Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
453 comments
Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated.
To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is a paid service (I guess is youtube part of that?) now.
I just assumed if there was a problem we could youtube-dl everything, it didn't occur to me that control of the account would be suspended arbitrarily with no recourse for literally no reason. Despite reading about similar things here for years.
I guess I just thought those were lightning strikes, and I was focusing my time outside of work on the new SPA rollout we were working on for the company. I understand excuses like armpits are something we all have and they all smell, so I'll just say I fucked up and own it.
I appreciate all the advice and I understand why you are all saying what you are saying.
This was spur of the moment post (I didn't think it through) and I hadn't updated my contact information on my profile. I've done so now.
Thanks.
To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is a paid service (I guess is youtube part of that?) now.
I just assumed if there was a problem we could youtube-dl everything, it didn't occur to me that control of the account would be suspended arbitrarily with no recourse for literally no reason. Despite reading about similar things here for years.
I guess I just thought those were lightning strikes, and I was focusing my time outside of work on the new SPA rollout we were working on for the company. I understand excuses like armpits are something we all have and they all smell, so I'll just say I fucked up and own it.
I appreciate all the advice and I understand why you are all saying what you are saying.
This was spur of the moment post (I didn't think it through) and I hadn't updated my contact information on my profile. I've done so now.
Thanks.
Since you are paid customers you should escalate your issue through Google Workspace support https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213?hl=en
Insist that your issue be escalated to an internal bug so that it is properly triaged.
Even if the videos were deleted as part of the suspension, it's highly likely that there are still multiple backups and cached versions in Google's systems. They should be able to help you restore them at the very least.
Insist that your issue be escalated to an internal bug so that it is properly triaged.
Even if the videos were deleted as part of the suspension, it's highly likely that there are still multiple backups and cached versions in Google's systems. They should be able to help you restore them at the very least.
Worth a try but I’ve tried doing this before and they said it’s outside the scope of paid support.
Yet it's not outside of the Law. At least in Europe, they MUST give all your data back.
Assuming you mean the GDPR, it only obligates them to share the data they have. If their response is "we don't have that data any more", then the GDPR won't help you.
It opens them up for a massive claim if it later turns out that they really did have the data somewhere, though.
It opens them up for a massive claim if it later turns out that they really did have the data somewhere, though.
The "we don't have that data any more" should only apply to "I closed my account" not to the "we unilaterally chose to close you're account and delete all your data just because we can". And if they jumped the gun and can't, they must pay for the prejudice. Period.
They bet on people not suing and they're right most of the time customer don't demand. It does not mean, just because they actually get away with it by play dumb, that there are not legal basis.
They bet on people not suing and they're right most of the time customer don't demand. It does not mean, just because they actually get away with it by play dumb, that there are not legal basis.
It would certainly be interesting to see the limits of that law tested. Does a fragment in a cache count as them still having the data? What about a copy in an unallocated block on some disk? What about traces left after the data was overwritten (no storage medium is just bits at the physical layer) - are they obliged to extract every last bit that is technically possible?
Fulltime YouTuber here. Just as one datapoint, I was recently [very] pleasantly surprised to learn that YouTube was able to restore a video that I had accidentally deleted. It went back to being live as if nothing had happened—though my contacting support was admittedly right after the deletion happened.
You did the best you could with the information you were given. I don't think anyone should have to resort to building multiple NAS and distributing them geographically. It's 2022 and this an extremely esoteric thing to do.
Going forward though, Vimeo feels like a better fit for you guys. Caveat emptor, never rely on free services for critical parts of your operation.
Going forward though, Vimeo feels like a better fit for you guys. Caveat emptor, never rely on free services for critical parts of your operation.
> Caveat emptor, never rely on free services for critical parts of your operation.
Don't rely on a single service. Having the same data at two free services is probably more safe than relying on a single paid service. At least for data loss.
If data is sensitive don't rely on any service, just encrypt it with your own key.
Don't rely on a single service. Having the same data at two free services is probably more safe than relying on a single paid service. At least for data loss.
If data is sensitive don't rely on any service, just encrypt it with your own key.
>I don't think anyone should have to resort to building multiple NAS and distributing them geographically. It's 2022 and this an extremely esoteric thing to do.
Given how giant companies (especially Google) behave, I do not feel it is an esoteric thing to do. Anyone with even a modicum of technical skill can roll their DIY NAS. For the non-tech savvy, buying off the shelf is fine.
Should not be needed in real life but this is the world we live in where robots have way too powerful ban hammers and the only way to get any support is to make sound in public forums or have a large social following.
Given how giant companies (especially Google) behave, I do not feel it is an esoteric thing to do. Anyone with even a modicum of technical skill can roll their DIY NAS. For the non-tech savvy, buying off the shelf is fine.
Should not be needed in real life but this is the world we live in where robots have way too powerful ban hammers and the only way to get any support is to make sound in public forums or have a large social following.
I have technical skill but have never done this. Where do you start?
Buy commodity computer parts and build a PC. If it's strictly storage, then a cheap pentium/i3/Ryzen 3 would suffice. If you want to do more, then spec for a higher CPU. PCPartPicker should be able to give you the list of compatible parts.
Then depending on what you want out of the device, do one of the following -
1. If it's strictly storage and you want the niceties of ZFS, install TrueNAS 2. If you want expandable storage without ZFS + VMs + Docker with a nice GUI and are willing to pay for a license, install Unraid. 3. If you want ZFS-backed storage + VMs and no docker, and maybe some datacenter-style capabilities, install Proxmox 4. If you want all of the above and are willing to manually configure everything, then install Ubuntu Server + Cockpit for managing the machine headless + Portainer for managing a large number of docker containers.
Then depending on what you want out of the device, do one of the following -
1. If it's strictly storage and you want the niceties of ZFS, install TrueNAS 2. If you want expandable storage without ZFS + VMs + Docker with a nice GUI and are willing to pay for a license, install Unraid. 3. If you want ZFS-backed storage + VMs and no docker, and maybe some datacenter-style capabilities, install Proxmox 4. If you want all of the above and are willing to manually configure everything, then install Ubuntu Server + Cockpit for managing the machine headless + Portainer for managing a large number of docker containers.
If you can afford it, the easiest way to start might be to buy a popular NAS. I would recommend Synology. The setup and interface are fairly intuitive, especially if you're technical. Then as part of your workflow, just make sure the completed videos are stored on the NAS as they are uploaded to YouTube.
The important thing for your business going forward is to ensure that you have good contracts. Your contract with YouTube was their terms of service. Those terms basically give you no guarantees yet give Google immense freedom.
I think Vimeo is a good choice for hosting new videos. For archival I would consider just using a single NAS of your own and then have that replicate to Amazon Glacier in at least 1 other region (unless you already have the rack space and someone to physically manage the NAS box in another region).
I think Vimeo is a good choice for hosting new videos. For archival I would consider just using a single NAS of your own and then have that replicate to Amazon Glacier in at least 1 other region (unless you already have the rack space and someone to physically manage the NAS box in another region).
I wouldn't rely on a contract for archival services. Legal action can take several years to wind through the courts.
For gawd's sake, buy some terabyte drives and make a backup that you control. Mail a copy to your mom just in case.
For gawd's sake, buy some terabyte drives and make a backup that you control. Mail a copy to your mom just in case.
Hence why I didn't say to use Glacier as the only archival copy. In the setup I'm proposing, they would have a copy on Vimeo, at least 1 copy on Glacier, and a copy on their NAS. An offline backup mailed to his mom isn't a bad idea either though.
The point I'm making about contracts here is not solely about having the option to sue if the other party doesn't uphold their end of the contract. It's about even having the option to agree to conditions that aren't ridiculously one-sided in the first place.
The point I'm making about contracts here is not solely about having the option to sue if the other party doesn't uphold their end of the contract. It's about even having the option to agree to conditions that aren't ridiculously one-sided in the first place.
Back up everything in G-Suite outside of Google. If your Youtube account is connected to your G-Suite services they are at risk as well.
Geo dispersed NAS is probably the most cost effective long term but for now the important thing is getting data off Google services before you lose it forever. So take a look at other cloud providers in the short term. The more you interact with Google and ask questions the more likely it is they shut down more access.
If you have your domains registered with them move it somewhere else, preferably a dedicated registrar so you can at least re-host email and website.
Geo dispersed NAS is probably the most cost effective long term but for now the important thing is getting data off Google services before you lose it forever. So take a look at other cloud providers in the short term. The more you interact with Google and ask questions the more likely it is they shut down more access.
If you have your domains registered with them move it somewhere else, preferably a dedicated registrar so you can at least re-host email and website.
This cross-connection of services scares me as well. I once happily ordered a Pixel phone using my gmail account. The phone was stolen before delivery (the delivery guy handed me an empty box with a hole in it!).
I reported the situation to Google and they could confirm with the parcel company the delivery was not completed successfully (plus some additional background checks they did after requesting access to my account) and they refunded the order.
The thing is I was not brave enough to place a second order of a Pixel because of fear of risking closure of my gmail account if the phone in the second order was also stolen before delivery, so I ended up ordering a Nokia instead.
I reported the situation to Google and they could confirm with the parcel company the delivery was not completed successfully (plus some additional background checks they did after requesting access to my account) and they refunded the order.
The thing is I was not brave enough to place a second order of a Pixel because of fear of risking closure of my gmail account if the phone in the second order was also stolen before delivery, so I ended up ordering a Nokia instead.
You can buy 16 terabyte drives for $300 or so. Cost shouldn't be a problem to back up your videos.
I second this. I can't fathom that on HN of all sites people recommend renting backup space from the same big tech companies that continuously fuck over people. Setting up a NAS is not magic. Setting up two isn't either. Put one in you parents basement and check on it once every year when you visit for Christmas. If you don't need 16TB go with an SSD (although with the current contamination situation not the best timing to buy flash).
Don't even need to be NAS, couple external HDDs work as well. Add the new videos every month or something. Keep one at work and one at home. Or in some other place. Anyone not Gen Z should be entirely familiar with process of moving files between disks.
Yup. I just buy bare drives, and have a SATA-to-USB adapter, and away we go. Although I did write my own rsync clone program to do the work (it only copies changed files).
Aren't you making it sound a bit too easy and straightforward than it actually is? It might be that simple for you but buying a NAS device like from synology can be pricey too, setting it all up so it is secure but network accessible, and then also handling possible drive failures down the line (and the chances of that are much higher than google fucking you over IMHO) is much more than an average non-tech-savvy user would be interested in.
How expensive was losing 7 years of work?
People look at the cost of properly storing the data without thinking of the cost of not doing it.
A team I was helping with was in charge of making a lot of training videos which were then used in paid classes. Several employees working at least 4 days a week shooting and editing videos. They had been keeping all their master copies on the same memory cards they used in their cameras, "backups are too expensive!". Then one of their memory cards corrupted, and I asked them to calculate the amount of salary went in to making the data on that flash card.
That afternoon a NAS was delivered with authorization to backup that to separate cloud services. Suddenly when they bothered to have that perspective the cost of a NAS was dirt cheap despite being way too expensive days before.
People look at the cost of properly storing the data without thinking of the cost of not doing it.
A team I was helping with was in charge of making a lot of training videos which were then used in paid classes. Several employees working at least 4 days a week shooting and editing videos. They had been keeping all their master copies on the same memory cards they used in their cameras, "backups are too expensive!". Then one of their memory cards corrupted, and I asked them to calculate the amount of salary went in to making the data on that flash card.
That afternoon a NAS was delivered with authorization to backup that to separate cloud services. Suddenly when they bothered to have that perspective the cost of a NAS was dirt cheap despite being way too expensive days before.
Maybe not really easy but it is really just due-diligence and getting a solution that is worth the money you are making by providing the service.
If you weren't a mechanic, you wouldn't avoid maintaining a car and then get upset that it broke down eventually, you would pay a specialist to maintain it for you.
Youtube is cool because it's "free" but you also get almost zero support from Google and they are pretty the worst in my opinion. I have got decent support from AWS and Microsoft (never tried with FB).
If you weren't a mechanic, you wouldn't avoid maintaining a car and then get upset that it broke down eventually, you would pay a specialist to maintain it for you.
Youtube is cool because it's "free" but you also get almost zero support from Google and they are pretty the worst in my opinion. I have got decent support from AWS and Microsoft (never tried with FB).
Yes, I wouldn't recommend my mom do it. This was with the average HNer in mind, but even an average tech enthusiast could do it. I think the OP commented here too saying he is a techie.
But tbh I think even getting and external drive and backing up to it should at least be done in parallel to any cloud service you choose.
But tbh I think even getting and external drive and backing up to it should at least be done in parallel to any cloud service you choose.
You're making this too complicated. Upload the video to youtube, then plug in your 16TB USB drive and copy the file there as well, then unplug the drive and put it back on the shelf. When you fill up one drive, you buy another, and the first one stays in the closet, forever. That's it.
If youtube deletes your account, you take the drives out of the closet and re-upload. If a drive fails, you use youtube-dl to repopulate it.
The only way this fails is if a drive dies / house fire on the same day that youtube deletes your account. If you are really that paranoid about it, keep a second copy of each drive at work / home. But you really, really don't need to.
If youtube deletes your account, you take the drives out of the closet and re-upload. If a drive fails, you use youtube-dl to repopulate it.
The only way this fails is if a drive dies / house fire on the same day that youtube deletes your account. If you are really that paranoid about it, keep a second copy of each drive at work / home. But you really, really don't need to.
Indeed you have become one of those "lightning strikes". What would have convinced you that it was a real possibility though?
Even reading this post, many readers are will also just assume the same as you did, that it was a lightning strike and will never happen to them... Not sure i have a solution myself.
Even reading this post, many readers are will also just assume the same as you did, that it was a lightning strike and will never happen to them... Not sure i have a solution myself.
First, IANAL.
This is really dependent on where you live, but as you are paid customers I would suggest to file a lawsuit in a small claims court. Seriously! Google is not playing its part on a legally binding contract, and money exchanging hands is enough to make it valid for the courts. The amount of work poured into these videos, compared with the equivalent compensation that you would have to pay for an employee to make the same work would also qualify for damages. This can also protect you against retaliation from google. But again, IANAL and check our local legislation carefully before.
Where I live it's a thing a person can do in an afternoon (usually takes less time than fighting big companies' support online), do not require lawyers, and the other part also can not bring a lawyer to conciliatory session (for big companies this is usually a sham: even if their representative does not have a lawyer present at court, be sure that s/he was heavily counseled by company legal staff before and everything presented was proofread by them too).
This is really dependent on where you live, but as you are paid customers I would suggest to file a lawsuit in a small claims court. Seriously! Google is not playing its part on a legally binding contract, and money exchanging hands is enough to make it valid for the courts. The amount of work poured into these videos, compared with the equivalent compensation that you would have to pay for an employee to make the same work would also qualify for damages. This can also protect you against retaliation from google. But again, IANAL and check our local legislation carefully before.
Where I live it's a thing a person can do in an afternoon (usually takes less time than fighting big companies' support online), do not require lawyers, and the other part also can not bring a lawyer to conciliatory session (for big companies this is usually a sham: even if their representative does not have a lawyer present at court, be sure that s/he was heavily counseled by company legal staff before and everything presented was proofread by them too).
> multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated
I decided to look at using AWS S3 to archive my media library. If you use the `DEEP_ARCHIVE` storage class, I believe costs are ~$1 per month per TB. The downside of such a storage class is that it takes ~48 hours for files to be "defrosted" and ready to download.
Before I push any of my media (that I have legally purchased), I also encrypt it to hedge the risk that AWS suddenly decides to start doing automated scans/fingerprinting for copyrighted content. I assume that's overkill but w/e.
Here is a CLI I wrote to make the above a bit easier: https://gitlab.com/tlonny/dfrost
I decided to look at using AWS S3 to archive my media library. If you use the `DEEP_ARCHIVE` storage class, I believe costs are ~$1 per month per TB. The downside of such a storage class is that it takes ~48 hours for files to be "defrosted" and ready to download.
Before I push any of my media (that I have legally purchased), I also encrypt it to hedge the risk that AWS suddenly decides to start doing automated scans/fingerprinting for copyrighted content. I assume that's overkill but w/e.
Here is a CLI I wrote to make the above a bit easier: https://gitlab.com/tlonny/dfrost
Probably not that expensive. Vimeo cheapest plan is $7/month (w/ limits) and $50 for unlimited plan and cloud storage (for backup) is cost competitive. Even having it on a local disk would probably be enough. But... it's not your fault. It's just that despite the propaganda these companies don't give a fuck about their users.
cost competitive against free?
lol
Evidently "free" has other costs, like "we're going to delete your stuff and there's nothing you can do about it".
So on balance I'd say paying for something is a pretty good deal.
So on balance I'd say paying for something is a pretty good deal.
Free is perfect for content that is free to make. If your content has clear monetary value in workhourse, why not pay at least fraction of that for actual service?
Free as in serfdom, you don't own a thing, you have no right, your content can be deleted for any reason at any time without recourse.
> multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated
As some one working in storage, please do not get tons of NAS they are pain to manage eventually. Example: linus-tech-tips could not do it properly.
If you use youtube-dl how large is one video? Lets say 2 GB. I presume, every week you create have 2 videos? Then 4GB per week.
Google gives you $20 for 100 GB. Every year create a new account - like - company name.2022 dump everything there. Hire an clerk to make sure the credit card is payed every year.
That way you do not lose all videos at a time.
Heck you can even create free Google drive account every few months and segment them.
As some one working in storage, please do not get tons of NAS they are pain to manage eventually. Example: linus-tech-tips could not do it properly.
If you use youtube-dl how large is one video? Lets say 2 GB. I presume, every week you create have 2 videos? Then 4GB per week.
Google gives you $20 for 100 GB. Every year create a new account - like - company name.2022 dump everything there. Hire an clerk to make sure the credit card is payed every year.
That way you do not lose all videos at a time.
Heck you can even create free Google drive account every few months and segment them.
Linus tech tips are not exactly professionals though they have learnt a bit over the years, but it is why they mess up all the time. It makes it amusing for me, but their advice is often worst practice.
NAS is fine if you know what you are doing, cloud storage (S3, GCS, B2) is probably best though.
NAS is fine if you know what you are doing, cloud storage (S3, GCS, B2) is probably best though.
