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Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

palant.de

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Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#141

Post by akavel »

chongli wrote: post #95
Waterluvian wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This petrifies me. Google provides an incredibly easy way for me to capture all data that I care about. Getting photos and videos of my kids growing up and keeping them for years is trivial with Google. And in one little error it can all disappear with no recourse. I continue to struggle today to find a silver bullet solution for someone like me who just wants to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money to guara…

It's called Google Takeout[1]. Use it. Download all of your data. Back it up in a place you trust. [1] http://takeout.google.com

For me, the "Back it up in a place you trust" is coming back to square 1 of the parent poster's problem. I actually do have my photos on (a few) disks and computers, not on Google, and I still have the problem that I want to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money..."

I'm kinda hoping for some open-source solution to emerge based on IPFS or the like, which would let me easily control replication of my photos & vids over a few local disks (probably via some local NAS machine[s]), and some online paid pinning service.

There are apparently some efforts towards something like that in the IPFS community [1][2], but no clear winner yet I think, or at least especially no good UI/UX for this yet.

[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/47

[2]: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster/issues/157

edit: some random service/startup which I just googled up which apparently tries to fit into this area, linking here to hopefully match them with potentially interested users, and thus maybe help them reach critical mass: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/846e64/photo_backup_a...

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#142

Post by akavel »

singularity2001 wrote: post #130
Waterluvian wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This petrifies me. Google provides an incredibly easy way for me to capture all data that I care about. Getting photos and videos of my kids growing up and keeping them for years is trivial with Google. And in one little error it can all disappear with no recourse. I continue to struggle today to find a silver bullet solution for someone like me who just wants to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money to guara…

> find a silver bullet solution switch to apple

Yeah, sure, with the stories of Apple deleting songs from your local machine because they were deleted from your cloud account because DRM or whatever, and IIRC even deleting some random photos because some bug (but w.r.t. photos I'm not sure if I recall this correctly, or just spreading FUD here.) Or was this Amazon with Kindle and with ebooks? Apple was sure reported as deleting high quality mp3s from your disk because they have mp3s of the same songs in poorer quality as their deduplication reference files on their cloud.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#143

Post by palant »

CryoLogic wrote: post #7

They somehow have the man power to ban your extension in 2 hours and 30 minutes without an explanation as to why, but than when I get a fake copyright claim on my most popular YouTube video somehow it takes three months, 12 emails and I still don't get the ~$900 lost revenue back.

I'm not sure what their approach is. My article links to another about fake ad blockers - flagging these usually yielded in no results, neither when flagging trademark infringements nor malicious functionality. The process took months even for the obvious cases, and Google did little to prevent these extensions from being resubmitted. Yet when my article on them got picked up on HN, all of them were suddenly taken down. So it doesn't look like they have any man power whatsoever - the scarce resources they have are busy fighting bad press and threats to Google's business interests.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#144

Post by iaml »

singularity2001 wrote: post #130
Waterluvian wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This petrifies me. Google provides an incredibly easy way for me to capture all data that I care about. Getting photos and videos of my kids growing up and keeping them for years is trivial with Google. And in one little error it can all disappear with no recourse. I continue to struggle today to find a silver bullet solution for someone like me who just wants to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money to guara…

> find a silver bullet solution switch to apple

As much as I like apple, handing over all your data to another big company and praying for their good will is not a solution.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#145

Post by sitepodmatt »

yAnonymous wrote: post #139
eksemplar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting locked out of gmail is no joke. I have an old account that’s been forwarding to me for years, but when I recently changed my phone I lost my two factor. Despite being able to supply google with the creation date (they ask), the fact that my name/birthday is the same on both accounts, I’ve attached the same visa to both google accounts, I’ve logged on to them from the same ips, and the fact that it’s forwardin…

tl;dr: Need to contact someone at Google? File a copyright complaint. -------------- I was in the same situation, having the correct logon credentials for my account, but the system refused to believe it's me and asked for proof, but I forgot the security answer. Ended up filing a bogus copyright complaint, knowing they can't handle that automatically. I told them there was a copyright violation and proof was in my l…

Top stuff. Impressed.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#146

Post by iaml »

Waterluvian wrote: post #77
nixpulvis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that an extension was removed. There will always be erroneous attempts at making things safer for users when playing the game of content moderator. The problem is that Google is impossible to talk to, and makes no effort to help when things go wrong. As a current user of gmail this worries me.

