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Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

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Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#31
post #20
post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

This is rather creepy if I'm honest - why are you scraping user's profile data? Is there a way I can request that you delete any of my data that may be in there?

Only what was public was scrapped. You can make a request to the Internet Archive to remove your content when they have ingested it and made it available.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#32
post #6
post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

It's a kind of "dragnet conservation".

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#33
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

> Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? What seems unimportant and insignificant to us now might become very interesting in the future. People in the future might consider the arrival of the internet as the beginning of a new age. Furthermore, some things may seem obvious to a person born in our times, but might not be obvious to people born in the future. So many works,…

I'm less worried about the curiosity of people decades or centuries in the future than I am in the privacy interests of former Google+ users right now. Many of them chose that social network specifically because it was supposed to offer them better privacy protections. Which isn't a litmus test for whether or not they'd be OK with having their profile scraped and archived, but it is at least suggestive.

It would be polite if ArchiveTeam were to now contact everyone whose profile they have scraped, and ask for permission to retain that data. And then delete all the profiles for which they didn't get affirmative consent.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#34
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

I wonder too. I was berated on here for mentioning that I deleted my reddit comments when I quit reddit, as if I was somehow stealing (my own content) from the users. Just weird IMO.

Ironic considering you comment here and HN does not allow editing or deleting comments after a two hour window to protect discussion integrity.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder too. I was berated on here for mentioning that I deleted my reddit comments when I quit reddit, as if I was somehow stealing (my own content) from the users. Just weird IMO.

Well, as a Reddit user i dislike these "delete old comments" scripts since i very often read old discussions about topics i find interesting and when i hit the occasional "deleted by script foo, do it yourself too because reddit evil" i get irritated since they make following that old discussion hard. It is your account of course, but i still dislike the practice since it goes counter to the entire purpose of a discu…

Several sites ingest and store Reddit comments forever. Scripts that overwrite old comments are ceremony for the user, nothing more.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it curious and saddening that this is becoming an expectation. Someone voluntarily publishes something for the world to see - they are certainly within their rights to issue a retraction, but they have long since relinquished control over others’ actions with the data they published. This is pretty fundamental to how the internet works. The fact that there is now an expectation of continued control over said d…

Under many data privacy laws, data subjects have a legal "right to correct" any inaccurate personal data concerning him or her. GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/

[deleted]

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#37
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

> Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? What seems unimportant and insignificant to us now might become very interesting in the future. People in the future might consider the arrival of the internet as the beginning of a new age. Furthermore, some things may seem obvious to a person born in our times, but might not be obvious to people born in the future. So many works,…

I had room fulls of boxes of things that I thought might one day be important, or significant to someone. Then I realized, when I die, all those things are just going to be thrown away or donated to a thrift store, and it's highly unlikely that anyone who buys any of that will find the same value in it that I thought it had. If I have created anything truly timeless and worthwhile, then it had better be something I created for a client and got paid for making, otherwise it's just going to probably end up in a garbage heap. So I made a decision to get rid of all of it. Time is too short to be held down by the (truly) endless possibilities of "what if" this or that thing ends up being useful to someone in the future.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#38
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

Content that is created is valuable to someone, somewhere. This is probably my favorite Google Plus post: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9FEWJo...

Great post. Thanks!

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#39
post #6
post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

A lot of what we previously know about societies comes from things like midden piles, literal trash heaps of discarded crap nobody wanted.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder too. I was berated on here for mentioning that I deleted my reddit comments when I quit reddit, as if I was somehow stealing (my own content) from the users. Just weird IMO.

Ironic considering you comment here and HN does not allow editing or deleting comments after a two hour window to protect discussion integrity.

What do find ironic about it? It's two entirely different types of discourse, so it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
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