Recommending Google as a backup in case Google decides to delete your videos sounds a bit suboptimal. Go with hosted backup; sure, for this use case that makes sense. But do so with a different company.
acquiring talent to manage google drive is easy. Not cheap or easy for Amazon/B2.
Please note that Google are perfectly happy to ban all of your accounts simultaneously. And your neighbors' accounts, apparently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ckoej1/googles_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ckoej1/googles_...
Note that in 7 years OP had one problem now... I know people with local NAS one need to do maintenance and so on. Again, depends on your technical ability. Bit-rot, power failures etc.
Why do you need to hire extra people to manage a cloud storage account with two file uploads per week?
Linus Tech Tips built and installed a custom ZFSonLinux server, which I'd also not suggest OP does.
The difficulty in managing a NAS is completely different if you buy two off-the-shelf Synology boxes and log in and point-and-click turn on snapshot sync between the two and create an Amazon Glacier backup task.
The difficulty in managing a NAS is completely different if you buy two off-the-shelf Synology boxes and log in and point-and-click turn on snapshot sync between the two and create an Amazon Glacier backup task.
Perhaps you need to look at average human trying to setup a router/DSL modem in a house hold. Then you may note that all your second sentence is a large task for any CEO. (No offence they are good in their field but anything more than dropbox or email or drive is a no go!)
CEOs are supposed to, like, delegate.
That's unnecessarily complicated and expensive.
Object storage like Wasabi and BackBlaze B2 are $6/year for 100GB, and much easier to upload, maintain and retrieve from in the future.
Object storage like Wasabi and BackBlaze B2 are $6/year for 100GB, and much easier to upload, maintain and retrieve from in the future.
Wouldnt this be against the TOS and then get another strike?
If you're a paid G-Suite user, you might be able to get help that way. I'm pretty sure I have heard of others doing something like that.
In my experience, paid GSuite "support" are just underpaid contractors in developing countries who don't have much power to do anything outside of a few common actions in response to customers' requests.
strange, every time Ive contacted gsuite support I've gotten timely professional support
Yep, even if you pay Gsuite you get some guy in the middle of nowhere earth just feeding you macros for support. They don't care at all big gov contracts is their business
AWS Glacier or some similar service on Azure. Super cheap. Cloudflare will store and stream 1000 minutes for $6 a month.
For write and store content would m-disc work better?
It's not cheap but passive.
It's not cheap but passive.
If the account can still login in any capacity, please attempt a takeout of the the youtube account.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?p...
This will generate a link that could possibly have an archive of every video uploaded by that account.
You don't have have any contact information listed on your account page. Please do so.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?p...
This will generate a link that could possibly have an archive of every video uploaded by that account.
You don't have have any contact information listed on your account page. Please do so.
I have added contact information, sorry about that, take out reports less than one megabyte.
"Unable to access a Google product If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended."
This is so incredibly frustrating. I wish I had asked on hacker news before trying for so long to get a response from google.
"Unable to access a Google product If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended."
This is so incredibly frustrating. I wish I had asked on hacker news before trying for so long to get a response from google.
Just thinking out loud, I wonder if this falls afoul of the GDPR for users in the EU in any way. This "access is blocked" position kind of leaves hanging whether data has explicitly been retained or deleted; so in scenarios where a user could demonstrate incontrovertible proof that they uploaded some information to a service and did not delete it, it would be interesting to see if the user could leverage freedom-of-information or similar to regain access to their data. My naive guess is that the only legitimate scenario where the service could deny this is where the content is illegal - and I (loosely) understand that the GDPR has stipulations requiring humans to be able to review and revert automated/AI actions applied to user data, so issuing a FOIA-type request could make for a fairly intuitive way to kick the tires in these sorts of situations - worst case scenario the service hands the user their data and tells them to leave, best case scenario (sigh) there's no explanation and everything goes back to normal :( (hmph)
*If* this is possible, of course, it only works where the GDPR holds ground - so the EU, sadly. But again, *if* this is actually possible, that's a pretty big win for the GDPR and all the more reason to make noises about it.
Which was why I was wondering out loud - I'm curious how far detached my mental model is from reality.
*If* this is possible, of course, it only works where the GDPR holds ground - so the EU, sadly. But again, *if* this is actually possible, that's a pretty big win for the GDPR and all the more reason to make noises about it.
Which was why I was wondering out loud - I'm curious how far detached my mental model is from reality.
I think GDPR rules would be cleared with Google effectively deleting all the data, which could be their laziest solution to a legal request…
Deleting data in response to a GDPR request is explicitly illegal under the GDPR.
Oh, that's pretty awesome!
Oooooh, I wonder what happens if I signed up for a service and then requested "all current and future data on, about and related to me"... that would mean it couldn't be deleted until I'd been sent a copy.
Forward-acting, perpetual motion FOIA machine go brrrt? Yes please lol
Oooooh, I wonder what happens if I signed up for a service and then requested "all current and future data on, about and related to me"... that would mean it couldn't be deleted until I'd been sent a copy.
Forward-acting, perpetual motion FOIA machine go brrrt? Yes please lol
I don't think the GDPR gives you any right to request future data (you can make another request in the future but that will only cover the data stored at the time of that request) so they can always delete the data after providing it to you - which I think is fair.
I stand corrected
No, they actually have to keep the data safe for their users. Deleting the data is a GDPR violation.
To be clearer : they're free to delete the data in normal times. But once you request it, they can't delete it between receiving your request and answering it. They're free to delete it again after answering.
*Headdesk*
D:
D:
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?
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have heard the "big enough to sue" which is also "big enough to afford the indemnity insurance in case they're sued" is a common problem in Australian government contracting.
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.
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.
It’s fair to say that working with smaller companies has different risks, but that doesn’t mean that working with large companies reduces project risk. It’s just trading one set of risks for another.
I have personally seen one of the big consultants change entire project methodologies twice - at the customer’s expense - within 6 months, in the same project.
This is leaning more into the big business revolving door problem - but in any case, I don’t think it’s widely accepted that the big consultants reduce project risks in any meaningful way.
And quite frankly, if your strategy is to sue a company if things go pear shaped, why in gods name would you choose IBM as your partner?
I have personally seen one of the big consultants change entire project methodologies twice - at the customer’s expense - within 6 months, in the same project.
This is leaning more into the big business revolving door problem - but in any case, I don’t think it’s widely accepted that the big consultants reduce project risks in any meaningful way.
And quite frankly, if your strategy is to sue a company if things go pear shaped, why in gods name would you choose IBM as your partner?
This is an absurd argument trotted out by people who -- to be blunt -- have absolutely no idea what really goes on.
Lawsuits by government agencies against suppliers are rare, and likely to result in a loss if attempted against large corporations. Companies like Microsoft or Oracle have armies of the best lawyers on retainer. Government agencies can only afford the ones that have sensible shoes and patches on their jacket elbows.
A recent case in point: The NSW Transport department had a legal spat with a huge contracting company Acciona, and ended up losing the court case to the tune of over half a billion dollars!
That specific case made me laugh out loud because the company I worked for had signed a very similar contract with the same department. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some sort of joke that nobody in their right mind would sign (on the government side). It included none of the "hard but essential" bits, and all of the easy fluffy bits. They signed it. They argued with us over non-delivery. We pointed at the contract and made them pay us 5x more than the original amount to do the actual, hard work.
The real reason that government agencies like big contractors is because they are reassuringly expensive. They're the "big name" that looks good in reports. They're chosen by people with unlimited funding, no profit motive, and the power to choose a vendor with the sole motivation of covering their ass. That's it. No need to be "efficient", or "fit for purpose", or any such thing.
These decisions are all made by a small number of people acting in individual self-interest. Optimising for their own continued employment. They're trading your taxes so that in the event of a failure they can point at the name on the report memo and say: "See! Not even Big Name Vendor could implement this! It's not my fault!"
I once got "fired" from a consulting gigs where things went wrong and I took it very hard. A salesman explained that our purpose is to be easily fire-able so that the manager at the customer can keep his job. That's why he paid us triple rates compared to a direct contractor. I was back on that site 12 months later, once everybody forgot who I was.
TL;DR: Organisations that mis-allocate punishment and reward force their internal middle-managers to protect themselves at the expense of the organisation. Big consulting firms exist to milk these inefficient organisations, and this has nothing to do with lawsuits.
Lawsuits by government agencies against suppliers are rare, and likely to result in a loss if attempted against large corporations. Companies like Microsoft or Oracle have armies of the best lawyers on retainer. Government agencies can only afford the ones that have sensible shoes and patches on their jacket elbows.
A recent case in point: The NSW Transport department had a legal spat with a huge contracting company Acciona, and ended up losing the court case to the tune of over half a billion dollars!
That specific case made me laugh out loud because the company I worked for had signed a very similar contract with the same department. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some sort of joke that nobody in their right mind would sign (on the government side). It included none of the "hard but essential" bits, and all of the easy fluffy bits. They signed it. They argued with us over non-delivery. We pointed at the contract and made them pay us 5x more than the original amount to do the actual, hard work.
The real reason that government agencies like big contractors is because they are reassuringly expensive. They're the "big name" that looks good in reports. They're chosen by people with unlimited funding, no profit motive, and the power to choose a vendor with the sole motivation of covering their ass. That's it. No need to be "efficient", or "fit for purpose", or any such thing.
These decisions are all made by a small number of people acting in individual self-interest. Optimising for their own continued employment. They're trading your taxes so that in the event of a failure they can point at the name on the report memo and say: "See! Not even Big Name Vendor could implement this! It's not my fault!"
I once got "fired" from a consulting gigs where things went wrong and I took it very hard. A salesman explained that our purpose is to be easily fire-able so that the manager at the customer can keep his job. That's why he paid us triple rates compared to a direct contractor. I was back on that site 12 months later, once everybody forgot who I was.
TL;DR: Organisations that mis-allocate punishment and reward force their internal middle-managers to protect themselves at the expense of the organisation. Big consulting firms exist to milk these inefficient organisations, and this has nothing to do with lawsuits.
I spent some time at a large .gov entity. Our terms were pretty brutal, to the point that big companies would only contract via third parties.
Acquainted with a few pretty terminations for cause, some of which put resellers out of business.
Acquainted with a few pretty terminations for cause, some of which put resellers out of business.
I have extensive experience in the outsourcing and contracting business for large institutions, and none of what you're saying is a refutation.
Of course lawsuits against suppliers are rare, because conflicts between suppliers and clients are resolved through contract law. When I was managing customers' servers we had specific SLAs and service metrics that if not attended to resulted in the supplier reimbursing the customer by a _nice_ amount. A Sev1 incident on mainframes that was attended to later than expected could cost tens of thousands to the supplier.
You point to government agencies, but you forget that the consumers of these services are also large Fortune500 companies with very explicit profit motives, cost-saving policies, and relatively effective IT departments. Large companies are as leery as governments of small suppliers for the same reasons. Is the argument valid considering that there are very competent organizations that hold the same reservations?
Of course lawsuits against suppliers are rare, because conflicts between suppliers and clients are resolved through contract law. When I was managing customers' servers we had specific SLAs and service metrics that if not attended to resulted in the supplier reimbursing the customer by a _nice_ amount. A Sev1 incident on mainframes that was attended to later than expected could cost tens of thousands to the supplier.
You point to government agencies, but you forget that the consumers of these services are also large Fortune500 companies with very explicit profit motives, cost-saving policies, and relatively effective IT departments. Large companies are as leery as governments of small suppliers for the same reasons. Is the argument valid considering that there are very competent organizations that hold the same reservations?
> company that's been in business for over a century isn't going to go out in a year
Lehman Brothers was around for 158 years and it imploded in much less than a year.
Lehman Brothers was around for 158 years and it imploded in much less than a year.
This is exactly why Facebook has so many video ads promoting new regulations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kur94OyXf3U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kur94OyXf3U
The video has no information about what they want the government to regulate. It links to this page:
https://about.fb.com/regulations/
Which then links to this page:
https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/four-ideas-regulate-intern...
Basically, what I gathered is that they want to create a high barrier to entry for their potential competitors, as one would expect. There is nothing useful to people in those regulations.
https://about.fb.com/regulations/
Which then links to this page:
https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/four-ideas-regulate-intern...
Basically, what I gathered is that they want to create a high barrier to entry for their potential competitors, as one would expect. There is nothing useful to people in those regulations.
I don't think regulating access to online accounts has to include anything about video hosting specifically. We need more of an "online bill of rights", which includes a right to download any data you've created before an account is closed. We could also throw in a right to privacy.
The bill of rights in the Constitution doesn't prohibit people from opening businesses - I don't see why an online bill of rights would do so
The bill of rights in the Constitution doesn't prohibit people from opening businesses - I don't see why an online bill of rights would do so
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the person who posted this nice-sounding comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30402432 has an email in their profile.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Worth giving a go at least...
My anecdotal experience (just poking around) is that Google never deletes publicly-facing data, because it's cheaper to just keep it. So there may be a reasonable chance the photos are tucked away somewhere, along with the metadata pointing them to the account in question.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Worth giving a go at least...
My anecdotal experience (just poking around) is that Google never deletes publicly-facing data, because it's cheaper to just keep it. So there may be a reasonable chance the photos are tucked away somewhere, along with the metadata pointing them to the account in question.
Why would he work for free for Google in the first place?
I submit edits to Google Maps occasionally (less often recently, as I mostly use OpenStreetMap these days). It's easy to do, helps others, and Google sure isn't gonna fix info on small businesses halfway across the world from their HQ.
Google makes it seem like you are doing charity and uses gamification to keep you hooked.
The gamification was a factor but also the person really enjoyed having their photos viewed by a lot of people.
They’d go out and photograph places that had poor photos on maps to improve them.
They’d go out and photograph places that had poor photos on maps to improve them.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fault is not with gallery destroying copy, but with destruction of the original.
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It should be treated like an easement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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=CEL...
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=CEL...
Why exclude text? Why shouldn't some spammer or like be able to get the textual content they have produced on that platform?
>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.
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.
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'.
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'.
>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.
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.
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.
Yes. But just want to mention self burnt DVD and CD degrade in quality over time. You may want something like M-Disk [1]. ( Someone on HN introduced it to me )
Unfortunately there aren't much R&D into optical disc technology. Would have been nice if we get 1TB per disc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Unfortunately there aren't much R&D into optical disc technology. Would have been nice if we get 1TB per disc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Right? And if you want redundancy, burn multiple copies on discs made by different manufacturers.
That said as said in the other comment M-DISC is really the way to go. Burn a couple of these, store them separately. They're rated for 1,000 years of storage if stored even somewhat properly. You can get them in 100GB sizes, so perfect for this kind of job. Burners aren't crazy expensive, 100GB discs were around $10/disc last time I bought.
That said as said in the other comment M-DISC is really the way to go. Burn a couple of these, store them separately. They're rated for 1,000 years of storage if stored even somewhat properly. You can get them in 100GB sizes, so perfect for this kind of job. Burners aren't crazy expensive, 100GB discs were around $10/disc last time I bought.
TrueNAS uses ZFS by default and they have small SOHO solutions [0], too.
[0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/#Configure
[0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/#Configure
Yes it was pointed out many times on HN, but TrueNAS Mini E starts diskless at $800. Not consumer range or are they consumer friendly. I was originally hoping Kobol [1] will get traction and once they gain economy of scale both in terms of hardware and software. It even has a Built-In UPS! And Things will improve. But the market and supply chain is simply too tough.
[1] https://kobol.io
[1] https://kobol.io
An s3 account in this case would work too..
Or a github account.
There are dozens of services that one could use to backup videos.
A stack of DVD's in a book shelf.
A stack of DVD's in a book shelf.
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.
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.
Lots of commenters rushing to chastise the user for not taking pro-active steps to preserve content, since your Google account (or any cloud account once a provider decides you've violated their Terms of Service) may go "poof".
Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?
Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?
Both of those things are true simultaneously. YouTube and other Google products are advised against for long term storage because Google's acting this way is entirely unacceptable. Until the latter can be fixed, the only real hedge a person has is to simply not rely entirely on Google for anything. That's just the reality of it.
Blame never rests on the user, either way. Google will always have far more power than the user.
Blame never rests on the user, either way. Google will always have far more power than the user.
It would. I hope people here work towards their companies regularly warning their customers that any content stored on their services can be gone any day without any warning.
Not that I'm justifying it, but isn't that part of every single ToS of web services?
"Your account may be terminated at any time"
No business owner wants to print that in large letters above every upload form: "Thanks for uploading, your content may be deleted at any time, keep a copy."
What we need though is some accountability especially from large companies and for real users.
How long can we go before we start treating online stuff like real stuff? Why is my car protected from theft but my data isn't?
"Your account may be terminated at any time"
No business owner wants to print that in large letters above every upload form: "Thanks for uploading, your content may be deleted at any time, keep a copy."
What we need though is some accountability especially from large companies and for real users.
How long can we go before we start treating online stuff like real stuff? Why is my car protected from theft but my data isn't?
Clearly many users here want it. Maybe even with these pop-on level forced notification boxes. And thus I recommend they fully start pushing such big red warning letters in the services they work with.
And size should have nothing to do with it. I believe treating most SaaS providers the same.
And size should have nothing to do with it. I believe treating most SaaS providers the same.
How about if durable archival was an upsell alongside upload?
So the issue is Google often takes down accounts with illegal content using the same process as here. Imagine the very real scenario that Google found CSAM on an account: They aren't going to let you access it or download it again for any amount of money.
And that's the problem here: With no humans in the process, YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way, because ultimately, algorithms are stupid and don't make good moderators.
And that's the problem here: With no humans in the process, YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way, because ultimately, algorithms are stupid and don't make good moderators.
> YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way
Does it have to be that way? There are various reasons for banning an account.
If the content is actually CSAM, then I imagine a provider's hands are tied under US law at least. But algorithmically flagged CSAM has a confidence percentage associated with it. A provider is not legally obligated to deny you archival access to video of a kid's pool party given a false positive flag by a scanning algo.
Then there are lots of other reasons that an account may end up banned where archival access doesn't necessarily have to be problematic. For example, there's no reason to take away access to completely original COVID denialist videos, even if the platform decides that it's not going to allow them to be shared.
Does it have to be that way? There are various reasons for banning an account.