This petrifies me. Google provides an incredibly easy way for me to capture all data that I care about. Getting photos and videos of my kids growing up and keeping them for years is trivial with Google. And in one little error it can all disappear with no recourse. I continue to struggle today to find a silver bullet solution for someone like me who just wants to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money to guara…

This has been bothering me too. My solution is NAS as a place to put all the data in, backuped to the cloud.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#147

Post by fauigerzigerk »

londons_explore wrote: post #128
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takeout is great, but it has one major flaw. There is no way to download only data that has changed after a specified date, i.e no incremental backups.

There is also no "Take in". Your data might be all in that file, but without a lot of effort, you aren't going to be able to get it back into a usable form, with Google apps or a competitor.

It's not so bad actually.

The Google Drive files are exported as you would expect and you can just copy them into some other sync folder as is. Takeout transforms any Google Docs and Sheets into Word and Excel formats (configurable), so you don't end up with links into your disabled Google account (contrary to how their Backup and Sync client works).

Emails are exported as mbox files, calendars in ics format. It's pretty easy to import everything using widely available email and calendar clients. It's also pretty easy to put it all back into another Google account, but you're right, it's not as simple as importing the entire takeout zip file in one piece.

What I haven't tried is what happens to files that were shared with you. I would expect that they don't get exported because it's someone else's data after all.

I think if the purpose is to let you move all your data to a different provider and avoid any lock-in, then Google Takeout is an honest and practical solution.

It's clearly not meant as a routine backup solution though.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#148

Post by roadbeats »

They took down my bookmarking extension with no notice, replied none of my e-mails. Although @GoogleChrome gives support on Twitter, they completely ignored my and also some user tweets. We had good description, many screenshots and a screencast, our extension is even open source (https://github.com/kozmos/browser-extensions).

I don't even know the reason why they took it down.

I just had to re-publish my extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/daababmdfacmmkokdf...

Tweets from users: https://twitter.com/JesMullins/status/1014085292133888002

Tweets I sent; https://twitter.com/getkozmos/status/1013511183519879168

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#149

Post by palant »

vageli wrote: post #74
foobarbazetc wrote: post #47

Meanwhile there’s an extension on there with our company name and logo (both trademarked) that might be stealing peoples data and Google have done nothing about it after many submissions of their trademark infringement form.

Thank goodness that Google is not a court of law and you can engage the legal system for restitution. I mean, wouldn't you want to go that route anyway given the potential damage to your brand by a third-party abusing your trademark? Would pulling the extension undo all the harm the infringement caused you?

Given that these copycat extensions usually aren't giving you a way to find their creator - good luck with the legal system. And even if you can find them, what will you do about them if they are located somewhere in China? The legal route is only good enough to force Google into removing infringing extensions. For you, it means more effort and money wasted. And these malicious extensions get more time to catch unsuspecting users. Of course, after being taken down they will immediately resubmit their extension and you start from scratch. All while Google has a way to report such cases but won't act on the reports.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#150

Post by palant »

Boulth wrote: post #2

It's interesting to observe current landscape of app delivery, previously it was just binaries or sources on developer's site now it's shifting to centralized model in the name of protecting users from malicious actors. I wonder if there is a way to have a cookie (developers don't need to worry about random behavior of your centralized owner) and eat it too (fight malware).

Quite remarkably, they are only moderately successful in keeping malicious actors out of Chrome Web Store. Centralizing deployment won't give you that automatically, you also need the manpower to enforce policies. And Google isn't even acting when extensions are flagged.
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