Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

To be fair, Google's ad dept. wants you to put everything about your digital life into their services, yet nowhere do they warn you about backing your stuff up with the same gusto that they put into getting you to use the service in the first place. It's not quite a "Chad's Garage" scenario.

"I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities."

Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.

This is a gestalt response, but leonroy, I hope you don't mind if I put it here. You are talking about what I want to talk about: solving a problem. ...

Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility.

Suppose Dennis Cooper forgets his online banking password today. Does Google have a responsibility to somehow deliver the forgot password email?

Did not the initial Gmail marketing say something like "This will be free forever! Don't delete your old mail, archive it! Use search on the records of your own life!"

Sounds like a utility to me.

The law isn't always right. Times change, for example.

I believe that 1. the majority of individuals aren't TOS savvy and 2. the majority of individuals believe that they have a right to a persistent email account.

If property laws and corporate policies and user habits tend to visit tragedy on users... Well, something should change!

The USAmerican Congress does have a history of designing rules to serve the common good and forcing tech giants to play by those rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934

One rule could be that service providers must make a reasonable effort to give users their data in a functional, useful form in the event of account termination. For the good of society.

Another might be that critical services (online banking password recovery) cannot be revoked without due process.

Oh, does that one cause a big effing problem for Gmail, Outlook.com, etc? Well so be it. Online service providers made that problem for themselves when they fought tooth and nail to become important parts of everyone's lives.

This kind of thing is what Government is FOR.

Title II of the 1934 Comms Act required interoperability between networks. In modern times, that might mean implementing a open format, or open protocol. Maybe another rule would prohibit offering a message delivery service to consumers if said service doesn't implement an open protocol.

I only meant "renting" a reachable IP from some third party. I think that's realistic.

However what you describe -- building out your own infrastructure -- still remains a lofty but worthy endeavor for anyone with the skills and determination.

No. That is not the situation here. Pretending like somebody using a 'free' service is equivalent to them being far behind on payments to a storage service is a ridiculous analogy. Google advertises their reliability and nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups or move out. You are not generally in an adversarial relationship with google like you would be to a company you're in debt to.

EDIT: This post isn't as well written as I'd like it to be, but parent is bullshit and I think the core argument of "This is not an analogous situation" holds. I need to leave in a few minutes though so I don't have time to write a better argument, sorry.

As a short version though, if this was an analogous situation where google had tried to contact this person to take down whatever was objectionable, and warned them that they should back up their stuff immediately since they could decide to take it down on any business day, I bet this guy would have been right on that.

They didn't though. Giving them social credit like they did is ridiculous.

When my brother died in 2010, I posted to that effect on Facebook. Many friends (majority of them "real life," pre-Facebook/outside of Facebook friends) gave their condolences. Others called me. A few messaged me, etc. You get the picture.

That correspondence was, and remains, important to me.

Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it?

The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have.

But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want.

From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail, and agree to store my archive for me.

That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every sense of ownership.

The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.