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Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

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Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#111

Post by roenxi »

hermannj314 wrote: post #35

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

YouTube is a free service built by a company that is harvesting people's data to make a profit off it.

The real & lasting solution is to not try and build a business on something that unreliable. It is up there with storing emergency supplies for a flood in the low point of a floodplane. Any level of thoughtful contingency planning will reveal that storing all your videos on a YouTube channel with no personal backups is going to be a disaster if anything goes wrong, ever. As has been revealed, this woman had no control over her (very valuable) data. Y'know, whoopse. Lots of sympathy but this is a potential ending to giving all your data to Google.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#112

Post by camkego »

gruez wrote: post #57
hermannj314 wrote: post #35

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

>At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. FDA, youtube edition: alphabet is the only company approved to host videos for public consumption, because they're the only one that has an approved copyright/hate speech filter (regulated for safety, efficacy, ADA compliance, and to be non-discriminatory). All other sites are prohibited from operating unless they spend $5B to ge…

This is exactly why Facebook has so many video ads promoting new regulations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kur94OyXf3U

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#113

Post by jjcm »

ilamont wrote: post #97

How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action? No warning. No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy." No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative. N…

It'd be interesting what a technology bill of rights looks like, but one form I could easily support would be saying any account that acts as an identity provider (i.e. oauth) requires a judge ruling to be deleted. It'd require additional identification measures to prevent spam upon creation, but the tradeoffs might be worth it. One of the larger impacts of having your gmail deleted is how many other services likely rely on it - it doesnt just remove Google services, it often nukes an entire digital identity requiring months to fix.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#114

Post by D13Fd »

hermannj314 wrote: post #35

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

Yes. Congress can pass a law saying that companies of a certain size that host user-generated multimedia media content (not text) must offer a reasonable opportunity for users to retrieve that content before it is deleted.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#115

Post by mephistophocles »

The takeaway from this horrible story, and the stories of so many like you guys, is pretty simple. Never use Google products. For anything. Ever. And encourage anyone else who might not know better to never use them either. There are plenty of alternatives.

That sucks and it’s a tragic shame. Sorry it happened to you and that there seems to be no recourse.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#117

Post by Ekaros »

doctor_eval wrote: post #109
adventured wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to leaving your personal property contents in a storage locker / unit / container that you don't own. Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately. No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an ar…

I don’t think this analogy is correct. Instead, I’d say the analogous case is more like loaning your art to a gallery. The gallery makes a profit from the thousands of people who pay to view the art that you provided at your own expense. Then, one day someone at the gallery decides that the art contains something that doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s a peach, in the background, that looks like a butt. So, to resolve th…

Bad analogy. Better would be that you have taken nice picture. You give this to art-gallery to show. As it is all digital they get a copy. And then you think oh art-gallery has it I can destroy my original. And then art-gallery thinks that it is not needed anymore and copy really has no extra value and destroys it.

The fault is not with gallery destroying copy, but with destruction of the original.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#118

Post by stjohnswarts »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #60
hermannj314 wrote: post #35

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

A friend of mine had a similar problem in Google maps. He’d spent years adding photos and reviews and his photo views were in the millions, then Google flagged him as doing something that violated their terms. Within a week his whole account had been taken down and there’s no way to speak to a human about what happened. Never even received confirmation of which post was in violation and what the issue was. How did we…

You'd think that google is smart enough to give content a score based on popularity and sheer amount of content (and existence time) and allocate those to humans to review and handle.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#119

Post by stjohnswarts »

jmnicolas wrote: post #107

If think this can happen if a malicious person (a competitor for example) use a bot to mass report your videos. So it might not be as random as you think. I'm currently in a conundrum: I'm completely degoogled except a YT account that I can lose without problem. I have built a website a few weeks ago and I don't think I can get good SEO rankings if I don't use Google console tools. I'm just procrastinating because it…

I think this is the most likely scenario

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#120

Post by stjohnswarts »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #31
abledon wrote: post #20

maybe a competitor was tipped off about her business and hired a 'company' to flag the videos

Nah, there was a post on HN a month or two ago about YouTube warning they were going to start removing old unlisted videos, and someone on HN pointed out that this would probably affect a lot of companies' training videos

Nah, if you read the description the content was flagged and removed; it wasn't because they were old.
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