31–40 of 77 posts
Even hashes of your email address or payment data should be something you should be able to request they must delete.
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There was a recent example with Google Drive where it explicitly disabled any way to appeal. I was able to reproduce the issue where it was flagging files that consisted of a single byte, sometimes followed by \r\n or \n. Here's the HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405 Screenshots of trying to "appeal" (Request a review) from when I recreated the issue show pretty clearly there is no human involved…
I don’t see how you get from Google’s statement “Was taken down for legal reasons and cannot be appealed“ to “no human was involved” .
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I don’t see how you get from Google’s statement “Was taken down for legal reasons and cannot be appealed“ to “no human was involved” .
I think the point is they, based on the file content, no human could have been involved in the decision. If there was a human involved, the files never would have been flagged.
That might be as simple as checking for the existence of legal documents claiming copyright infringement, or as reading a web page stating “we already removed X other copies of this file”.
Neither is a fail-safe way of doing such a review, but doing a thorough review might be expensive even for Google. Does anybody know how many such reviews they do each day?
It might also be a bug on their tooling to assist human reviewers.
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It still is.
Spirit of the law is a concept I would encourage anyone to think about when arguing about these things. I believe most people, and courts in particular, would not agree that a human rubber-stamping automated decision is in line with the spirit of the law. Clinging onto a technicality isn't going to go well. I'd also like to point out that these laws don't just come out of nowhere in a vacuum, to be interpreted withou…
There’s also the right to be forgotten. How can they ban you if they have to delete all information that can be used to identify you? Even hashes of your email address or payment data should be something you should be able to request they must delete.
If a person revokes consent for their personal data to be used, the data must be deleted if "there is no other legal ground for the processing". But if a data processor has an overriding "legitimate interest" in storing data about you, then they have legal grounds to do so without your consent. The details of this will vary depending on the situation (and the jurisdiction) but, for example, fraud prevention is explicitly called out as a legitimate interest.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37882/google-adwords...
The problem is that the GDPR is pretty much not enforced. See https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ where the author tries to get all his data from Facebook - the case hasn't moved since 3 years now. The regulators are useless (especially the Irish one which seems happy to shield big tech scum from having to comply with the law) which confirms my own experience raising complaints with the ICO (the UK privacy regulator…
For example, the author you linked to is demanding a portable copy of all his personal data from all sources, which Facebook has no GDPR obligation to give him. He seems to have been misled by a form letter he found, which incorrectly conflates Article 15 data access (isn't required to be portable) and Article 20 data access (isn't required to include data that he didn't initially provide).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a recent example with Google Drive where it explicitly disabled any way to appeal. I was able to reproduce the issue where it was flagging files that consisted of a single byte, sometimes followed by \r\n or \n. Here's the HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405 Screenshots of trying to "appeal" (Request a review) from when I recreated the issue show pretty clearly there is no human involved…
I don’t see how you get from Google’s statement “Was taken down for legal reasons and cannot be appealed“ to “no human was involved” .
Also, just the absurdity that a human would review a file containing only "1" and decide the decision to flag it was correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spirit of the law is a concept I would encourage anyone to think about when arguing about these things. I believe most people, and courts in particular, would not agree that a human rubber-stamping automated decision is in line with the spirit of the law. Clinging onto a technicality isn't going to go well. I'd also like to point out that these laws don't just come out of nowhere in a vacuum, to be interpreted withou…
But the entire premise here is a "letter of the law" thing. Online account bans are pretty clearly not within the spirit of the GDPR restrictions on automated decisionmaking; note how the guidelines you linked, despite providing quite a bit of detail about different kinds of automated decisionmaking and rules around them, don't mention account bans at all.
However, I could make the case that losing an account which holds years of your private correspondence and is your point of contact for private exchange, services you rely on (including where bills, account recovery emails, policy changes, warnings & alerts, 2fa codes, and other very important messages are sent), potential employers or clients, and which doubles as a login for other services (see openid) and so on, can have a significant effect on your life and could potentially fall under "decisions that deny someone an employment opportunity or put them at a serious disadvantage" or (admittedly vague) "lead to the exclusion or discrimination of individuals."
Some of the other examples in the guidelines seem mild by comparison (e.g. getting a reduced limit on credit card).
My perspective is colored by both having lost access to an email account and also being denied a credit card application; the former was a much bigger problem.
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I think the point is they, based on the file content, no human could have been involved in the decision. If there was a human involved, the files never would have been flagged.
You're assuming the human both has agency, and gives a damn. It's more likely the human just rubber-stamps all bans, to get their KPI of number of appeals processed per day up!