If the content is actually CSAM, then I imagine a provider's hands are tied under US law at least. But algorithmically flagged CSAM has a confidence percentage associated with it. A provider is not legally obligated to deny you archival access to video of a kid's pool party given a false positive flag by a scanning algo.
Then there are lots of other reasons that an account may end up banned where archival access doesn't necessarily have to be problematic. For example, there's no reason to take away access to completely original COVID denialist videos, even if the platform decides that it's not going to allow them to be shared.
Solution: A button that says "Click here to pay $5 for a human to review your situation."
Good idea. Not sure why YouTube/Google doesn't do it. As you would think there is good money in it and better user relations. Possibly they like the authoritarian algorithm approach, and feel they are making enough money, so don't need to bother with alternatives or "lowly user" issues.
YouTube can undelete accounts. All of their old videos are still there.
I wonder how that would work, after certain amount of data or time period. For reasonable cost ship a tape archive or similar to customer?
For most services (certainly for Google) the cost of long-term storage isn't the main issue — it's the cost of supporting an appeals process when you have to deal with bad actors and legal complexities. We have to overcome the economics and legalities and make it feasible to provide download of the archived materials even after an account gets banned.
Brainstorming an interface, I can imaging "archive your original source materials" as an upsell alongside the YouTube upload, with an option to archive the actual video file as well. This would actually be enabled if you were to subscribe to the archival service, which would be paid in advance. Perhaps we can argue that such files should be considered private materials rather than redistributed works, so not subject to copyright takedowns.
Brainstorming an interface, I can imaging "archive your original source materials" as an upsell alongside the YouTube upload, with an option to archive the actual video file as well. This would actually be enabled if you were to subscribe to the archival service, which would be paid in advance. Perhaps we can argue that such files should be considered private materials rather than redistributed works, so not subject to copyright takedowns.
YouTube isn't a cloud storage service, let alone one a paid one. I'm not really sure what you'd expect them to do. If they lost access to their free Google drive I'd be more sympathetic.
Heyo,
First off, sorry to hear that this has happened to you. It's never the for tools to be abused like this and for support be to be so unreachable.
I've gone ahead and sent you an email so I can get some details and we can work to recover at least some of the content.
Q.
Disc: Googler, but I don't work in YouTube.
First off, sorry to hear that this has happened to you. It's never the for tools to be abused like this and for support be to be so unreachable.
I've gone ahead and sent you an email so I can get some details and we can work to recover at least some of the content.
Q.
Disc: Googler, but I don't work in YouTube.
:)
I hope OP got in touch. Thanks for doing the thing.
Reading the thread made me think of a curious idea. It's got a couple layers of nuance, but could ultimately be really cool.
In short: have a proactively-updated list somewhere that shows the presentation and content of every single email that will be sent before someone is due to lose access to a given service or their whole account.
For example this could look like a (perhaps loosely-interconnected) web of support.google URLs with content like "you might receive an email like the following" <insert HTML extract/embed or screenshot of exactly what the email looks like here> "and you can do" <insert brick wall here :)>.
If this were a reliable resource that stuck around, I could totally see a community-maintained tool emerging that would monitor for these sorts of emails then eg send emergency SMS/notifications/etc so that carefully-coordinated action could be undertaken immediately by competent users. These notifications could be sent to a tech-savvy family member or associate/colleague, who likely would not otherwise have access to the account in question. This person could then gain impromptu access (perhaps via remote access) and take immediate action such as generating takeouts (and perhaps sharding them to raise the chances they complete in time), individully downloading or screenshotting critical info, and firing out bulk alerts reminding of alternate contact info. Basically disaster-handling to try to end-cap workflow disruption while the mess (hOpEfUlLy) gets fixed.
I can't help but think there's probably a disconcertingly large proportion of grandmas and effectively-illiterate users being caught in situations where they have very literally no idea how to proceed (eg, none of their Facebook friends are going to have a clue).
It would seem there is enough awareness and reactivity localized around HN to make a difference to that 99th percentile, if harnessed in a constructive and non-disruptive way.
It's a nuanced idea, but I'm reminded of the old YouTube story where optimizing the homepage made the site seem to load slower because it became viewable by a large demographic of people using sub-2G connections. Here, I can certainly see a temporary uptick in apparent legitimate account closures as the true false positive gap is surfaced, and that might translate to a bit of a suboptimal reputation hit. But in the ideal case, the new feedback would be integrated quickly, that transient spike would soon be forgotten, and in the long term, integrating the new data would help to further micro-optimize the performance of the 99th percentiles involved with the ML analytics processes in ways that exceed expectations.
I'm thinking of the bigger-bigger picture; I understand it's simply impossible for Google to provide tier-one support to every single one of their four billion+ free users. This approach could implement an unorthodox workaround that lets motivated individuals contribute toward closing the loop of false positives. Currently it is effectively impossible for Google's userbase to take charge of this particular edge case. I am sure the number of people who would be very happy to take preventative action against false positives completely outweighs (perhaps by an order of magnitude) those who posture and rage and make themselves look stupid in the forums when things don't go their way.
Knowing what all (or almost all) warning emails look like ahead of time is the only way a significant dent could be made in the false positive statistics; there's nothing stopping a detection project from getting off the ground today, but the lists of what content patterns to look for would have to be forged in blood by users who've had their accounts shut down, with this status quo compounded every time the wording of the warning emails changes.
The one caveat emptor I can think of is that there is of course no way to prevent malicious users from taking advantage of a community initiative that enables a heightened baseline of proactivity, especially if it goes viral and is easy to use. But I'm honestly curious... how might this be the end of the world? The worst the malicious users can do is download their data, which a) they probably have a copy of anyway, and if they don't, b) wouldn't be a great look in legal cases where a defense can say "here is evidence ABC used XYZ software to monitor their account for shutdown, which is why shortly after *point* this email was sent they *point* submitted a takeout request 5 minutes later."
I can definitely see some legal/regulatory/policy hesitancy (sigh), but (from my position as a relatively naive random internet user) I'm hopeful that hesitancy would mostly be without precedential substance, and this could actually viably happen with a bit of gruntwork and convincing.
I hope OP got in touch. Thanks for doing the thing.
Reading the thread made me think of a curious idea. It's got a couple layers of nuance, but could ultimately be really cool.
In short: have a proactively-updated list somewhere that shows the presentation and content of every single email that will be sent before someone is due to lose access to a given service or their whole account.
For example this could look like a (perhaps loosely-interconnected) web of support.google URLs with content like "you might receive an email like the following" <insert HTML extract/embed or screenshot of exactly what the email looks like here> "and you can do" <insert brick wall here :)>.
If this were a reliable resource that stuck around, I could totally see a community-maintained tool emerging that would monitor for these sorts of emails then eg send emergency SMS/notifications/etc so that carefully-coordinated action could be undertaken immediately by competent users. These notifications could be sent to a tech-savvy family member or associate/colleague, who likely would not otherwise have access to the account in question. This person could then gain impromptu access (perhaps via remote access) and take immediate action such as generating takeouts (and perhaps sharding them to raise the chances they complete in time), individully downloading or screenshotting critical info, and firing out bulk alerts reminding of alternate contact info. Basically disaster-handling to try to end-cap workflow disruption while the mess (hOpEfUlLy) gets fixed.
I can't help but think there's probably a disconcertingly large proportion of grandmas and effectively-illiterate users being caught in situations where they have very literally no idea how to proceed (eg, none of their Facebook friends are going to have a clue).
It would seem there is enough awareness and reactivity localized around HN to make a difference to that 99th percentile, if harnessed in a constructive and non-disruptive way.
It's a nuanced idea, but I'm reminded of the old YouTube story where optimizing the homepage made the site seem to load slower because it became viewable by a large demographic of people using sub-2G connections. Here, I can certainly see a temporary uptick in apparent legitimate account closures as the true false positive gap is surfaced, and that might translate to a bit of a suboptimal reputation hit. But in the ideal case, the new feedback would be integrated quickly, that transient spike would soon be forgotten, and in the long term, integrating the new data would help to further micro-optimize the performance of the 99th percentiles involved with the ML analytics processes in ways that exceed expectations.
I'm thinking of the bigger-bigger picture; I understand it's simply impossible for Google to provide tier-one support to every single one of their four billion+ free users. This approach could implement an unorthodox workaround that lets motivated individuals contribute toward closing the loop of false positives. Currently it is effectively impossible for Google's userbase to take charge of this particular edge case. I am sure the number of people who would be very happy to take preventative action against false positives completely outweighs (perhaps by an order of magnitude) those who posture and rage and make themselves look stupid in the forums when things don't go their way.
Knowing what all (or almost all) warning emails look like ahead of time is the only way a significant dent could be made in the false positive statistics; there's nothing stopping a detection project from getting off the ground today, but the lists of what content patterns to look for would have to be forged in blood by users who've had their accounts shut down, with this status quo compounded every time the wording of the warning emails changes.
The one caveat emptor I can think of is that there is of course no way to prevent malicious users from taking advantage of a community initiative that enables a heightened baseline of proactivity, especially if it goes viral and is easy to use. But I'm honestly curious... how might this be the end of the world? The worst the malicious users can do is download their data, which a) they probably have a copy of anyway, and if they don't, b) wouldn't be a great look in legal cases where a defense can say "here is evidence ABC used XYZ software to monitor their account for shutdown, which is why shortly after *point* this email was sent they *point* submitted a takeout request 5 minutes later."
I can definitely see some legal/regulatory/policy hesitancy (sigh), but (from my position as a relatively naive random internet user) I'm hopeful that hesitancy would mostly be without precedential substance, and this could actually viably happen with a bit of gruntwork and convincing.
It's not a terrible idea, and personally, I believe we should be doing more proactive reach-out when events like this are happening. Thing like text messages, push notifications, and big red scary banners on the home pages of unrelated products.
I'll file a Feature Request internally, but given the scope I can't imagine things will be too quick.
Disc: Googler, not in YouTube
I'll file a Feature Request internally, but given the scope I can't imagine things will be too quick.
Disc: Googler, not in YouTube
If making changes to Google-side reach-out is actually possible, that's absolutely the far more realistic scenario here. My previous post is more of a Rube-Goldberg overengineered attempt at making the hockey puck meet the stick rather than the other way around.
Side-channeling "here's what our emails look like" kinda feels like kicking the info out a side door or something, which I can totally see internal clearances and perhaps legal just not liking the look of... and even if that approach did succeed, the less-straightforward internal handling associated with such an indirect strategy may well incur delays in updates and perhaps even occasional accidental article deletion (where the replacement articles wind up at different URLs and people have to take ages to find them... yep, Rube-Goldberg machine).
I can imagine a new broad scope in myaccount.google for "enhanced notifications" "if there is any suspicious activity with my account", with an associated stronger connection between account flagging events being classified in with suspicious activity in general.
Perhaps I'd first add other users' information under People & Sharing, allow them access to the relevant info in Data & privacy, then opt them in to security notifications in Security. (Where do I send my PM application again? ;) )
I'd probably want to be able to add direct SMS numbers (handled "magically" or "hands-off", like one-time verification codes etc, with the exception of being stored long-term) so that in worst-case situations if an entire group of accounts gets super-nuked or whatever (which presumably blacklists the contact methods associated with those accounts, including phone numbers - hence the idea of magical handling) I still receive last-resort notifications in case of edge-case mistakes. Obviously third-party email addresses would be ideal to add too (with the requisite amount of confirmation bustlework - I'm reminded of the absolute tantrum Gmail very appropriately pulls when you enable forwarding, maybe that would be too strong here but I imagine it might make for good inspiration). Adding Google accounts to send FCM push notifications to multiple stakeholders could also be a good idea (and, FWIW, may also create a helpful source of high-signal data to contribute to cross-account security analyses processes).
Generally I'm trying to cover 2-3 of broad bases here: that of having last-resort notifications still function in scenarios where the AI mistakenly decides everything about an account (or worse, set of accounts) is worst-case-scenario not-ham; making it possible to send those notifications to multiple users/contacts, including contacts that do not typically have access to a particular account; and making sure the notifications and pings actually get through even when the system really doesn't like someone.
Big scary banners on unrelated products is a great idea! I would never have thought of trying to vie for something like that, would have thought it would be possible.
Hmm, could you modify the user account avatar service so that if the user is requesting their own avatar they get served a giant exclamation instead? That could help serve as a perpetual reminder that would show up *everywhere* - Google homepage, account icons across the web and in random Android apps, etc etc. (Potential blocking issue: things might cache the avatar and get stuck.)
I've also occasionally seen how the homepage occasionally shows a very small infobox with a bit of text in it toward the lower quarter of the page. Perhaps this could be hijacked to prioritize showing the scary warning as well.
Totally understand that this'll move at "eventual consistency" pace :)
Feel free to copy the text of this and my parent (dumpster-fire...) comment into the feature request if that's helpful.
My motivation here is mostly a reaction to low-grade obsessive paranoia about AI glitching out on my or my family's accounts, and a strong interest in doing whatever I can to mitigate the fallout in the worst case scenario.
Thanks very much for replying!
Side-channeling "here's what our emails look like" kinda feels like kicking the info out a side door or something, which I can totally see internal clearances and perhaps legal just not liking the look of... and even if that approach did succeed, the less-straightforward internal handling associated with such an indirect strategy may well incur delays in updates and perhaps even occasional accidental article deletion (where the replacement articles wind up at different URLs and people have to take ages to find them... yep, Rube-Goldberg machine).
I can imagine a new broad scope in myaccount.google for "enhanced notifications" "if there is any suspicious activity with my account", with an associated stronger connection between account flagging events being classified in with suspicious activity in general.
Perhaps I'd first add other users' information under People & Sharing, allow them access to the relevant info in Data & privacy, then opt them in to security notifications in Security. (Where do I send my PM application again? ;) )
I'd probably want to be able to add direct SMS numbers (handled "magically" or "hands-off", like one-time verification codes etc, with the exception of being stored long-term) so that in worst-case situations if an entire group of accounts gets super-nuked or whatever (which presumably blacklists the contact methods associated with those accounts, including phone numbers - hence the idea of magical handling) I still receive last-resort notifications in case of edge-case mistakes. Obviously third-party email addresses would be ideal to add too (with the requisite amount of confirmation bustlework - I'm reminded of the absolute tantrum Gmail very appropriately pulls when you enable forwarding, maybe that would be too strong here but I imagine it might make for good inspiration). Adding Google accounts to send FCM push notifications to multiple stakeholders could also be a good idea (and, FWIW, may also create a helpful source of high-signal data to contribute to cross-account security analyses processes).
Generally I'm trying to cover 2-3 of broad bases here: that of having last-resort notifications still function in scenarios where the AI mistakenly decides everything about an account (or worse, set of accounts) is worst-case-scenario not-ham; making it possible to send those notifications to multiple users/contacts, including contacts that do not typically have access to a particular account; and making sure the notifications and pings actually get through even when the system really doesn't like someone.
Big scary banners on unrelated products is a great idea! I would never have thought of trying to vie for something like that, would have thought it would be possible.
Hmm, could you modify the user account avatar service so that if the user is requesting their own avatar they get served a giant exclamation instead? That could help serve as a perpetual reminder that would show up *everywhere* - Google homepage, account icons across the web and in random Android apps, etc etc. (Potential blocking issue: things might cache the avatar and get stuck.)
I've also occasionally seen how the homepage occasionally shows a very small infobox with a bit of text in it toward the lower quarter of the page. Perhaps this could be hijacked to prioritize showing the scary warning as well.
Totally understand that this'll move at "eventual consistency" pace :)
Feel free to copy the text of this and my parent (dumpster-fire...) comment into the feature request if that's helpful.
My motivation here is mostly a reaction to low-grade obsessive paranoia about AI glitching out on my or my family's accounts, and a strong interest in doing whatever I can to mitigate the fallout in the worst case scenario.
Thanks very much for replying!
FYI, before you chastise the OP for not backing up, please take a minute and think about the fact that this can happen with Gmail too. Have you backed up your email?
I think Google has the responsibility to make it VERY clear that you can lose access to your content without notice. I don't think users truly understand that now.
I think Google has the responsibility to make it VERY clear that you can lose access to your content without notice. I don't think users truly understand that now.
Seriously, we've been in this for a decade at least. There was enough time to learn this single lesson: data stored in someone's cloud is not your data.
In 2022 it's plain stupid to keep your email in Gmail or rely on Google Photos as the only storage for your family archive. People pay $15/mo for Netflix, but can't pay $50/year for a email address? Nobody will lend a random person $1000, but people still happily give their work, worth orders of magnitude more, to a company that has literally zero obligations to them.
I sincerely sympathize with this couple and wish they will eventually recover their stuff, but c'mon, let's be proactive and prevent such incidents (and educate/help others)
In 2022 it's plain stupid to keep your email in Gmail or rely on Google Photos as the only storage for your family archive. People pay $15/mo for Netflix, but can't pay $50/year for a email address? Nobody will lend a random person $1000, but people still happily give their work, worth orders of magnitude more, to a company that has literally zero obligations to them.
I sincerely sympathize with this couple and wish they will eventually recover their stuff, but c'mon, let's be proactive and prevent such incidents (and educate/help others)
But paying 50 USD still keeps the data in the cloud. You cannot spend money to solve the backup problem, you need a process and quite a lot of technical and organizational skill.
I honestly think there are less than 1 in 100 people who have a working system of backups that would bring them back all their photos taken from their mobile phones.
Since Google turned off syncing of photos to Google Drive, my system broke for instance. Like OP, I haven't had time to set a new backup process up since then.
I honestly think there are less than 1 in 100 people who have a working system of backups that would bring them back all their photos taken from their mobile phones.
Since Google turned off syncing of photos to Google Drive, my system broke for instance. Like OP, I haven't had time to set a new backup process up since then.
> Since Google turned off syncing of photos to Google Drive, my system broke for instance. Like OP, I haven't had time to set a new backup process up since then.
Do it now[1].
Assuming what you already have setup for Google Drive is using rclone, it's probably not going to take you longer than what it took to write that comment.
[1] https://wiki.emilburzo.com/backing-up-your-google-digital-li...
Do it now[1].
Assuming what you already have setup for Google Drive is using rclone, it's probably not going to take you longer than what it took to write that comment.
