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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

#121

Post by Axsuul »

jdhendrickson wrote: post #56

Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated. To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is…

You did the best you could with the information you were given. I don't think anyone should have to resort to building multiple NAS and distributing them geographically. It's 2022 and this an extremely esoteric thing to do.

Going forward though, Vimeo feels like a better fit for you guys. Caveat emptor, never rely on free services for critical parts of your operation.

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

#122

Post by foxfluff »

Ekaros wrote: post #102
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…

We need education. Education to regular people that unless you have a contract with clear clauses and payments involved your data is worth what you pay. Your expectations from free service should be zero. It can go out of business at any time. Or they can stop offering it at anytime.

> Your expectations from free service should be zero.

So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot?

It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.

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

#123

Post by Ekaros »

foxfluff wrote: post #122
Ekaros wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need education. Education to regular people that unless you have a contract with clear clauses and payments involved your data is worth what you pay. Your expectations from free service should be zero. It can go out of business at any time. Or they can stop offering it at anytime.

> Your expectations from free service should be zero. So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot? It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.

Cities already move your vehicle away if you leave it in free parking spot for years, even faster if it is unregistered for example. I don't see how that is any different from this case for example. There are similar analogies.

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

#124

Post by foxfluff »

Ekaros wrote: post #123
foxfluff wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your expectations from free service should be zero. So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot? It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.

Cities already move your vehicle away if you leave it in free parking spot for years, even faster if it is unregistered for example. I don't see how that is any different from this case for example. There are similar analogies.

I think the difference is that the extent to which a city can do things with your property is governed by law. And it is not in any way similar analogy; this wasn't cleaning up an abandoned account taking up public space, this was a sudden takedown of an active account that did not violate any rules or laws.

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

#125

Post by Ekaros »

D13Fd wrote: post #114
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.

Why exclude text? Why shouldn't some spammer or like be able to get the textual content they have produced on that platform?

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

#127

Post by Daishiman »

doctor_eval wrote: post #101
belter wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise a very important point, that I have seen at work in the Finance industry. It goes like this: Large consulting companies are structurally incompetent and keep running to the ground financial and government IT projects. After starting to see their lunch taken by small specialized and competent small operations, a underground operation starts to require the regulator to force companies working in the space to…

I saw the end result of this, after working on a proposal for a large Australian city council. After the presentation, I was told that while our ideas were awesome, unfortunately we were too small (ca. 15 people). We would have to have partnered with a large consultant (IBM was mentioned), or we would not be invited to continue our work. We were told explicitly that this was because council needed someone big enough…

Sure it does; your 15 person company can go out of existence just by a fight between founders. Lead engineer gets run over by a bus and didn't document his work? You're done. Lose your other customer out of the 2 that were keeping you alive? You have to fire half of your staff.

Whether the reason was made to justify the existence of some parasites doesn't change the fact that it's a real reason. A company that's been in business for over a century isn't going to go out in a year, and worst case someone will have the knowledge and certs to keep the ship running.

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

#128

Post by Ekaros »

foxfluff wrote: post #124
Ekaros wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities already move your vehicle away if you leave it in free parking spot for years, even faster if it is unregistered for example. I don't see how that is any different from this case for example. There are similar analogies.

I think the difference is that the extent to which a city can do things with your property is governed by law. And it is not in any way similar analogy; this wasn't cleaning up an abandoned account taking up public space, this was a sudden takedown of an active account that did not violate any rules or laws.

And why shouldn't they have right to remove such content? Clearly it wasn't following intent of the site. And the user didn't really lose anything, as they still have the originals. Which in no way have been affected.

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

#129

Post by kingcharles »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #65
randartie wrote: post #38

If I had to speculate based off my experience at other FANG companies, the videos still exist in the Youtube infrastructure somewhere to allow for the possibility of a human intervention to restore them (For example, to allow for recovering from a system gone haywire or just to give time for manually reversed decisions). That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently. I hope y…

I was thinking that if OP's wife or the video subjects are European then a GDPR request# might surface the data. Strikes me the videos would probably only have a delete flag set if this is recent and even after deletion from live data may exist in backups? (# AIUI companies are obliged to share with you any PII they hold that identifies you.)

I hate to be deceptive, but I was thinking that even if they are not EU residents (or residents of another entity that has similar laws, e.g. UK), then they might be able to fake residency for the purposes of using data laws to exfiltrate the videos. They might have to take the dishonesty further and say that they appear in all the videos.

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

#130

Post by sneak »

alasdair_ wrote: post #103
pembrook wrote: post #94

After seeing posts like this on HN for years, this one officially scared me enough to completely migrate off Gmail altogether. I’m in the process right now of removing my gmail from any online account. Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verif…

Your post reminded me to back using my gmail locally and to ensure a script does so automatically from now on. I need to do the same with google docs as soon as possible. I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”

The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe.

Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.

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