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It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

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Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#51

Post by severine »

Clubber wrote: post #33
iampims wrote: 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.

Serious question: what are some examples of great content virtually erased from the web by search engines?

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#52

Post by saalweachter »

ameister14 wrote: post #41
sshumaker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be fine if they didn't insist that the automation simply flagged it so humans could review it for the final decision.

Eh, human review isn't all that and a bag of chips. Firstly you have the subjective problems in human review, that different humans will find different things egregious. Secondly you still have the context problems: would the humans have been more likely to review the videos in the context of a reporter reporting on evidence presented in a court trial?

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly from the standpoint of anyone building a system to moderate content, you have the human toll: most of the content the humans are reviewing is going to be highly objectionable to most humans, by definition. Expecting humans to review this content day in, day out and not have it take a psychological toll is not realistic; you can find interviews with people who have done this work for various companies, and the tales of their burnout.

(This is not meant to defend Google or condone what the reporter is going through, etc, just to point out that "make humans review everything" is not a slam-dunk answer.)

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#53

Post by ocdtrekkie »

deathanatos wrote: post #28
jack9 wrote: 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,…

Personally, I have a couple synced drives at home to tolerate hardware failure, and an additional storage setup at a family member's house, which syncs directly over the Internet, to cover incidents that affect my home. Roughly, I have my important data on five drives across two physical locations. And no data is stored in places I lack physical access to.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#55

Post by jdietrich »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #5

Normally I try to rule out conspiracy theories, but this one is pretty interesting. A video being removed I could understand, but deleting an entire Google account seems like a rather extreme measure, and I wonder who is really pulling the strings here. I could certainly think of motives for doing so.

> I wonder who is really pulling the strings here

With 99.9% confidence, I'm saying an algorithm. It isn't unusual for a company to automatically delete accounts that seriously breach their ToCs; the unique problem with Google is that their ecosystem is so large and pervasive.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#56

Post by donalhunt »

The following articles may be of help:

1) https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695

2) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168?hl=en

Despite claims in this thread that Google likes to do things without due process and clear guidelines, the reality is that something like an account deletion is both pretty rare and not done lightly (you'll see that in some of the language in support articles and T&Cs related to this course of action). Product managers and engineers put a lot of thought into how to identify accounts that only exist to provide content that break TOS vs a case like this.

In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user.

With regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this. When you're building systems that cater for billion+ users, you have to look at systematic ways to deal with incoming requests such that the set of requests that need human intervention is as small as possible (assuming you don't want a company with millions of employees). At the end of the day, it's a balancing act and I personally feel that Google's approach is sane. Unfortunately that means a small number of users do get a bad experience.

Disclaimer: I worked at Google for over a decade. I am aware of some of the process and legality decisions that go into how these type of things are structured internally. I did not work in the area of abuse or policy.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#57

Post by donalhunt »

ben_jones wrote: post #9

CTRL + F "Disclaimer: I work at Google" Funny how that never comes up on these threads. I get it you can't discredit your employer. Even at Google.

Probably because employees are asked not to post on topics that could be controversial or where they are likely to only have a very small part of the picture.

Googlers do read a lot of hackerne.ws articles and will flag cases like this internally for review where appropriate. :)

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#58

Post by jdietrich »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #19

What are some good alternative email accounts to use? I should really start decreasing my dependence on Google.

Anything, so long as your e-mail address is on a domain name you own and you back up your inbox via IMAP. If both of those are in place, you're not really dependent on your mail provider at all, because you can switch just by changing a DNS record. If you lose the use of an e-mail address on someone else's domain, then you've got a serious problem.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#59

Post by Clubber »

severine wrote: post #51
Clubber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Serious question: what are some examples of great content virtually erased from the web by search engines?

Why don't you Google them?

Edit: So someone missed the joke. If the Google removed an article, you couldn't Google it.

Anyway, I finally found something after searching a bit.

https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas...

the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results.

Re: It appears my Google account is slated for deletion

#60

Post by pharrington »

sshumaker wrote: post #21
KGIII wrote: 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.

An organization has developed a semi-automatic process that is consistently flagging documented evidence of various nations committing crimes. Human employees of that organization, when looking at the flagged documented evidence, are consistently deleting it. Assuming these humans are competently doing their job, they're following processes that were authored by the same entities responsible for (which is not the same as the implementers of) the machine processes.

edit: /implemented by/the implementers of

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