[1] https://wiki.emilburzo.com/backing-up-your-google-digital-li...
OP stated that they were paying customers, this is very troubling. But in any case, at least as a paying customer you might have some legal recourse. As a non paying customer I don't think you can do anything.
Also as you've mentioned you must have backups at all times. no matter if you're paying or not.
Sure, you still need to deal with backups, but at least you won't lose your email address if google decides to block your account. Also, if your email provider blocks your account, you just switch MX record to another one.
Any recommendations for commercial email?
I use fastmail + my own domain (so I'm still the owner of my own email address)
I agree. People quickly jump to "you're not paying for it so what did you expect" but without a warning in big red letters saying "we could fuck you over any day" this has the same vibe as a drug dealer giving you you first hit for free.
I lost access to my Yahoo mail address from teenage days and consecutively the YouTube account associated with it. The videos are still up and it's just random shenanigans, but still. Learned my lesson with big tech companies.
I lost access to my Yahoo mail address from teenage days and consecutively the YouTube account associated with it. The videos are still up and it's just random shenanigans, but still. Learned my lesson with big tech companies.
I hope that everyone here has taken action to push for those big warnings in their own SaaS and like products. And from now on always remember to tell that in their sales pitches. As anything else is just evil...
I don't see how users don't understand this by now.
I will not put anything on a cloud service (let alone a free cloud service) that I rely on in any way. Including E-mail. If my only copy of some content is in the cloud, that means I have deliberately made the decision that that content is expendable and my life would not be affected if my account disappeared tomorrow.
It's really sad that we have to read these stories weekly, but somehow the word just isn't getting out there. Don't rely on someone else's computer to host the only copy of irreplaceable content! This does not absolve cloud providers from being better stewards of people's data--it's just a cry to be careful with things that are valuable. I know this sounds like blaming the victim, but how many more of these stories have to be posted to overcome everyone's "It won't happen to me" attitude?
I will not put anything on a cloud service (let alone a free cloud service) that I rely on in any way. Including E-mail. If my only copy of some content is in the cloud, that means I have deliberately made the decision that that content is expendable and my life would not be affected if my account disappeared tomorrow.
It's really sad that we have to read these stories weekly, but somehow the word just isn't getting out there. Don't rely on someone else's computer to host the only copy of irreplaceable content! This does not absolve cloud providers from being better stewards of people's data--it's just a cry to be careful with things that are valuable. I know this sounds like blaming the victim, but how many more of these stories have to be posted to overcome everyone's "It won't happen to me" attitude?
I'm not sure how my parents would be able to run their own email service or manage a backup routine if they went the POP3 & SMTP route. The reason why cloud services have grown so much is because they make computing services accessible and easy to use for a much wider portion of the population. I think it will take multiple generations of technological fluency indoctrination before we can get to the point where people can use these types of services without relying on cloud services. Cloud services are likely here to stay and likely will maintain their power unless regulation steps in.
There's a big difference between free and paid cloud services.
Why do you think that? Most people actually need to pay Google at least for the data storage subscription.
Human-based support is one of the selling points of that subscription, right?
> It's really sad that we have to read these stories weekly, but somehow the word just isn't getting out there
It's because companies - sometimes purposefully - continue to make it difficult to maintain an off-line backup of cloud data in a reasonable way, and people can't be arsed to figure out how each service allows users to backup their data (if at all). The most accommodating cloud service on this front, google with their google takeout service, offer scheduled multi-GB zipped archives for download.
Backups should be automatic and standard. Offer a standard incremental syncing api (not downloads) and integrate it as an opt-out (not opt-in) step for signing up. Then have an industry-standard app (like how google authenticator is standard for otp) handle backups.
Anything more complicated than that and will continue reading stories like this.
It's because companies - sometimes purposefully - continue to make it difficult to maintain an off-line backup of cloud data in a reasonable way, and people can't be arsed to figure out how each service allows users to backup their data (if at all). The most accommodating cloud service on this front, google with their google takeout service, offer scheduled multi-GB zipped archives for download.
Backups should be automatic and standard. Offer a standard incremental syncing api (not downloads) and integrate it as an opt-out (not opt-in) step for signing up. Then have an industry-standard app (like how google authenticator is standard for otp) handle backups.
Anything more complicated than that and will continue reading stories like this.
I have been backing up my email since I was a young teenager.
These days, I grab my Google Takeout every year or so and also have a Fastmail account that pulls in every other email I receive.
These days, I grab my Google Takeout every year or so and also have a Fastmail account that pulls in every other email I receive.
>>Have you backed up your email?
Yes...
Every piece of data I have that I care about is backed up following a 3-2-1 model
I am also in the process of moving off Gmail due to the Legacy termination.
>I don't think users truly understand that now.
In my experience user don't truly understanding anything, given that I work in data storage I take is seriously, I am also called on my people on a semi regular basis to recover from data loss because their drive crashed, or something like that. every time I attempt to educate them on low cost backup solutions to prevent it in the future, less than 1% even after suffering data loss will learn the lesson and start doing backups
That is for onPrem hardware failure. For a service like Google, facebook, Microsoft, etc they just simply do not believe they will ever lose that data.
Hell just the other say in a sysadmin forum people were debating is business even need to backup data in Office 365 because "that would be a waste of money"
People have taken the meme of "internet never forgets" far to literally
Yes...
Every piece of data I have that I care about is backed up following a 3-2-1 model
I am also in the process of moving off Gmail due to the Legacy termination.
>I don't think users truly understand that now.
In my experience user don't truly understanding anything, given that I work in data storage I take is seriously, I am also called on my people on a semi regular basis to recover from data loss because their drive crashed, or something like that. every time I attempt to educate them on low cost backup solutions to prevent it in the future, less than 1% even after suffering data loss will learn the lesson and start doing backups
That is for onPrem hardware failure. For a service like Google, facebook, Microsoft, etc they just simply do not believe they will ever lose that data.
Hell just the other say in a sysadmin forum people were debating is business even need to backup data in Office 365 because "that would be a waste of money"
People have taken the meme of "internet never forgets" far to literally
I am CS mayor and would say that I failed to create a system that works reliably for backup.
My digital footprint is only something like 2 TB, but none of my devices can store this kind amount of data at once without external HDDs. So doing a backup is a step by step manual and time consuming process of downloading and juggling data, rotating individual backups, etc. I rarely could think of doing it more than once per year.
My digital footprint is only something like 2 TB, but none of my devices can store this kind amount of data at once without external HDDs. So doing a backup is a step by step manual and time consuming process of downloading and juggling data, rotating individual backups, etc. I rarely could think of doing it more than once per year.
In this day there is very limited reasons to not have backups,
Even if your devices can not store that kinda of data, and 2TB is nothing IMO... (My home has raw storage online capacity of over 100TB right now, and probably triple that in offline / non-powered on storage)
There are countless economical cloud backup services, and of you are creative ways to put import things into multiple "free" services
For example one person was really concerned about their photos, but they did not want to pay for a proper backup. My suggestion then was at a minimum to use 2 or more of the free photo services, They had a Amazon Prime Subscription, used an iPhone, and had a google account so Prime Photos, Google Photos, and iCloud where all options, picking at least 2 of them would be better than nothing. It would not be a proper 3-2-1 backup, but it would protect against something like random account deletion from one of the providers
The point is, there are creative ways to ensure access to data with out having to have a massive storage array in your home like I do. I value privacy and control more than most, this is also why all my home automation non-cloud based, I dont use Google Home, Siri, Homekit, Alexa etc. and I will never buy a device that requires cloud service to use. But I recognize I am not like most people sadly....
Even if your devices can not store that kinda of data, and 2TB is nothing IMO... (My home has raw storage online capacity of over 100TB right now, and probably triple that in offline / non-powered on storage)
There are countless economical cloud backup services, and of you are creative ways to put import things into multiple "free" services
For example one person was really concerned about their photos, but they did not want to pay for a proper backup. My suggestion then was at a minimum to use 2 or more of the free photo services, They had a Amazon Prime Subscription, used an iPhone, and had a google account so Prime Photos, Google Photos, and iCloud where all options, picking at least 2 of them would be better than nothing. It would not be a proper 3-2-1 backup, but it would protect against something like random account deletion from one of the providers
The point is, there are creative ways to ensure access to data with out having to have a massive storage array in your home like I do. I value privacy and control more than most, this is also why all my home automation non-cloud based, I dont use Google Home, Siri, Homekit, Alexa etc. and I will never buy a device that requires cloud service to use. But I recognize I am not like most people sadly....
Yes, I have been backing up my email regularly for the past 25+ years, just like any other important data. I have 3-2-1 copies of everything I have ever done on a computer during that time.
I cannot understand why anyone would tolerate the risk of losing important information.
I cannot understand why anyone would tolerate the risk of losing important information.
How many disks does this require?
[deleted]
Yes. I started to back up all my gmail emails, years ago, after reading about such horror stories.
Eventually, I just switched to fastmail and gave up Google altogether.
Eventually, I just switched to fastmail and gave up Google altogether.
I use protonmail for email I care about.
In 2021, there was an effort to archive older unlisted videos uploaded before 2017 before they were automatically made private [1]. It's fairly unlikely your videos were archived by this effort unless they were publicly linked somewhere, but you can still try to find them using a tool like: https://filmot.com/unlistedSearch or https://unlistedvideos.com/. If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them up from the Web Archive [2] and save them from there.
[1]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube#Older_unliste...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/
[1]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube#Older_unliste...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/
If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them up from the Web Archive [2] and save them from there.
It's been over a decade since YT would simply allow you to download the video file directly (does anyone still remember the "s/watch?v=/get_video?video_id=/" trick?), probably for DRM reasons. Even if it did, I doubt the Internet Archive would have bothered to try archiving due to the immense volume that video takes.
It's been over a decade since YT would simply allow you to download the video file directly (does anyone still remember the "s/watch?v=/get_video?video_id=/" trick?), probably for DRM reasons. Even if it did, I doubt the Internet Archive would have bothered to try archiving due to the immense volume that video takes.
From what I understand, the Internet Archive does store some YouTube videos using a special setup, for an example archived video with working playback see: http://web.archive.org/web/20210716000952/https://www.youtub.... The files can be downloaded from the archive using https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.arch....
Google is the fucking worst. A few years ago I uploaded a bunch of music to Google Music, rather than carrying it around with me through different computers and backups. This was a bunch of priceless stuff -- mp3s from tiny bands (some of whom I personally knew) that cannot be gotten anywhere anymore, recordings of my own bands in college, etc. Of course I deleted them from my devices, and then a few weeks ago I want to listen to one of the songs, and it turns out they're all gone forever. Google Music discontinued a while ago. How do I get these songs back? I literally have zero recourse.
Over a year ago Google Music sent out notices that users can download or migrate their uploaded media to YouTube Music via https://music.youtube.com/transfer. There really wasn't a shortage of notices and blog posts across a wide variety of media outlets instructing people to migrate and warning when Google Music was shutting down.
I got those notices and in my case it was "only" dozens of CDs I backed up. I was so frustrated and disgusted that I had taken time to back them up to Google Music that I just let them go. I still have the CDs, hopefully they are still in good enough condition to be backed up again.
YouTube Music was really rough in the beginning, and while I still have some UI nitpicks, I've come to find its radio algorithm to be much superior than Google Music's ever was for finding enjoyably obscure tracks. The tracks I uploaded to Google Music and transferred to YouTube Music are still playable through YouTube Music and downloadable from Google Takeout. If you migrated your library to YouTube Music, you may yet be able to download them from https://takeout.google.com (YouTube and YouTube Music).
> "indicating cyber bullying"
Oh the irony. Just like deleting user videos for no good reason without warning and not offering any means of appeal.
Oh the irony. Just like deleting user videos for no good reason without warning and not offering any means of appeal.
Let's face it. If you use a cloud service for any critical business service, such as processing payments, or data storage, you're liable to get "turned off" for any random reason by an algorithm. You have no recourse whatsoever.
Have your own personal backups of all your valuable data, emails, videos, pictures, etc.
As I learned from expensive experience, if you use a cloud payment processor, have it set up with at least two distinct companies. Yeah, I got turned off by an algorithm on one. Their support sent me pathetically worthless AI generated emails. After a couple months, I got it turned back on finally because I personally knew someone at the company. Obviously, this is not a general solution.
Always have a backup service plan at another company.
Have your own personal backups of all your valuable data, emails, videos, pictures, etc.
As I learned from expensive experience, if you use a cloud payment processor, have it set up with at least two distinct companies. Yeah, I got turned off by an algorithm on one. Their support sent me pathetically worthless AI generated emails. After a couple months, I got it turned back on finally because I personally knew someone at the company. Obviously, this is not a general solution.
Always have a backup service plan at another company.
If think this can happen if a malicious person (a competitor for example) use a bot to mass report your videos. So it might not be as random as you think.
I'm currently in a conundrum: I'm completely degoogled except a YT account that I can lose without problem. I have built a website a few weeks ago and I don't think I can get good SEO rankings if I don't use Google console tools.
I'm just procrastinating because it was so hard to degoogle then falling back is a hard pill to swallow. You example is yet another reminder how evil Google is.
I'm currently in a conundrum: I'm completely degoogled except a YT account that I can lose without problem. I have built a website a few weeks ago and I don't think I can get good SEO rankings if I don't use Google console tools.
I'm just procrastinating because it was so hard to degoogle then falling back is a hard pill to swallow. You example is yet another reminder how evil Google is.
This is the reason why Google stopped demoting sites in a lot of cases. SEO hackers do not only promote results. They try to demote the competition.
I think it's important to be pragmatic here. I'm (slowly) in the process of moving away from 'big tech' services where I can, but I still plan to use them where it makes sense (WhatsApp, Discord, YouTube).
I'm also evaluating e-mail for a small business and we might be going with Microsoft, even though I would never choose them for my personal e-mail (I left some comments on that topic recently).
Taking back our privacy is a noble quest, but I think it's bad to deal in absolutes.
I'm also evaluating e-mail for a small business and we might be going with Microsoft, even though I would never choose them for my personal e-mail (I left some comments on that topic recently).
Taking back our privacy is a noble quest, but I think it's bad to deal in absolutes.
I hear you, but if I surrender my site to Google, I will always have the risk of being banned for no reason.
If I understand correctly the recent news I can't use Google analytics anyway (both my site and I live in France).
If I understand correctly the recent news I can't use Google analytics anyway (both my site and I live in France).
If you want just an email provider I cannot recommend Fastmail enough. Entirely painless, just works and the web UI is fast.
Fastmail looks great from a UX perspective, but the problem is that they store your e-mail in the US, which I don't want.
I'm currently with Soverin, but I'm not completely satisfied with them. If anybody has recommendations for good email providers in the EU, I'm interested to hear them!
I'm currently with Soverin, but I'm not completely satisfied with them. If anybody has recommendations for good email providers in the EU, I'm interested to hear them!
Technically not the EU but Protonmail is in Switzerland.
I think this is the most likely scenario
YouTube deleted my account a few months ago. The reason was totally unfounded and I had no recourse. I’m pretty certain some AI flagged my account and instead of a sensible approach like
1) notify the user that something they did was flagged.
2) point to the instance where the supposed bad behavior happened and allow review/context by humans
3) see that my YouTube account was 12-13 years old and had only a handful of personal videos and 1-2 public videos and that I have a long history of not behaving badly
Instead I got a flippant response to my query as to why it was deleted and I quote: “Yeah I’m going to go ahead and deny your claim”.
As far as I’m concerned the less Google I have in my life from now on the better. While I don’t think that the other options are much better, this incident has changed me from having not much of an opinion on Google to having a pretty seething dislike for them.
Instead I got a flippant response to my query as to why it was deleted and I quote: “Yeah I’m going to go ahead and deny your claim”.
As far as I’m concerned the less Google I have in my life from now on the better. While I don’t think that the other options are much better, this incident has changed me from having not much of an opinion on Google to having a pretty seething dislike for them.
The arrogance and abusiveness of Google/YouTube is that they don't see any competition nor have fear of legal actions against them by "lowly" "nobody" users. More people have to choose alternatives to the point that Google/YouTube management will notice and be concerned about.
Infuriating. I know it’s a private company but the internet feels much less free recently.
The reason I’m using YT is for private video backup and slideshows. So basically stuff that is backed up elsewhere.
I want more decentralized solutions. The problem is that they are costly.
The reason I’m using YT is for private video backup and slideshows. So basically stuff that is backed up elsewhere.
I want more decentralized solutions. The problem is that they are costly.
> The reason I’m using YT is for private video backup
I hope this thread has really shown you why this isn't a good idea. YouTube is video distribution not archive.
I hope this thread has really shown you why this isn't a good idea. YouTube is video distribution not archive.
Best of luck to you and your family.
That said I feel like going forward y'all need to share work videos internally, rather than depending on YouTube.
As an ultra longshot you might find the videos on archive.org
This is a thread of someone who was trying to find his old videos .
https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-u...
That said I feel like going forward y'all need to share work videos internally, rather than depending on YouTube.
As an ultra longshot you might find the videos on archive.org
This is a thread of someone who was trying to find his old videos .
https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-u...
OP said that the videos were unlisted, so that makes it extremely unlikely they can be found on archive.org, unless they were linked from somewhere else.
If I had to speculate based off my experience at other FANG companies, the videos still exist in the Youtube infrastructure somewhere to allow for the possibility of a human intervention to restore them (For example, to allow for recovering from a system gone haywire or just to give time for manually reversed decisions).
That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently.
I hope you can get a human from YouTube to talk to you.
It may benefit you to post a link to the youtube channel so someone can proactively investigate. Lots of google employees read this forum.
That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently.
I hope you can get a human from YouTube to talk to you.
It may benefit you to post a link to the youtube channel so someone can proactively investigate. Lots of google employees read this forum.
This was my thinking as well, it's safer to never delete data and simply null route requests to it. It's what I've done in the past when I was on their side of the ethernet cable.
The youtube channel in question.
https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/
The youtube channel in question.
https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/
I'm sure the 'why' this happened doesn't matter much to you now, but noticed in just searching for channel name "tranresearchtraining" google would auto-correct and search for "trans research training". Maybe that flagged the review algo to be extra sensitive to certain phrases, etc. Also, where you're dealing with multiple nationalities, wouldn't be surprised if it included non-native english speakers and/or words outside the standard english dicts... so their auto speech-to-txt may have taken creative liberties, and a mistranslation triggered other flags. So, basic edge case nightmare. Their automated support is the worst too. Probably worth trying to spread this story on twitter and linkedin as well to increase the chances of it reaching someone who might be able to help or create enough negative PR to get on the radar. good luck.
