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It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

alexaobrien.com

31–40 of 278 posts

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#31
post #18
post #2

In a lot of ways this kind of stuff is what we were warned about by many including the FSF. Cloud software you don't control, or which knows a lot about you, can be used to censor you. Always better to self-host and backup/distribute via the cloud as a secondary method. Easier said than done though.

Yeah, lots of people saw this coming light-years away. People really should stop ignoring the TOS.

Society really should stop tolerating this type of TOS.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#33
post #4

Someone's gotta do something about Google. While they can't be responsible for someone putting all their eggs in the same basket, their terrible customer support policies can really ruin someone's work beyond repair.

The biggest problem with Google isn't that they can delete YouTube videos or your Google+ account, it's that they can virtually erase you from the web through their search domination.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#34
post #7

Well, she is easier to defend than Nazis. So, here I go... Freedom of expression, not just free speech the legal concept, should be a societal goal. Google has every right, legally, to delete this stuff. However, in an ideal world, they'd do no such thing and would let people judge based on the merits of the message. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to work towards that ideal world. Maybe the solution…

> Maybe the solution is distributed content and P2P networks?

Zero Net does that: https://zeronet.io/

A surprising relatively recent project that is much more usable than Tor onions or Freenet project. All content is hosted in a P2P fashion, you seed all the contents you have visited. If enough people visit your content, you won't need to host it.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#35
post #7

Well, she is easier to defend than Nazis. So, here I go... Freedom of expression, not just free speech the legal concept, should be a societal goal. Google has every right, legally, to delete this stuff. However, in an ideal world, they'd do no such thing and would let people judge based on the merits of the message. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to work towards that ideal world. Maybe the solution…

xoogler here. I would definitely subscribe to occam's razor here. Rather than explicit censorship, this is probably something that just got snagged in the net of Google's semi-automated content moderation process, which is probably overzealous in combating #extremism. Having no human channel to contact doesn't help either.

> I appealed both decisions. Those appeals were apparently rejected, (at least that is what I gathered.because the videos were removed). That the community strikes stood (despite my appeals) was not explicitly clear during the process.

Is the appeal process automated? If there is no way to circumvent an automated process then it has to work 100% correctly, 99% is simply not acceptable.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#36

Help me understand- Alexa O'Brien has a Youtube account with many hours of video. She also has a google account, drive, etc. Some of her videos contained material that Google (being Google), didn't like. Despite the fact that it was all very important journalism, Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned. I would say that 5 years ago I would have been shocked and outraged, but lately I just abso…

I don't like that google is doing this, but your argument doesn't help our cause.

> Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned.

The author admits the videos contain terrorist propaganda. Its not arbitrary, its literally the definition of extremism. If google doesn't want to host that content, they don't have to. They want to be vaguely family-safe.

> Google is on a crusade to demonetize any video it doesn't like, so it can keep dwindling ad money flowing to only the people it chooses.

Absolute bullshit. Google doesn't crusade - its a company not a religion. And are you really insinuating that google is somehow a plot to make the rich richer? Really? The platform where anyone can upload a video and monetize it, and countless joe-schmoes have become millionaires from?

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#37
post #33
post #4

Someone's gotta do something about Google. While they can't be responsible for someone putting all their eggs in the same basket, their terrible customer support policies can really ruin someone's work beyond repair.

The biggest problem with Google isn't that they can delete YouTube videos or your Google+ account, it's that they can virtually erase you from the web through their search domination.

I mean technically yes, but that is pretty much fear mongering. That is like fearing the government because they could delete your social security number. Neither would ever do it, despite it being possible. The ramifications would be absurd.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#38
post #10

Terabyte drives are very cheap. Since it's borderline stupid, to simply upload this volume of work to some third party service without backup, I have no sympathy or technical concern. This being an illustration of Google's terrible "progressively tyrannical" track record, the article is badly titled. More like Google the Oppressor of Truth. Good Luck to Alexa.

Ideally, I'd like to back up my data too. That's where it becomes much harder: I need a second location. (In case my house catches fire, or floods in a hurricane, etc.) AWS and GCE both provide raw disk space, and certainly, an encrypted backup could be uploaded to them. I would like to be able to put a cap on what I spend on service, in case something goes wrong with the system, which AFAIK, neither GCE/AWS provide,…

Video originals, soundclips, text, edited versions, become a tangled pipeline without experience (in the form of seeing it work in a large project context).

I backup my multiple TB of data on Dropbox, some on Github (the code and production assets are committed to it), and external drives at least once a month. I think people have a tough time determining what's important (obviously) and are bad at organizing large amounts of data, conceptually more than technically. That being said, if you are going to generate a lot of data worth anything, even your publishing platform gives you an idea to how to structure it.

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