly specify those obligations to avoid unintended consequences is a separate matter, maybe not even possible but it’s an orthogonal question.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > When your profits are socialized across the entire world What does this mean?
Finnucane 1y ago
Platforms like Google, Meta, Xitter, and so on, have an incentive to save data, because mining that data is how they make money. So they save as much as they can for as long as they can. But if a mine is tapped out, it gets closed.
jrmg 1y ago
I’m willing to bet the reaction here would be different (not from everyone, but in aggregate) if the headline was “Sourceforge just erased years of free software history” or “Google Scholar just erased years of scientific history” because they’d just taken down all old repos or search results for old papers without any notice.
- 1y ago

Rebuff5007 1y ago

Everyone here is commenting on the fact that you cannot depend on a big company to store backups for you. This is generally fair, but the company in question specifically has the following mission statement: > Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful At the very least, google has some responsibility in helping out web archivists...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
liveoneggs 1y ago
"Don't be evil"

Cytobit 1y ago

This article reports on the removal of access to the ad archive. No where does it claim the onus is on Google to maintain this data. Most of top level comments here are arguing against a straw man.

refurb 1y ago

This erasure of our political past feels dangerous, for scrutiny, for accountability, for shared memory, for enforcement of our rules - for our democracy. My goodness, I wonder how long it took them to think this statement up? I imagine they revised it again and again asking the editor "does this sound scary enough?" to the point it bears little resemblance to reality. Google didn't delete your political history, it deleted it's own. You lost something that was given for free, thus could be taken away at any time. Apparently it was so important that it would be "dangerous" if it went away but the author couldn't put in a minimal amount of effort to make a copy of it.

niam 1y ago

I mostly agree with comments here saying this is kind of silly to malign Google for. I'm grateful for the piece regardless if only to inform me that the service exists (and, well — now doesn't for some countries).

mediumsmart 1y ago

They wouldn’t. You just can’t access it anymore. And there is a reason for that.

wtcactus 1y ago

It’s not Google’s responsibility to keep an archive of data a few people find important. If they find important to keep those ads get funding for their project and store it themselves. Ideally without further burdening taxpayers.

throwaway984393 1y ago

[dead]

titzer 1y ago

This thread is full of comments that miss the fact that political ads are not uploaded to Google for free. Advertising is 99% of the funding that sustains the platform and makes Google oodles of money, and when it no longer suits them (read: doesn't generate profit and might be risky), they're dropping the content. It'd be one thing if it was 20 petabytes of cat videos, but this is content that Google was literally paid to serve to people. The whole discussion is cosmically ironic.

raincole 1y ago
TV ads are not free either. But I don't think many people expect TV stations to archive every single ad forever. Stadium ads are not free either. But (ditto).
- albumen 1y ago
  We're talking political advertising, not all ads. And 'broad'cast advertising is a different beast from hyper-targeted advertising that nobody but the intended recipient sees. In the latter case, political advertising archives offer insight into otherwise hidden advertising.

fedeb95 1y ago

no way, something on the internet disappeared?

dangoodmanUT 1y ago

It would be foolish to let Google (or any other company) be YOUR archivist

Aurornis 1y ago

There must be more to this story given that the political ad archive is still available for many other non-EU countries: > Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below): Is there some sort of EU data retention law at play here?

renegat0x0 1y ago

I maintain my own link meta archive. Just because I know that it will stay, but I am aware of link rot. I know also that internet archive exists, and also I know that it works painfully slow. I want to be able to at least browse headlines and titles about Jeffrey Epstein after 20 years, when they start erasing all history about him. Links: https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - Year 2025 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024 - Year 2024 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - Year 2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2022 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2022 - Year 2022 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2021 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2021 - Year 2021

wback100 1y ago

The Meta Ad Library may be next - possibly in a week or so. Creating an archive is a much bigger exercise than the Google one, particularly if the media files are part of the exercise. If anyone had the skill/resources to pull it off (27 EU countries, plus any UK data before they left the EU, all the way back to 2018), that would be an enormous public service.

wback100 1y ago

Meta will likely to the same next week. Anyone with the skills to create a copy for the EU back to 2018 would be doing an enormous public service. Particularly if they can get the media files too.