Their side of the ethernet cable??
Is this situation really that bad? D:
Is this situation really that bad? D:
Do you know what the channel ID (UCID) was?
Unfortunately no, and attempting to go to https://www.youtube.com/account_advanced redirects the suspended account page.
You may be able to find it in your browser history. For example: youtube.com/channel/UC* or studio.youtube.com/channel/UC*
You could use https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html to extract your browser cache, then grep the whole thing for something like `UC[A-Za-z_-]{20,30}`. That'll probably find an overwhelming amount of junk, but it might also work too. (The idea is to search the cache for UCID matches in JSON dumps.)
If this seems interesting, the immediate priority would be to backup your cache folder immediately (%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache), then extract and search it at your leisure.
(This is all for Windows, but IIUC there are alternatives for Linux and macOS.)
If this seems interesting, the immediate priority would be to backup your cache folder immediately (%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache), then extract and search it at your leisure.
(This is all for Windows, but IIUC there are alternatives for Linux and macOS.)
I was thinking that if OP's wife or the video subjects are European then a GDPR request# might surface the data. Strikes me the videos would probably only have a delete flag set if this is recent and even after deletion from live data may exist in backups?
(# AIUI companies are obliged to share with you any PII they hold that identifies you.)
(# AIUI companies are obliged to share with you any PII they hold that identifies you.)
I hate to be deceptive, but I was thinking that even if they are not EU residents (or residents of another entity that has similar laws, e.g. UK), then they might be able to fake residency for the purposes of using data laws to exfiltrate the videos. They might have to take the dishonesty further and say that they appear in all the videos.
[deleted]
This is extremely concerning, frightening and downright alarming behavior by Google.
This was the final straw for me to move off of Gmail, and anything google related. Currently in the process of migrating over 500,000 emails, a small-ish YouTube channel locally backed up, and anything else I can think of.
I hope you get your items back. This is absurd. Simply absurd.
This was the final straw for me to move off of Gmail, and anything google related. Currently in the process of migrating over 500,000 emails, a small-ish YouTube channel locally backed up, and anything else I can think of.
I hope you get your items back. This is absurd. Simply absurd.
I am confused. Don't you have to create your own videos first and then upload them to YouTube? Or is that a common practice that for people to delete their local copy of videos after they upload to YouTube?
I am defenitely not blaming the person in any way. I just don't understand this behavior after have seen this for several times. Why wouldn't you keep your local copy? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
I am defenitely not blaming the person in any way. I just don't understand this behavior after have seen this for several times. Why wouldn't you keep your local copy? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Some (big) creators store all related material and the videos themselves. Others get rid of everything once the video is finished and uploaded.
Edit: Of all my YT videos I wouldn't know where I have the sources stored although I never deliberately deleted them.
Edit: Of all my YT videos I wouldn't know where I have the sources stored although I never deliberately deleted them.
Is this because video files are very large and store them will be very expensive? I honestly have no idea how large they are, but I would be surprised if it will become a significant portion of the cost of a serious business.
They can be pretty large. I see point of not storing raw footage, but finished videos after encoding is surely something to keep. Just for in future to upload to other services.. At least if you run actually profitable business.
I wasn't aware that unlisted videos could even receive copyright/bullying strikes, but it seems obvious now.
You could easily ruin someone's YouTube channel by finding unlisted videos through the rest of the Web and reporting them, like this poor couple have found out....
You could easily ruin someone's YouTube channel by finding unlisted videos through the rest of the Web and reporting them, like this poor couple have found out....
yeah, I've had unlisted/private videos that are a couple years old (with the links shared with no one) get retroactive age-restriction flags or copyright flagging. I'd have to assume YT updates their algo and retroactively skims over some older back-catalog videos.
Thanks for the reminder. Personally I do my part to caution all of my friends and family to not host things they don't want to lose somewhere where they aren't paying the bills. It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.
Well they could at least give you a chance to download your own content first.
“ It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.”
But that’s Google’s business model. The service is free.
But that’s Google’s business model. The service is free.
To serve them to public with adds showing. Now make it private and take the view count down... Yeah, should be obvious to anyone.
No backup and ‘all the eggs in one basket’. Seems to me like a high risk to take.
‘Backup being too expensive’ surely there can’t be that many videos (a $business$ should be able to afford a few ~10TB usb disks for a few hundred $/€).
I have no trust in services like YT (where I am the product) so I host my own data on my own server and roll my own backups - on/off-site - (thus have only myself to blame if it goes bad).
I have actually been thinking if I should yt-dl the good videos I have found on YT for exactly the incident you have been exposed to!
I really feel for your loss - and really hope that a human contact will be made so the content can be retrieved. Hopefully HN attention might help!
It’s a sad world where so-called AI makes the decisions and it’s almost impossible to get in touch with a real live human being. I fear for the future (your experience being a good example of how bad it can go). Just think about when those methodologies get applied to the legal-system or health-system. ‘Appeal - not possible the AI knows better and have decided…’ Hmm - I think I read it already started in the police-domain with face-detection…
I have no trust in services like YT (where I am the product) so I host my own data on my own server and roll my own backups - on/off-site - (thus have only myself to blame if it goes bad).
I have actually been thinking if I should yt-dl the good videos I have found on YT for exactly the incident you have been exposed to!
I really feel for your loss - and really hope that a human contact will be made so the content can be retrieved. Hopefully HN attention might help!
It’s a sad world where so-called AI makes the decisions and it’s almost impossible to get in touch with a real live human being. I fear for the future (your experience being a good example of how bad it can go). Just think about when those methodologies get applied to the legal-system or health-system. ‘Appeal - not possible the AI knows better and have decided…’ Hmm - I think I read it already started in the police-domain with face-detection…
It might be too late, but for others, PeerTube, open source replacement of YouTube, is the solution.
Longer discussion https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-repl...
I don't see how this is a solution.
Either you host it on a public instance and the admin can delete your videos as well, or you host it yourself, but it requires technical abilities and lots of money.
Either you host it on a public instance and the admin can delete your videos as well, or you host it yourself, but it requires technical abilities and lots of money.
Presumably these videos were originally created on your own equipment, before they were uploaded? Are there no copies of the originals anywhere on your local computers?
Do you use Macs? Do you have Time Machine?
Do you use Macs? Do you have Time Machine?
How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action?
No warning.
No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy."
No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative.
No recourse.
There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case. Ultimately, the OP or my non-tech savvy employee or my mother should be able to get real answers and/or help from a human being when wronged by Google, a telco, or the local bank.
(Repost #1)
No warning.
No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy."
No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative.
No recourse.
There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case. Ultimately, the OP or my non-tech savvy employee or my mother should be able to get real answers and/or help from a human being when wronged by Google, a telco, or the local bank.
(Repost #1)
It's really disheartening that these support channels are so poor. I had my bank account terminated recently for a valid support request the bank didn't want to deal with as it would require a change to their concrete support script.
My girlfriend had her Tumblr account terminated by some automated process and Tumblr won't respond to her. And this was devasting to her, because not only was it content she had spent a long time curating, but there were many friends of hers that she only had contact with through Tumblr due to her wish to protect her offline identity. To suddenly lose dozens of good friends overnight due to a software error was insanely depressing for her.
The effects of these account terminations can be far-reaching. After watching the effect on my SO, I have to wonder how many suicides have been precipitated by an unfair account termination?
My girlfriend had her Tumblr account terminated by some automated process and Tumblr won't respond to her. And this was devasting to her, because not only was it content she had spent a long time curating, but there were many friends of hers that she only had contact with through Tumblr due to her wish to protect her offline identity. To suddenly lose dozens of good friends overnight due to a software error was insanely depressing for her.
The effects of these account terminations can be far-reaching. After watching the effect on my SO, I have to wonder how many suicides have been precipitated by an unfair account termination?
I wonder what the right rule is. I think if I were running a Web 2.0 site, a deactivated account would still allow log-in for, say, 60 days, but present only an account admin panel with four options:
- Appeal the deactivation, with guaranteed human review of the account if above the, say, 20th %ile of account age
- Download your text and media assets
- Send a message to social connections with an e-mail where to reach you
- Truly delete everything within the next 24 hours (right to be forgotten, etc.)
- Appeal the deactivation, with guaranteed human review of the account if above the, say, 20th %ile of account age
- Download your text and media assets
- Send a message to social connections with an e-mail where to reach you
- Truly delete everything within the next 24 hours (right to be forgotten, etc.)
I think you present some excellent ideas. And I would guess some of them depend on the reason for termination (although often the reason selected by some automated processes makes no sense).
In the OP's scenario, for instance, YouTube could have at least allowed his partner to export all the videos.
There are some definite easy wins to be made by players in this space that don't even involve them having to hire more humans.
In the OP's scenario, for instance, YouTube could have at least allowed his partner to export all the videos.
There are some definite easy wins to be made by players in this space that don't even involve them having to hire more humans.
Thanks! For the things that do require human review, I wonder what the best way is to scale that.
It actually might be a potential business opportunity. Gig economy social media moderation. Pay $50 and YouTube contracts out with a company for $40 to pay a subcontractor $30 to spend an hour reviewing your appeal and account history and making a recommendation.
It has an icky protection racket feel to it and would incentivize YouTube to be more aggressive in deactivating accounts. But... maybe it's less icky than advertising, selling your privacy for pennies, and permanently deleting your stuff?
It actually might be a potential business opportunity. Gig economy social media moderation. Pay $50 and YouTube contracts out with a company for $40 to pay a subcontractor $30 to spend an hour reviewing your appeal and account history and making a recommendation.
It has an icky protection racket feel to it and would incentivize YouTube to be more aggressive in deactivating accounts. But... maybe it's less icky than advertising, selling your privacy for pennies, and permanently deleting your stuff?
And while the quality of random gig economy contractors would be pretty poor, it certainly could not be worse than no support at all as they are bound to make the correct determinations some of the time.
Maybe some kind of consensus protocol?
I am very curious to get a tad more context about the bank issue, if that's straightforward.
Also, I have no idea if this will work, but: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418165 - a bit of quote-googling (recommended to verify) suggests this person may use gmail. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, I have no idea if this will work, but: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418165 - a bit of quote-googling (recommended to verify) suggests this person may use gmail. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's worth a try, thanks :)
The bank (Square) issue is that I ordered something online, FedEx screwed up the delivery, it got returned to merchant, but merchant does not respond. I asked bank for chargeback, but they can't do one as the package got delivered (back to the merchant). Their support script only allows chargebacks when there is no delivery at all. They tried to get me to persuade FedEx to change the package status to nondelivered, but I refused, so they gave me the money back anyway and closed my account because it was easier than changing their immutable support script to allow for an edge case where a package was delivered, but not delivered to customer.
The bank (Square) issue is that I ordered something online, FedEx screwed up the delivery, it got returned to merchant, but merchant does not respond. I asked bank for chargeback, but they can't do one as the package got delivered (back to the merchant). Their support script only allows chargebacks when there is no delivery at all. They tried to get me to persuade FedEx to change the package status to nondelivered, but I refused, so they gave me the money back anyway and closed my account because it was easier than changing their immutable support script to allow for an edge case where a package was delivered, but not delivered to customer.
Now I'm curious to find out how it works out.
That comment was from a few years ago so the poster may be relatively distant to Tumblr nowadays and it might take a few additional people-hops (if it doesn't fall through) to get anywhere. I also wonder if old/deactivated non-public account data is held indefinitely (eg, private messages)... it probably is...
Regarding Stripe, wow, I admittedly didn't quite read the name the first time through the paragraph, and was very surprised when I actually noticed ("...that Stripe?"). I guess it makes sense; they're similar in scale and incumbance to the big-N stuffy local banks now. A good reminder that class-leading web design isn't necessarily a function of broad-spectrum competence across the board, just a very well-paid design team lol
I take it you can't reopen an account? :/
(Uh, if you'd even want to...)
That comment was from a few years ago so the poster may be relatively distant to Tumblr nowadays and it might take a few additional people-hops (if it doesn't fall through) to get anywhere. I also wonder if old/deactivated non-public account data is held indefinitely (eg, private messages)... it probably is...
Regarding Stripe, wow, I admittedly didn't quite read the name the first time through the paragraph, and was very surprised when I actually noticed ("...that Stripe?"). I guess it makes sense; they're similar in scale and incumbance to the big-N stuffy local banks now. A good reminder that class-leading web design isn't necessarily a function of broad-spectrum competence across the board, just a very well-paid design team lol
I take it you can't reopen an account? :/
(Uh, if you'd even want to...)
Not Stripe - Square. I get the two mixed up also. Square is now Block, but their banking at least is still called Square.
I sent an unsolicited email to the person above, and was polite about asking, but no reply yet :)
I sent an unsolicited email to the person above, and was polite about asking, but no reply yet :)
Oooh. Humble thanks, I did indeed get the two confused. There was a recent post talking about how iPhones will be able to pretend they're payment terminals (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30259183), with Stripe in the position of major partner, and Square as the unimpressed incumbent that had just had their core competency made redundant. That kind of backs out my point somewhat then heh. *Moves Stripe back to "probably ok"*
The comment I linked incidentally happened to be (understandably) stuck in my head, but some bumbling around and experimentation with Algolia for a few minutes (trying keywords like "works at", "engineer" and "dev") also found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29700627, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12924580, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928349, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20701499, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815847, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16971725, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3587191, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728531. It's quite possible none of these are relevant or useful; I also just thought of https://github.com/search?q=tumblr&type=users, which surfaces an interesting level of signal right on page 1, and this is not even mentioning LinkedIn, notwithstanding that site's caveat of "oh no" vs "likely most direct solution to problem" :)
(Now to work through this small pile of unrelated interesting things that also mysteriously opened themselves over the past few minutes. Welp. All good :D)
The comment I linked incidentally happened to be (understandably) stuck in my head, but some bumbling around and experimentation with Algolia for a few minutes (trying keywords like "works at", "engineer" and "dev") also found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29700627, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12924580, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928349, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20701499, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815847, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16971725, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3587191, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728531. It's quite possible none of these are relevant or useful; I also just thought of https://github.com/search?q=tumblr&type=users, which surfaces an interesting level of signal right on page 1, and this is not even mentioning LinkedIn, notwithstanding that site's caveat of "oh no" vs "likely most direct solution to problem" :)
(Now to work through this small pile of unrelated interesting things that also mysteriously opened themselves over the past few minutes. Welp. All good :D)
It'd be interesting what a technology bill of rights looks like, but one form I could easily support would be saying any account that acts as an identity provider (i.e. oauth) requires a judge ruling to be deleted. It'd require additional identification measures to prevent spam upon creation, but the tradeoffs might be worth it. One of the larger impacts of having your gmail deleted is how many other services likely rely on it - it doesnt just remove Google services, it often nukes an entire digital identity requiring months to fix.
Also a key right must be that when an account is deleted, you have 60 days to download all your data.
It'd their platform and a free service, so maybe it is fine to deactivate you and remove your content from the world.
But to simultaneously remove your access so you lose everything is just a demonstration that they have zero care about your work or compassion that their customers are human beings. In other words, they are straight-up psychopaths
If you care about anything, do NOT use these services for that. Great for junk accounts, but otherwise...
It'd their platform and a free service, so maybe it is fine to deactivate you and remove your content from the world.
But to simultaneously remove your access so you lose everything is just a demonstration that they have zero care about your work or compassion that their customers are human beings. In other words, they are straight-up psychopaths
If you care about anything, do NOT use these services for that. Great for junk accounts, but otherwise...
Maybe a little trickier than that. Should they continue to give a user 60 days of access to child porn they might have uploaded? That might constitute distribution of child porn.
If we permit immediate removal, what are the reasonable boundaries? Legal/illegal is a court decision but you can't run all such decisions through the courts. So now we're back to Google just deciding what they will remove and it's on you to back things up. Sucks but that's probably reality we'll have to live with.
If we permit immediate removal, what are the reasonable boundaries? Legal/illegal is a court decision but you can't run all such decisions through the courts. So now we're back to Google just deciding what they will remove and it's on you to back things up. Sucks but that's probably reality we'll have to live with.
Or just copy-righted or copy-right disputed content. Share the access to download option and you will soon find groups repeatedly exploiting this. Pirated content being accessible for 60 days for free is already pretty good.
Good points, and all easily manageable via a few adjustments to the rule.
If it's cporn or other felony content, then fine, shut it all off.
For anything else, allow download only from the last three IP addresses the owner personally logged in from, plus two (if they've moved or are nomadic), plus maybe the same two or three last logged-in-from MAC addresses. Limit to three successful copies downloaded, then shut off.
Alternatively, if you still think that zero future sharing through their site must be the rule, then at least provide the content on a media copy at a nominal fee such as [cost of media]+ [50% service charge] + postage.
Finding fault is the easiest thing in the world. But if you apply your brain to finding a solution instead of merely a problem, things work better.
If it's cporn or other felony content, then fine, shut it all off.
For anything else, allow download only from the last three IP addresses the owner personally logged in from, plus two (if they've moved or are nomadic), plus maybe the same two or three last logged-in-from MAC addresses. Limit to three successful copies downloaded, then shut off.
Alternatively, if you still think that zero future sharing through their site must be the rule, then at least provide the content on a media copy at a nominal fee such as [cost of media]+ [50% service charge] + postage.
Finding fault is the easiest thing in the world. But if you apply your brain to finding a solution instead of merely a problem, things work better.
The reason felony content is a problem is due to liability issues, but it doesn't only apply to that. The lines aren't always clear, so they would probably err on the side of being overly aggressive to be safe. Can you relax that paranoia legislatively somehow?
Yes, tho it seems that as soon as they are not publishing it, i.e., only holding it for private storage by the single posting party, the only problem is with strict liability content like cpron, which mere possession is a crime?
Additionally, the hosts like Google/YouTube, etc. can say that they have found that the material has potential legal issues, and they will hold it for release when the courts sort it out.
Again, the key here is to have some kind of recourse. Anything less is psycopathic - they make a fair exchange by providing a "free" service in exchange for the users' attention, and then when someone puts in 2/3 of a decade of attention and content-building, to simply cut it off with no recourse is just massive theft or vandalism, at best.
And, if they are not going to provide that, they need to provide at least constant prompts that Damocles' sword is hanging over their heads and they need to make local backups.
Additionally, the hosts like Google/YouTube, etc. can say that they have found that the material has potential legal issues, and they will hold it for release when the courts sort it out.
Again, the key here is to have some kind of recourse. Anything less is psycopathic - they make a fair exchange by providing a "free" service in exchange for the users' attention, and then when someone puts in 2/3 of a decade of attention and content-building, to simply cut it off with no recourse is just massive theft or vandalism, at best.
And, if they are not going to provide that, they need to provide at least constant prompts that Damocles' sword is hanging over their heads and they need to make local backups.
Yep, effectively Gmail is your internet driver license.
I would say Gmail is your auto pilot. If you have an internet driver license, you know how to operate your own mailserver ;-)
Note: Yes it ain't easy and it ain't fun, just like driving a car during rush hour.
Note: Yes it ain't easy and it ain't fun, just like driving a car during rush hour.
TIL comments can be downvoted enough to be grey but upvoted enough to float to the top of the subthread.
https://i.imgur.com/tqlQeTW.png
https://i.imgur.com/tqlQeTW.png
I'd say shadow bans would work better.
We did this at a company I worked for (back in the day)
When a user posted things we didn't like, we stopped showing it. The only person who could read the post was the poster.
This works in the content creation sphere.
This works in the content creation sphere.
The current alternative to me is a form of digital Epicureanism or digital Stoicism in the sense of intentionally not putting any effort into any kind of online digital presence or content creation.
I don't remember anyone being upset if they changed emails and started posting on usenet from a different email address. The discussion at hand was what was important.
People are ultimately causing themselves all this stress and worry over absolutely nothing. All these make believe missed opportunities if you don't put in all this effort to get one of the lottery tickets.
I don't remember anyone being upset if they changed emails and started posting on usenet from a different email address. The discussion at hand was what was important.
People are ultimately causing themselves all this stress and worry over absolutely nothing. All these make believe missed opportunities if you don't put in all this effort to get one of the lottery tickets.
It's not about your posting identity, but missing important communications that was sent to an old address. Now your email is your authentication second factor in many cases, it's also lockout prevention.
We need education. Education to regular people that unless you have a contract with clear clauses and payments involved your data is worth what you pay.
Your expectations from free service should be zero. It can go out of business at any time. Or they can stop offering it at anytime.
Your expectations from free service should be zero. It can go out of business at any time. Or they can stop offering it at anytime.
> Your expectations from free service should be zero.
So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot?
It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.
So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot?
It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.
Cities already move your vehicle away if you leave it in free parking spot for years, even faster if it is unregistered for example. I don't see how that is any different from this case for example. There are similar analogies.
I think the difference is that the extent to which a city can do things with your property is governed by law. And it is not in any way similar analogy; this wasn't cleaning up an abandoned account taking up public space, this was a sudden takedown of an active account that did not violate any rules or laws.
And why shouldn't they have right to remove such content? Clearly it wasn't following intent of the site. And the user didn't really lose anything, as they still have the originals. Which in no way have been affected.
> And why shouldn't they have right to remove such content?
They should, but they should also clearly communicate what content they consider acceptable and I think they should also notify the user and give them time to move their things out if G decides the content is deemed unacceptable. Especially if the content is not obviously and egregiously violating the terms of service and hasn't been considered a problem for the past seven years. Pulling the rug like that all of a sudden isn't cool.
If I offer to hold your grocery bag while you go to the restroom, do you think it's OK for me to throw it all away because after digging aronud a bit, I notice you have bought apples I don't like? What if I've been repeatedly extending the same courtesy for the past ten years and never had a problem with these apples until today? What if I advertise myself as a free bag holding service by the entrance to the restroom?
I think people should have the expectation that if a company (or individual) offers a service and holds on to your property (be it digital or physical), they should treat it responsibly and not just trash it all out of the blue.
> Clearly it wasn't following intent of the site.
That does not seem clear at all based on a reading of youtube's policies.
> And the user didn't really lose anything, as they still have the originals.
That's not something Google can decide or verify. Instead, they could help the user move their stuff out and that would ensure they still have everything.
But I like this line of arguing; I think copyright infringement is ok because the copyright holder still has their original copy which has in no way been affected.
They should, but they should also clearly communicate what content they consider acceptable and I think they should also notify the user and give them time to move their things out if G decides the content is deemed unacceptable. Especially if the content is not obviously and egregiously violating the terms of service and hasn't been considered a problem for the past seven years. Pulling the rug like that all of a sudden isn't cool.
If I offer to hold your grocery bag while you go to the restroom, do you think it's OK for me to throw it all away because after digging aronud a bit, I notice you have bought apples I don't like? What if I've been repeatedly extending the same courtesy for the past ten years and never had a problem with these apples until today? What if I advertise myself as a free bag holding service by the entrance to the restroom?
I think people should have the expectation that if a company (or individual) offers a service and holds on to your property (be it digital or physical), they should treat it responsibly and not just trash it all out of the blue.
> Clearly it wasn't following intent of the site.
That does not seem clear at all based on a reading of youtube's policies.
> And the user didn't really lose anything, as they still have the originals.
That's not something Google can decide or verify. Instead, they could help the user move their stuff out and that would ensure they still have everything.
But I like this line of arguing; I think copyright infringement is ok because the copyright holder still has their original copy which has in no way been affected.
My understanding is in this case the user doesn’t have the originals; they’ve truly lost 7 years of labor.
That's on them though. I mean a DVD burner and a shoe box would remove all backup issues here.
> So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot?
Not the best analogy since the parking lot is just an empty physical space. Taking it away wouldn’t also “delete” your car. The car is actually a separate physical object. But in a cloud drive, the file and the space are the same. Taking away the space is obviously going to take away the file.
On top of all that, the file still exists elsewhere for most people.
Not the best analogy since the parking lot is just an empty physical space. Taking it away wouldn’t also “delete” your car. The car is actually a separate physical object. But in a cloud drive, the file and the space are the same. Taking away the space is obviously going to take away the file.
On top of all that, the file still exists elsewhere for most people.
> Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.
Unless explicitly stated. And we all know that: 1) most of the internet users don’t read the Terms of Service, and 2) YouTube probably states in their Terms of Service doc that they can do whatever they want with your data (I don’t know this for sure because of point 1)
Unless explicitly stated. And we all know that: 1) most of the internet users don’t read the Terms of Service, and 2) YouTube probably states in their Terms of Service doc that they can do whatever they want with your data (I don’t know this for sure because of point 1)
> next time you park on a free parking lot?
The closest analogy is; if you park without paying, your car might get impounded.
The closest analogy is; if you park without paying, your car might get impounded.
> impounded
Not a bad analogy. Getting an impounded car back is often described as being abusively expensive beyond real costs.
That would be a improvement for the OP.
Though I don't think any of the giants have an incentive to offer this since might draw more attention than just telling them to fuck off.
Not a bad analogy. Getting an impounded car back is often described as being abusively expensive beyond real costs.
That would be a improvement for the OP.
Though I don't think any of the giants have an incentive to offer this since might draw more attention than just telling them to fuck off.
So you are saying uploading to YouTube without paying is illegal? Nowhere on YouTube does it say that I have to pay anything.
I find it ironic that rather than avoid these pernicious companies people instead want to enshrine them as permanent fixtures into our society by legislating universal access to them. It would be analogous to passing a law that would guarantee free doses of heroin during the opioid crisis. We need to break the addiction, not exacerbate it.
Generally speaking I agree.. but having observed human behavior long enough, I don't think it's realistic to break that addiction. People are attracted to free services like flies are to manure, and often these free services are advertised with a huge budget and hype, and often come with network effects (~all of your friends and family are using said free service). Nobody reads the ToS, nobody cares about the implications of trusting their data to someone who doesn't care.. year after year we have these reports of people getting burned by the big G and still people keep using Google and acting surprised when they screw you over.
It seems to be human nature, and also nature of the market. It's the digital equivalent of race to the bottom. The shortsighted, uninformed, apathetic, and irrational people outnumber those who care, by a huge margin. "Just educate people" isn't happening any more than we can just tell people to "git gud." And that is why, in the physical space, we have laws that offer people some protection against terrible products that are unfit for purpose, unsafe, broken, etcetra. We wouldn't need those laws if we could just fix people and make them informed & rational; in that case, the market would truly sort out itself. It's just not happening, and it's also not happening in the digital space, so it's very possible we're going to see the same laws in the digital space.
It seems to be human nature, and also nature of the market. It's the digital equivalent of race to the bottom. The shortsighted, uninformed, apathetic, and irrational people outnumber those who care, by a huge margin. "Just educate people" isn't happening any more than we can just tell people to "git gud." And that is why, in the physical space, we have laws that offer people some protection against terrible products that are unfit for purpose, unsafe, broken, etcetra. We wouldn't need those laws if we could just fix people and make them informed & rational; in that case, the market would truly sort out itself. It's just not happening, and it's also not happening in the digital space, so it's very possible we're going to see the same laws in the digital space.
This is completely wrong. We should expect more from business. You should always be able to extract your data, period. Let’s not defend customer-hostile business models.
So let's say some startup runs a back up service with unlimited data. How many exabytes should a user be able to upload random data to them? And how long should it be available?
Always jumping to the extreme is tiresome. Plenty of disclosure laws have facility for covering reasonable or excessive costs.
I'm not sure how this could work for a free service at scale. Treating a free youtube account as a video storage service is a really bad idea. I think the issue is that this works for most people most of the time, so we come to expect it.
There are alternative paid options (vimeo, dropbox, S3) that should work fine.
This is also a big problem with gmail, hotmail, and a thousand other email providers. Most people assume their data is permanent and safe in a free email account. That's probably true 99.99% of the time, but it's not guaranteed. If your data is important, you should really pay someone to host it, or back it up yourself.
There are alternative paid options (vimeo, dropbox, S3) that should work fine.
This is also a big problem with gmail, hotmail, and a thousand other email providers. Most people assume their data is permanent and safe in a free email account. That's probably true 99.99% of the time, but it's not guaranteed. If your data is important, you should really pay someone to host it, or back it up yourself.
Even if it's paid, you should back them up really.
>How many more pleas like this will we see on HN?
Till the cost of bad press exceeds the cost of providing a usable support service.
Till the cost of bad press exceeds the cost of providing a usable support service.
Not necessarily.
The existing managers get their bonuses from the cost savings and move on to other things. 3 years later, a new generation of managers take over, realize the goodwill is already gone, and it would take an unrealistic herculean effort to reverse public sentiment. And it would take years. They take the easy route and try to squeeze even more money from the services by cutting more costs (yay AI!).
That's how giant companies fail.
The existing managers get their bonuses from the cost savings and move on to other things. 3 years later, a new generation of managers take over, realize the goodwill is already gone, and it would take an unrealistic herculean effort to reverse public sentiment. And it would take years. They take the easy route and try to squeeze even more money from the services by cutting more costs (yay AI!).
That's how giant companies fail.
And that's how they like it, extreme "techno-authoritarianism". Making as hard as possible to appeal decisions or access higher management, and the facade of customer service is usually into ignoring or gaslighting customers to the point of sadism.
Ban or shadow-ban whenever
Raise prices whenever
Sell your private info to whomever
Violate your privacy however
Ban or shadow-ban whenever
Raise prices whenever
Sell your private info to whomever
Violate your privacy however
Your suggestion might increase the costs so much that we will simply not have such free services. It’s best to limit expert support to actual purchases (like ebooks, apps, etc.) and services that have explicit guarantees.
The solution is decentralizing.
I am wondering if some people could share that used the usually venues of recourse which are going through the legal system:
1.) Letting a lawyer contact Google and then suing them.
2.) Using regulations such as GDPR to ask for correction of data about yourself and/or challenging the automated decision about yourself.
1.) Letting a lawyer contact Google and then suing them.
2.) Using regulations such as GDPR to ask for correction of data about yourself and/or challenging the automated decision about yourself.
This seems to happen a lot - it might not even be your fault, just someone decided they didn't like your videos and filed a bunch of complaints, or an algorithm misinterpreted some speech. Once the automation sides against you your only recourse is to hope to generate enough social outrage that a human takes notice. The lesson learned is always that YouTube should never be your primary data store, you need to keep the best quality copy of your video in S3 (or similar) so you can rebuild when needed.
I used to work for a cloud backup company. People thought it was strange to backup services like Google Drive and Gmail. Posts like this make me second think that
The takeaway from this horrible story, and the stories of so many like you guys, is pretty simple. Never use Google products. For anything. Ever. And encourage anyone else who might not know better to never use them either. There are plenty of alternatives.
That sucks and it’s a tragic shame. Sorry it happened to you and that there seems to be no recourse.
That sucks and it’s a tragic shame. Sorry it happened to you and that there seems to be no recourse.
You delegated the only and original copies of the works to a cloud entity?
This wasn't YouTube's fault. It was your company's. Let this be a lesson to you and start making offline, offsite backups of your work.
Today it was YouTube, tomorrow it could be ransomware. Be glad it was only some videos.
This wasn't YouTube's fault. It was your company's. Let this be a lesson to you and start making offline, offsite backups of your work.
Today it was YouTube, tomorrow it could be ransomware. Be glad it was only some videos.
maybe a competitor was tipped off about her business and hired a 'company' to flag the videos
Nah, there was a post on HN a month or two ago about YouTube warning they were going to start removing old unlisted videos, and someone on HN pointed out that this would probably affect a lot of companies' training videos
YouTube made old unlisted videos private last year unless you opted-out, are you thinking of that warning?
Nah, if you read the description the content was flagged and removed; it wasn't because they were old.
I'm not aware of any way to programmatically (or manually, for that matter) find unlisted videos.
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This is a good lesson in why you should save data that you care about off line and or in multiple places...
this is most unfortunate, but not having alternate copies outside of a capricious, free service like youtube was the first mistake.
Happens with other companies too. My partner currently has their twitter account locked for "evading a ban".
The thing is it is their main account, under their own name, used regularly to post non-controversial stuff (and their other accounts(not locked) are even more boring). No indication of what ban they are trying to avoid even. Their only weird thing they are doing is using VPNs sometimes.
They have filed an appeal but it has been a week and no feedback of any kind.
The thing is it is their main account, under their own name, used regularly to post non-controversial stuff (and their other accounts(not locked) are even more boring). No indication of what ban they are trying to avoid even. Their only weird thing they are doing is using VPNs sometimes.
They have filed an appeal but it has been a week and no feedback of any kind.
Sounds to me like a VPN IP was associated with a different banned account and the reuse of that IP by your partner associated your partner's account with the banned one.
This is extremely concerning.
I also have over 500 unlisted training videos - seen by average of 10-30 people each.
Most are boring IntelliJ or VS Code screencasts.
However some contain small outtakes from other Youtube videos - this could potentially trigger a strike.
SSD holding originals died without warning.
Time to download everything and invest into archive grade Blu-ray or LTO tapes.
I also have over 500 unlisted training videos - seen by average of 10-30 people each.
Most are boring IntelliJ or VS Code screencasts.
However some contain small outtakes from other Youtube videos - this could potentially trigger a strike.
SSD holding originals died without warning.
Time to download everything and invest into archive grade Blu-ray or LTO tapes.
You can also mirror them to other video services... One of the new ones will do it for you automatically. Odysee.com I believe.
Had something similar happen years ago. 3x bogus copyright strikes and the entire channel was removed. Can't appeal. Even big content creators get bogus strikes, but they have representatives or something that dispute it with YouTube. Don't use YouTube for anything important.
Why can't you appeal? Did you get a lawyer?
The cost of a lawyer is far too high. When you appeal you are legally saying that their dmca is false. Typically by this time the company will back off, or, they won't, and now your only choice is to persue it in civil court and prove their dmca was false. Or, the company can even come after you for falsely saying that their dmca was false.
It's not worth it. It's like civil asset forfeiture. The cost of getting back what was illigally seized is higher than the worth of it. In both time and money.
It's not worth it. It's like civil asset forfeiture. The cost of getting back what was illigally seized is higher than the worth of it. In both time and money.
OP, I can’t help except upvote the post for visibility. But if or when you get those videos, I hope you’d move to a platform that works for its customers (who are the users). In the case of YouTube, your wife was not the customer. Continuing to support such abusive platforms once any rogue bot activity is controlled would be harmful.
Edit: I just read one of the OP’s comments about backups not being there and how that should’ve been planned. Please disregard the below paragraph, OP. I’m still leaving it around for others.
Also, please always have backups of videos uploaded anywhere for sharing. I get that this may be irritating to read right now, but data that’s not stored on one’s hardware cannot be trusted to be around for long.
Edit: I just read one of the OP’s comments about backups not being there and how that should’ve been planned. Please disregard the below paragraph, OP. I’m still leaving it around for others.
Also, please always have backups of videos uploaded anywhere for sharing. I get that this may be irritating to read right now, but data that’s not stored on one’s hardware cannot be trusted to be around for long.
> This content was incredibly time intensive to create
why did she trash the origins? And please, do indieweb.org/POSSE - look at PeerTube and maybe distribute copies via YT but never exclusively or even rely on them as an archive.
Please.
why did she trash the origins? And please, do indieweb.org/POSSE - look at PeerTube and maybe distribute copies via YT but never exclusively or even rely on them as an archive.
Please.
I cant help with Youtube but this is a good reminder to look at your other practices and make sure you aren’t reliant on Google for anything else, and aren’t using free services for other critical functionality.
The videos were only stored on YouYube???
How long is the average video? 1-2 hours? Then I think the average size of the videos will be 1-2 GB for FHD solution with h.264 compression; maybe double the size for fast compression. But even so, 700+ videos will require a few TB of storage only. You can buy some 1-2 TB mobile HDD to store them offline, just in case. It’s nothing fancy but very easy to handle, cheap and works in most cases.
Most people store their photos in this way, if I’m not mistaken.
This is just sad and frustrating to read for multiple reasons.
This is extremely concerning. I have several of my daughter's childhood videos on YT as private videos and several hundreds of GBs of pictures in Google photos. And I literally don't have any backup for all this content.
I previously used external drives, but I moved them to the cloud so they are easily accessible and not have the risk of hardware failures. I guess not a good idea to just rely on cloud providers for important stuff.
I previously used external drives, but I moved them to the cloud so they are easily accessible and not have the risk of hardware failures. I guess not a good idea to just rely on cloud providers for important stuff.
> I guess not a good idea to just rely on cloud providers for important stuff
Certainly not, but if you're going to rely on cloud providers at all, definitely don't rely on ones that you aren't paying since they have no obligation to ensure your data stays online. If you're paying for your hosting you have established a legal contract that protects you from capricious access loss like the one described in the OP.
Certainly not, but if you're going to rely on cloud providers at all, definitely don't rely on ones that you aren't paying since they have no obligation to ensure your data stays online. If you're paying for your hosting you have established a legal contract that protects you from capricious access loss like the one described in the OP.
Do a google takeout. Now.
Is good for you and is good for Google not having to bear the unique responsibility over your memories. Win-win.
Is good for you and is good for Google not having to bear the unique responsibility over your memories. Win-win.
Use the 321 rule. 3 backups, 2 different media, 1 of them off site.
You should keep your external drive backups. “Cloud” gives you the off site, but by itself from the point of a user it is just 1 media and 1 backup. Even if they likely have a lot more internally.
You should keep your external drive backups. “Cloud” gives you the off site, but by itself from the point of a user it is just 1 media and 1 backup. Even if they likely have a lot more internally.
That's why I created https://megatorium.com/
YouTube is too random and uncontrollable.
YouTube is too random and uncontrollable.
The cloud... it's just someone else's computer.
Sad situation, and hindsight is always 20/20 with such. Probably would have been good to have also uploaded videos to other similar sites/alternatives like Dailymotion, DTube, etc... In addition to the free/cheap cloud storage options or buying external HDDs.
Google/YouTube will continue to ignore, abuse, and gaslight when they think there isn't any competition and can get away with it.
Google/YouTube will continue to ignore, abuse, and gaslight when they think there isn't any competition and can get away with it.
Not great from google, but you need a basic bcp/dr plan for common scenarios especially if service provider goes down for whatever reason.
What I dont't understand is that you created 700 critical videos and you did not have any backup of them anywhere?
I have a Youtube channel but I know Google can remove the content whenever they want. In 2022, it's time to acknowledge whatever you update inna GAFAM service is not safe and belongs literally to a trash bin with an unknown timer.
Good luck to get your video back
I have a Youtube channel but I know Google can remove the content whenever they want. In 2022, it's time to acknowledge whatever you update inna GAFAM service is not safe and belongs literally to a trash bin with an unknown timer.
Good luck to get your video back
speculates that google cleans out low hanging fruit, using metrics, and there was nothing in the content that triggered the bot at all
Why speculate? Ask your wife if she uses copyrighted content in her videos. Her response should tell you if she was flagged by an automated content-ID system.
All else aside, this is a lesson in never having only one copy of anything remotely important.
Why speculate? Ask your wife if she uses copyrighted content in her videos. Her response should tell you if she was flagged by an automated content-ID system.
All else aside, this is a lesson in never having only one copy of anything remotely important.
How did she create the videos in the first place? Are the original videos used to upload to youtube accessible or archived somewhere?
That is a rather unfortunate position to be in. My 2 cents this is important enough you shouldn't have to keep playing around with their UI and support. Get a lawyer to speak to their lawyers about your data, that way at least you are gonna get a respectful answer even though the answer might be we deleted the videos and you can never get it back.
As the saying goes, if you're not paying, you are the product.
There are so many ways that "a few hundred internal training videos" could violate YouTube policy I'm just going to assume you were violating policy and didn't know it.
In other words, the "always have a back-up of anything important you store in a free Google account" people are 100% correct.
There are so many ways that "a few hundred internal training videos" could violate YouTube policy I'm just going to assume you were violating policy and didn't know it.
In other words, the "always have a back-up of anything important you store in a free Google account" people are 100% correct.
> Youtube sent her 3 strikes in one week. On videos that were 4 years old, indicating cyber bullying.
Do you know by chance if anyone "internal employees" tried to complain and report? I suspect this is an insider issue.
may be some internal staff, downloaded everything and reported these videos to kill your wife's business and to start their own business.
Do you know by chance if anyone "internal employees" tried to complain and report? I suspect this is an insider issue.
may be some internal staff, downloaded everything and reported these videos to kill your wife's business and to start their own business.
This is kind of dumb. At-least YouTube should have a form of downloading archived videos if the account is deactivated. They probably have them on their servers anyway.
Some of this makes me feel like there should be some form of law. If you ban/delete someone’s account, and the data they had was not illegal .e.g child porn, you gotta hand it over.
Some of this makes me feel like there should be some form of law. If you ban/delete someone’s account, and the data they had was not illegal .e.g child porn, you gotta hand it over.
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Was her Youtube account removed or whole Google account?
I might need to rethink uploading my Factorio speedruns to YT...
I might need to rethink uploading my Factorio speedruns to YT...
As long as they are public, there is probably no problems. Though I'm not sure how they respond to low popularity content.
Still, safest option might be to use unconnected account for it.
Still, safest option might be to use unconnected account for it.
Depending on how valuable the videos are, you might consider sending a legal notice to Google.
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A bit late, but I started burning important media to MDISCs then giving them to friends that swing by. I ask them to toss them in the top of their closet and forget about them. Makes multiple redundant backups cheap and easy.
This needs greater publicity to shame google/YouTube . I feel the pain here!
Have you tried requesting google/youtube all your (her) data?
If the videos aren’t there you can almost certainly proceed with a lawyer since you know they should be there (and almost certainly they’re not permanently deleted).
If the videos aren’t there you can almost certainly proceed with a lawyer since you know they should be there (and almost certainly they’re not permanently deleted).
I feel bad for introducing google to so many people in the old days. Hard scam
Another one. How many stories like this never make it to the front page?
Google will kill your entire business via AI filtering and refuse to even acknowledge you exist while you lose your home and life after investing in and building their platforms.
Lessons to learn here, Do not base your work on 3ºparties, always do backups of your videos/work. The easiest way it is not the safest one...
Never rely on an online services to be a safe/backup location to store your files. If they are important to you. Keep them somewhere else too
Don't leave your only copy of your work with a company that is so big that finding human tech-support would be nearly impossible
i can't understand how anyone would trust the sole copy of their data to any of the big-tech platforms
Can we ask for the name of the channel?
Using IPFS to distribute videos may prevent lost in this situation.
You got backup and p2p distribution at the same time.
You got backup and p2p distribution at the same time.
"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
Keep local copies. Seriously.
I've had this exact same experience! Same reason (cyber-bullying) given.
I agree with others that users need a technology bill of rights. We also need heavy handed breakup of the tech giants into their constituent parts so that more competition will make smaller businesses fight over how well they can treat people instead of how big they can grow.
I remember getting an email that unlisted videos will be removed.
I wonder if Google Takeout would have the content? Definitely try that. Also try a GDPR request. Not sure if that will work but that might get you a backup copy if they have it. If people have watched the videos recently there might be some local cache on their computers you can grab.
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Why would you use a free service for any work things ever
Use google at your own peril. Truly evil company.
if you are in India, as a last resort you should file a complaint with consumer court and see what happens.
keep us posted if youtube makes any attempt to review this and rectify it please.
If she's in Europe maybe a GDPR personal data request? Long shot.
After seeing posts like this on HN for years, this one officially scared me enough to completely migrate off Gmail altogether. I’m in the process right now of removing my gmail from any online account.
Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification” in Gmail.
Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)…I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner.
You can also do a full export of your Google data, which I highly recommend.
Switched to fastmail recently for my personal domain and could not be happier with the service. It costs money every month, so they have actual human support if anything goes wrong.
Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification” in Gmail.
Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)…I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner.
You can also do a full export of your Google data, which I highly recommend.
Switched to fastmail recently for my personal domain and could not be happier with the service. It costs money every month, so they have actual human support if anything goes wrong.
Just gonna throw Migadu in here as a mail host. Everyone loves Fastmail, which is cool - I'm an ex-happy-user - but Migadu's point of difference is their pricing.
Whereas Fastmail charges by the user/month (or did when I was there), which can add up quickly if you've got a bunch of domains, Migadu does not. They charge by volume. You can add as many domains and mailboxes as you like. For some use cases - mine, and likely many of you - that ends up with a way smaller bill.
They're run by real people in Switzerland. I've been a customer for a couple of years now and it's worked flawlessly.
Usual disclaimers, just a happy customer, not affiliated.
https://www.migadu.com/pricing/
https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/
Whereas Fastmail charges by the user/month (or did when I was there), which can add up quickly if you've got a bunch of domains, Migadu does not. They charge by volume. You can add as many domains and mailboxes as you like. For some use cases - mine, and likely many of you - that ends up with a way smaller bill.
They're run by real people in Switzerland. I've been a customer for a couple of years now and it's worked flawlessly.
Usual disclaimers, just a happy customer, not affiliated.
https://www.migadu.com/pricing/
https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/
I did enjoy Migadu and want to support them, but I had more than one important business email get filtered on the receiving end as spam because of the host. I found myself having to check in with people on sensitive matters to ensure they got my email, which is not a great look.
This was back in the free tier days (though I had a paid account), so maybe its improved now.
This was back in the free tier days (though I had a paid account), so maybe its improved now.
It's a terrible look — one that you can't avoid with 100% certainty even with a Google or Microsoft email!
I recommend Purely Mail: https://purelymail.com/
Very cheap, pay-as-you-go, unlimited accounts and domains with routing. It's a 1-man company with rough UI but works well for keeping control of your own data.
Very cheap, pay-as-you-go, unlimited accounts and domains with routing. It's a 1-man company with rough UI but works well for keeping control of your own data.
Note that if you're just using the domains for one user, you can set them up as aliases rather than seperate mailboxes to avoid stacking fees that way.
I do this, but it does make me wary of lock-in. It’d be a pain to have to change all of these in order to leave fastmail.
This is one of my problems for migrating from Google Workspace. I use aliases and groups to have significant numbers of separate email addresses for specific services.
Mapping all these accounts will be a big pain in the butt.
Mapping all these accounts will be a big pain in the butt.
I had a very poor experience with migrating off Migadu when they dropped their free tier. It completely soured me off them forever.
On a related note, I’ve commented earlier about this. I didn’t like the way Migadu dropped the free tier when the pandemic was raging, with a short notice. From that experience, I can’t bring myself to trust it. I really appreciate the pricing that’s not per user/mailbox, but there’s more to a business than just pricing.
Mxroute provides a similar service that’s not based on users/mailboxes and is cheap enough for multiple domains and multiple mailboxes.
For those concerned with privacy and data stored in certain countries, Mxroute stores data in the U.S. (like Fastmail) and Migadu stores data in France (a 14 eyes country) even though the company is incorporated in Switzerland. Migadu also does/did not encrypt data at rest (as of a couple of years ago). So any seizure of its servers in France means your data could be exposed.
Mxroute provides a similar service that’s not based on users/mailboxes and is cheap enough for multiple domains and multiple mailboxes.
For those concerned with privacy and data stored in certain countries, Mxroute stores data in the U.S. (like Fastmail) and Migadu stores data in France (a 14 eyes country) even though the company is incorporated in Switzerland. Migadu also does/did not encrypt data at rest (as of a couple of years ago). So any seizure of its servers in France means your data could be exposed.
Can you elaborate? Were you using something like IMAP sync and having trouble or are you moreso talking about timelines and their comms?
Moreso timeline and comms. First e-mail communication I got regarding sunsetting of the plan was a section at the bottom of a length e-mail announcing pricing changes sent on August 28, 2020.
The e-mail announced that on October 1st 2020, free tier would be sunset, and immediately locked until upgrade to a paid account.
The e-mail announced that on October 1st 2020, free tier would be sunset, and immediately locked until upgrade to a paid account.
I completely agree on the pricing front. Migadu’s pricing (like Mxroute’s) is good for those who need multiple mailboxes.
> They're run by real people in Switzerland.
Please note that the data centers used by Migadu are in France. This may be a concern for some people who are looking to avoid 14 eyes countries.
> They're run by real people in Switzerland.
Please note that the data centers used by Migadu are in France. This may be a concern for some people who are looking to avoid 14 eyes countries.
Their explanation why: "We find EU privacy laws much more elaborate and restrictive than the Swiss ones. Switzerland used to be famous for banking secrecy, but that has nothing to do with digital data." https://www.migadu.com/procon/
I had super bad experience with Migadu. They had changed important settings and sent email about it few days later (pop server name), then they doubled the price despite their old home page claims (again no email notification). During the pandemia there were several downtimes. Emails to yahoo were not really delivered (I have an old domain, and I send only private emails.)
I switched to mxroute and it just works. Migadu's price is ok but the support and communication was really weak back then.
I switched to mxroute and it just works. Migadu's price is ok but the support and communication was really weak back then.
+1, Migadu is simple, reliable, easy, and just works. Cost is low enough it might as well be free. I've only ever had one issue (from incorrectly interpreting documentation) and had an actual human respond and walk me through it.
The only downside to be aware of is the lack of calendar support (technically yes via CalDAV, but that doesn't work for most users--e.g. Calendly won't work).
Edit: the way they handle domains and email aliases has simplified my email life.
The only downside to be aware of is the lack of calendar support (technically yes via CalDAV, but that doesn't work for most users--e.g. Calendly won't work).
Edit: the way they handle domains and email aliases has simplified my email life.
Just wanted to send you my thanks. For the last hour or so drinking my morning coffee I read their page.
I will give them a try but you might have provided me with the service to switch to from Google.
I already have replacements for storage (my second main use) and Documents. And I do not have a problem in general with proprietary solutions. But Google sadly more and more is not in line with what I see as values good for the internet nor humanity.
I will give them a try but you might have provided me with the service to switch to from Google.
I already have replacements for storage (my second main use) and Documents. And I do not have a problem in general with proprietary solutions. But Google sadly more and more is not in line with what I see as values good for the internet nor humanity.
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Sounds like a similar pricing model to MxRoute, who I've been quite happy with.
Your post reminded me to back using my gmail locally and to ensure a script does so automatically from now on. I need to do the same with google docs as soon as possible.
I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”
I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”
The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe.
Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
> has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence
I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.
I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.
> The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe.
There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
You are correct, and if that were the end of it, people like myself who are concerned about it could rightly be labeled paranoid.
However, the collected data create an intimate, detailed portrait of you. Data aggregators can know how old you are, your general state of health, where you have been, your interests, including sexual interests, your political views both expressed and unexpressed, your associations, your associates, your family, your daily habits, your unusual habits, your credit score, whether that credit score is accurate, etc, etc.
And, this is true for everyone you come into contact with: friends, family, business associates.
An AI could, with this data, model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse.
Moreover, not only must you trust the people with access to that data, and everyone they sell it to, to only ever use it for targeted ads, but you must trust everyone who will ever have access to it, forever.
While you may believe you're boring and your views are entirely uncontroversial, times change. Or, hell, with enough data and motivation, someone can paint a damning portrait of you made up whole cloth from true, innocuous details.
You have to just hope that neither you nor anyone you associate with become a political target, or the target of criminal activity, or garner just plain negative attention, for whatever reason, because if so, you and your loved ones will be trivially easy to find and manipulate.
However, the collected data create an intimate, detailed portrait of you. Data aggregators can know how old you are, your general state of health, where you have been, your interests, including sexual interests, your political views both expressed and unexpressed, your associations, your associates, your family, your daily habits, your unusual habits, your credit score, whether that credit score is accurate, etc, etc.
And, this is true for everyone you come into contact with: friends, family, business associates.
An AI could, with this data, model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse.
Moreover, not only must you trust the people with access to that data, and everyone they sell it to, to only ever use it for targeted ads, but you must trust everyone who will ever have access to it, forever.
While you may believe you're boring and your views are entirely uncontroversial, times change. Or, hell, with enough data and motivation, someone can paint a damning portrait of you made up whole cloth from true, innocuous details.
You have to just hope that neither you nor anyone you associate with become a political target, or the target of criminal activity, or garner just plain negative attention, for whatever reason, because if so, you and your loved ones will be trivially easy to find and manipulate.
>model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse.
To me this is a natural thing. It makes sense that computers are better at remembering and interpreting data than humans. YouTube is able to recommend me videos much better than I could myself. I don't remember the names of all the people I like, but YouTube does.
To me this is a natural thing. It makes sense that computers are better at remembering and interpreting data than humans. YouTube is able to recommend me videos much better than I could myself. I don't remember the names of all the people I like, but YouTube does.
> To me this is a natural thing. It makes sense that computers are better at remembering and interpreting data than humans. YouTube is able to recommend me videos much better than I could myself. I don't remember the names of all the people I like, but YouTube does.
This is a true statement that doesn't address any of the arguments; a non-sequitur. Yes, computers are better at remembering and interpreting (some) data than humans.
What does that have to do with the humans who access and use that data for their own, very human ends? You skipped that part.
This is a true statement that doesn't address any of the arguments; a non-sequitur. Yes, computers are better at remembering and interpreting (some) data than humans.
What does that have to do with the humans who access and use that data for their own, very human ends? You skipped that part.
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When I have the stomach for it, I click irrelevant ads which don’t reflect my interests. You know—out of curiosity—to spend their money. It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute.
> It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute.
Like if I click an ad for, say, hunting gear… I’m instantly inundated with “thin blue line” and not very subtly threatening “guns rights” stuff and pretty much every single thing I would expect to see in a far right mob.
Interesting, thanks.
Another pro-tip: forward to your new email, and set up a filter that labels all the items sent `TO` your old Gmail. This becomes a record of items you missed, and can update (or better yet, unsubscribe) as needed.
This is a great idea. I thought about forwarding, but hadn't thought of automatically labelling them as requiring an update (or unsubscribe).
This somehow reminds me of Yahoo. The fall of Yahoo starts with people stopped using Yahoo Mail and went to Gmail.
I've tried and failed to migrate off Gmail a few times. Mostly due to the number of SAAS accounts I've created with that email address. I like your suggestion to search for "verify your email" etc. I tried searching my Gmail inbox using search you suggested: “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification”. I got 3 results despite having hundreds of signups since starting the account back in 2006.
Something that would be super useful is a script that can be run against a local Gmail mailbox file that does a comprehensive search for "account created" type confirmation emails and produces a CSV of domain, date, etc. Something that would enable user to delete old accounts, or migrate them to a new email service.
Something that would be super useful is a script that can be run against a local Gmail mailbox file that does a comprehensive search for "account created" type confirmation emails and produces a CSV of domain, date, etc. Something that would enable user to delete old accounts, or migrate them to a new email service.
> it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address
And then taking a week off of work so that I can change 672 passwords.
And then taking a week off of work so that I can change 672 passwords.
I thought it was going to be a huge hassle (I too imagined I had hundreds of accounts), but for me there were less than 30 accounts I actually cared about. Basically credit cards, banking, airlines, government services, social accounts, FAANG accounts, and domains/hosting. Annoying, but only took about an hour and a half.
The rest that are non-important I'll just let languish in the Gmail account, assuming I'll be able to go back and get them if needed, yet, also not being heartbroken if I get screwed by some faceless algorithm like OP.
The rest that are non-important I'll just let languish in the Gmail account, assuming I'll be able to go back and get them if needed, yet, also not being heartbroken if I get screwed by some faceless algorithm like OP.
[deleted]
> Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)
We think the things we've built up over the years are important, but really they're just digital sandcastles. The only account you have online that matters is your bank account. When everything else goes, it turns out it doesn't affect you in the future. You just create new accounts and move on.
We think the things we've built up over the years are important, but really they're just digital sandcastles. The only account you have online that matters is your bank account. When everything else goes, it turns out it doesn't affect you in the future. You just create new accounts and move on.
The only account you have online that matters is your bank account
Can’t you just visit your bank office in person and reset it? Or if they can’t do it, just withdrew all the funds and create a new account?
Can’t you just visit your bank office in person and reset it? Or if they can’t do it, just withdrew all the funds and create a new account?
Oh sure, you can recover your account or create a new one in person. I imagine online banks have similar avenues
I'm not sure what the situation described above has to do with Gmail and migrating off of it. OP was storing hundreds of videos, probably against Youtube ToS, to run their business. Pretty sure unlisted videos can't run ads either, so they were basically using Youtube as a free hosting service for their business.
The common thread that they are trying to raise awareness about is that Google at any time, for any reason, can lock you out of your account with no way for you to actually find out why or what's happened.
Yes it's probally against YouTube's ToS to get people to pay for content in unlisted videos, but the terms of service doesn't explicitly talk about using YouTube to host paid-for content - it is covered in a border statement though in their ToS [0]
But they should still at least be able to talk to a real human about it and get told the actual reason "Your account was terminated for commercial use of unlisted videos" instead of automated email bot responses/Or have been given some warning "This is against our ToS, your account will be terminated in 7 days"
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/38348285?hl=en
Yes it's probally against YouTube's ToS to get people to pay for content in unlisted videos, but the terms of service doesn't explicitly talk about using YouTube to host paid-for content - it is covered in a border statement though in their ToS [0]
But they should still at least be able to talk to a real human about it and get told the actual reason "Your account was terminated for commercial use of unlisted videos" instead of automated email bot responses/Or have been given some warning "This is against our ToS, your account will be terminated in 7 days"
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/38348285?hl=en
1. Why would hundreds of unlisted videos be against the ToS?
2. OP didn't say the videos contained ads. And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
3. YT weren't complaining about ads anyway. It was "cyberbullying" in one video.
2. OP didn't say the videos contained ads. And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
3. YT weren't complaining about ads anyway. It was "cyberbullying" in one video.
> Why would hundreds of unlisted videos be against the ToS?
It's most likely against ToS if you use said videos in a commercial way. Youtube isn't your companies private video hosting service.
> OP didn't say the videos contained ads.
No, but they were used to run their business. So it was commercial in nature.
> And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
Mostly a quirk of how Youtube works.
> And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
Looks like I was wrong about this one, sorry. It does seem like unlisted videos can indeed run ads. That being said, it still seems like a bad idea to run company crucial part of your business off of a free ad-based service.
It's most likely against ToS if you use said videos in a commercial way. Youtube isn't your companies private video hosting service.
> OP didn't say the videos contained ads.
No, but they were used to run their business. So it was commercial in nature.
> And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
Mostly a quirk of how Youtube works.
> And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
Looks like I was wrong about this one, sorry. It does seem like unlisted videos can indeed run ads. That being said, it still seems like a bad idea to run company crucial part of your business off of a free ad-based service.
[deleted]
According To OP, YouTube noticed them about cyber bullying, not ToS violation because of hosting many unlisted videos.
I did something similar. Searching for verify and verification are good for those cases where you signed up with a Gmail email.
You can also navigate to Settings > Security > Signing in with Google to see everywhere that you've used Google Sign in (oAuth).
You can also navigate to Settings > Security > Signing in with Google to see everywhere that you've used Google Sign in (oAuth).
The simplest solution to this I can think of is to use a mail app on your laptop that syncs with your Gmail. That way you will always have a local copy of your emails.
I'm not sure if Google can kill Gmail. If any major competitor takes over, they could mine emails for ad value, which would give them a large edge.
Perhaps, but they can kill individual accounts.
That's why I pay for Gsuite.
I only need to worry about not losing control of my domain name. If my mail provider decide to kick me out, I just need to get a new host.
I only need to worry about not losing control of my domain name. If my mail provider decide to kick me out, I just need to get a new host.
I've been worried about someone taking over domain in recent years as well.
I've bought a bunch of decentralized domain for this reason on handshake, sol, etc. They aren't super usable yet as most email services won't resolve the alternative DNS but who knows what future holds.
Namecheap acquired namebase (namecheap of handshake world), recently.
https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/
So I've hope it will go somewhere.
I've bought a bunch of decentralized domain for this reason on handshake, sol, etc. They aren't super usable yet as most email services won't resolve the alternative DNS but who knows what future holds.
Namecheap acquired namebase (namecheap of handshake world), recently.
https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/
So I've hope it will go somewhere.
[deleted]
I’m not saying this is bad advice. It’s not a bad idea to reduce single points of failure!
But without objectivity about how often this happens, there’s probably a lot of other far worse problems that deserve our attention.
But without objectivity about how often this happens, there’s probably a lot of other far worse problems that deserve our attention.
It's a digital life equivalent of a motorcycle accident I think. The risk is catastrophic, so any incidence rate is enough to require being prepared for it.
At first I thought that losing access to my gmail would be pretty bad, but now that I think about it, I don’t see anything particularly troublesome if it happens tomorrow, let alone catastrophic. Can you give some examples?
If you owm the email's domain you can switch the domain Mx record and continue just fine. But over the years a lot of accounts end up tied to Google SSO and if you are just using a plain old @gmail and have tied all your accounts to it you are probably in trouble.
I’m not a business. I don’t use domains or SSO. Yes, I use my gmail address as a login to many websites, but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). And I do export my gmail inbox every year as a backup.
Fair enough, if you feel like you have a handle on your personal situation and are comfortable with the level of risk then by all means don't be worried. When I say catastrophic, I don't necessarily mean catastrophic to your entire life with no way forward. I just mean your digital life will be pretty toast and you'll have to start again on a lot of platforms that don't make the email changeover easy. That's not going to be true for everyone either. If you've got nothing important online, nothing to worry about.
> but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult).
I think this is pretty naive though, this thread is really a story about how automated systems are making the digital world more challenging to navigate and how getting a human to help you is becoming harder in many cases, making those automated decisions final. If all you needed to sign up for something was your email address, it's possible they will have no way to verify you are the owner if you lose access to that, even if you can get in contact with a human.
> but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult).
I think this is pretty naive though, this thread is really a story about how automated systems are making the digital world more challenging to navigate and how getting a human to help you is becoming harder in many cases, making those automated decisions final. If all you needed to sign up for something was your email address, it's possible they will have no way to verify you are the owner if you lose access to that, even if you can get in contact with a human.
Well, if I lose access to gmail the first thing I do will be switching all important online services to a new email.
I’m curious though, which online services would be really bad to lose access to (for you personally)?
I’m curious though, which online services would be really bad to lose access to (for you personally)?
How are you going to log in to anything using Google SSO? It's not the email address that logs you in, it's the authentication handshake from your google account. Anything using 2FA, or one time passcodes to your email address for new devices?
One example is when I lost access to an email account tied to a Digital Ocean account. It had been hosting a project VM and I never had a need to log in to it until the project shut down. I try and log in and although the credentials are right, it needs me to verify a one time code from my email address to prove I am not a bot. Couldn't do that. I never gained access back, DO required me to give them a full suite of proof of ID before I could even get them to disconnect my credit card, and even to this day it periodically restarts charges against my card and I have to contact them. Each time they escalate to engineering and engineering says they "Fixed the issue". Now times that experience by potentially dozens of accounts.
One example is when I lost access to an email account tied to a Digital Ocean account. It had been hosting a project VM and I never had a need to log in to it until the project shut down. I try and log in and although the credentials are right, it needs me to verify a one time code from my email address to prove I am not a bot. Couldn't do that. I never gained access back, DO required me to give them a full suite of proof of ID before I could even get them to disconnect my credit card, and even to this day it periodically restarts charges against my card and I have to contact them. Each time they escalate to engineering and engineering says they "Fixed the issue". Now times that experience by potentially dozens of accounts.
I never use my personal gmail account for anything work related. For 2FA I always use my phone.
But I agree that there might be situations where it could be bad, especially if you work as a consultant/freelancer, and/or own a small business.
But I agree that there might be situations where it could be bad, especially if you work as a consultant/freelancer, and/or own a small business.
As useless and pithy it is to say "just restore from backup", having your livelihood (or a significant time investment) depend on a system far outside of your control, where you have no service guarantees or even a billable relationship, is a fairly shaky ground to stand on. Ultimately if you spend your time producing digital assets, you should have taken action to ensure you had ownership and control over them somewhere.
> you should have
Please don't scold someone who's already in a shitty situation, or lecture them with the obvious. That breaks the HN guidelines, notably this one: "Be kind."
It's extremely easy to do this kind of thing on the internet and not as easy to realize the effect it has on people, and also on the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't scold someone who's already in a shitty situation, or lecture them with the obvious. That breaks the HN guidelines, notably this one: "Be kind."
It's extremely easy to do this kind of thing on the internet and not as easy to realize the effect it has on people, and also on the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I know this, you know this, and OP has for damned sure just realised this, as has anyone else who's read this post.
What the purpose of your comment? It's not helpful.
What the purpose of your comment? It's not helpful.
To give everyone else who hasn't done these things a harsh reminder of the damage it could bring if you don't.
The grandparent’s post sounds like it was written towards the OP, though, not everyone else.
If that weren’t the case, I agree with you, it’s a good message to spread.
If that weren’t the case, I agree with you, it’s a good message to spread.
Maybe leave out the harsh?
If even one person sees that comment and pulls their content out of the google ecosystem, then the comment was helpful.
Run this:
youtube-dl https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel
and have a snack while it finishes. You'll thank yourself later.
Run this:
youtube-dl https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel
and have a snack while it finishes. You'll thank yourself later.
Should not creators already have local copies of videos they upload to YouTube?
Many people have a naive trust of free services. If your livelyhood/business depends on uploaded files, do not trust Facebook, Youtube, Gmail, Google docs, etc to store it forever.
I think it's important to mention that such trust is misplaced and risky, ALWAYS make backups. Sure it's generally common sense for many, but the OPs story is a nice example.
I think it's important to mention that such trust is misplaced and risky, ALWAYS make backups. Sure it's generally common sense for many, but the OPs story is a nice example.
> Many people have a naive trust of free services.
I don't think that that's particularly true of HN readership though.
If GP's comment was on a more mainstream forum e.g. Reddit, then I would agree with you, but as it stands it feels a bit gratuitous.
I don't think that that's particularly true of HN readership though.
If GP's comment was on a more mainstream forum e.g. Reddit, then I would agree with you, but as it stands it feels a bit gratuitous.
I'm not sure OP has realised this, with remarks like "indicating cyber bullying".
I hope she can recover those videos. Aside from not backing up initially, I’m also wondering why or if she did anything after getting those 3 strike warnings :$
What can you do? Isn't a bot? It's not like you can respond and explain yourself.
I think he meant something like "shit they're going to remove all my videos in 2 days, I'd better back them up".
How are normies supposed to know this?
Because it's happened before. Leafyishere had 5 million subs but his channel got deleted from getting 3 "bullying" strikes all at once.
Things like this happen, get escalated to the media, and it creates public awareness of the risks of hosting digital content only in the cloud on servers that you don't own and don't even pay for.
In other words, the next generation of normies will probably understand this because of people before them learning the hard way.
In other words, the next generation of normies will probably understand this because of people before them learning the hard way.
Would a GDPR request have a backup?
I think its worth attempting.
> youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company
I don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of their website over the past few years, this sort of behavior is becoming quite common, and even among YouTubers with millions of followers I don't think I've seen them reverse a claim of this scale.
Yes, it's a shame. If you don't have them on your own computer though, then are they really yours? It's a hard way to learn that local backups are important, and "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs.
I don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of their website over the past few years, this sort of behavior is becoming quite common, and even among YouTubers with millions of followers I don't think I've seen them reverse a claim of this scale.
Yes, it's a shame. If you don't have them on your own computer though, then are they really yours? It's a hard way to learn that local backups are important, and "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs.
> "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs.
Except that is exactly how cloud companies market themselves. That is exactly what cloud companies have been telling consumers for a decade+.
Right up to the point of commercials showing someone lose a device and saying “no worries, it’s all in the cloud!”, etc. We’ve been told for years that our data is safer in the cloud than it is on our own devices. That the cloud itself IS the backup system.
Normal people didn’t just arrive at this conclusion on their own. They were fed it directly from the companies that we are all now supposed to just innately understand are not to be trusted with our data.
Except that is exactly how cloud companies market themselves. That is exactly what cloud companies have been telling consumers for a decade+.
Right up to the point of commercials showing someone lose a device and saying “no worries, it’s all in the cloud!”, etc. We’ve been told for years that our data is safer in the cloud than it is on our own devices. That the cloud itself IS the backup system.
Normal people didn’t just arrive at this conclusion on their own. They were fed it directly from the companies that we are all now supposed to just innately understand are not to be trusted with our data.
Sounds like either side was complicit in the matter. Again, I know it's not an easy pill to swallow (I anticipate both these comments will be dead or grey in time), but that's just how computers work. All the effort we put into abstraction is worthless if it allows (or in this case, encourages) the end-user to make catastrophic mistakes.
YouTube has never promised or implied your videos that are on their servers for free would be there forever.
The more cynical among us never believed their lies and knew things like this would happen. I hope normal people also start realising that they were being fed marketing BS all along, and no doubt the more things like this happen, the sooner they will.
Giving away all assets to one cloud company is definitely risky.
[deleted]
'The Cloud' is just someone else's computer. Nothing more nothing less
In a thread full of unhelpful, pedantic comments this is a podium finisher for sure.
Ok, thanks.
If YouTube decided that they didn’t want to host 700 unlisted videos that’s perfectly within their right; however, if that is the case then they should tell the user why their videos are being taken down with a deadline for them to download their videos. It would be wrong for YouTube to claim your videos are “cyberbullying” just so they can free up some space.
I think they know that, there’s no need to repeat the obvious just because it will make ourselves feel better.
People fuck up, it’s just a matter of when, and when we do it’s better to help and hope that some day you’ll be helped in turn.
People fuck up, it’s just a matter of when, and when we do it’s better to help and hope that some day you’ll be helped in turn.
To be fair, the rise of these arbitrary AI-based deletions with no recourse are a drastic shift in how Google treats its users, and most people who don't work in tech or follow HN haven't caught on yet.
And why should they? Google actively markets itself as trustworthy. Unless you know someone who has been burned, the average non-professional YouTube user who just thought it was a sensible way to host their videos would not be aware of the pattern.
And why should they? Google actively markets itself as trustworthy. Unless you know someone who has been burned, the average non-professional YouTube user who just thought it was a sensible way to host their videos would not be aware of the pattern.
Horrible answer but 100% correct.
[deleted]
One very important thing for everyone to remember is to NOT USE ANY GOOGLE SERVICES BESIDES YOUTUBE.
If you get banned from Google for something on your Google Drive, and lose your YouTube account, there's no alternative YouTube. You're fucked. But if you lose your ProtonMail account there are plenty of other email vendors, you'll be fine.
STICK TO YOUTUBE ONLY.
If you get banned from Google for something on your Google Drive, and lose your YouTube account, there's no alternative YouTube. You're fucked. But if you lose your ProtonMail account there are plenty of other email vendors, you'll be fine.
STICK TO YOUTUBE ONLY.
I've never posted anything like this, but this is the only place I have any hope of a human response after youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company. My wife started a company that helps people transition from colleges in their home country (for instance the IIT system in India) by translating their credit system into the American educational credit system.
She utilized a youtube channel with unlisted videos to explain to internal employees the nuances of difficult evaluation types, for instance how to determine for CEGEPs in Quebec the difference between upper secondary and post secondary. Another example would be how to award credits for MBBS programs from U.K modeled educational system (West Africa, India etc).
Youtube sent her 3 strikes in one week. On videos that were 4 years old, indicating cyber bullying. These videos were unlisted and literally contained only incredibly dense, rather boring videos covering the nooks and crannies of various educational systems and how they relate to each other. When she responded, she received an auto reply that stated you get a reply within 2 business days. No further response despite repeated requests within the system, then tweets, and finally submitting a new appeal form from scratch to which the reply was nothing can be done because too much time had passed.
This content was incredibly time intensive to create and was basically another job on top of her position as CEO. As a small company this was a devastating blow. Her work youtube account is now removed.
Personally the cynic in me speculates that google cleans out low hanging fruit, using metrics, and there was nothing in the content that triggered the bot at all, just a case of over 700 somewhat lengthy videos that were getting almost no traffic, and they get to delete them and hide behind the byzantine garbage fire that is their "support".
If you work for the youtube division and can help, I'm begging you please send me a message or reply to this post, it seems this is the only way to rectify this kind of problem. If there is anyway to download the videos that is all we are asking for.
-jdh