Depending on how valuable the videos are, you might consider sending a legal notice to Google.
Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
181–190 of 454 posts
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#182How 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…
Yep, effectively Gmail is your internet driver license.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#183After 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…
That's why I pay for Gsuite.
I only need to worry about not losing control of my domain name. If my mail provider decide to kick me out, I just need to get a new host.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#184Happens with other companies too. My partner currently has their twitter account locked for "evading a ban". The thing is it is their main account, under their own name, used regularly to post non-controversial stuff (and their other accounts(not locked) are even more boring). No indication of what ban they are trying to avoid even. Their only weird thing they are doing is using VPNs sometimes. They have filed an app…
Sounds to me like a VPN IP was associated with a different banned account and the reuse of that IP by your partner associated your partner's account with the banned one.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#185Lots of commenters rushing to chastise the user for not taking pro-active steps to preserve content, since your Google account (or any cloud account once a provider decides you've violated their Terms of Service) may go "poof". Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?
It would. I hope people here work towards their companies regularly warning their customers that any content stored on their services can be gone any day without any warning.
Not that I'm justifying it, but isn't that part of every single ToS of web services?
"Your account may be terminated at any time"
No business owner wants to print that in large letters above every upload form: "Thanks for uploading, your content may be deleted at any time, keep a copy."
What we need though is some accountability especially from large companies and for real users.
How long can we go before we start treating online stuff like real stuff? Why is my car protected from theft but my data isn't?
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#186After 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…
Just gonna throw Migadu in here as a mail host. Everyone loves Fastmail, which is cool - I'm an ex-happy-user - but Migadu's point of difference is their pricing. Whereas Fastmail charges by the user/month (or did when I was there), which can add up quickly if you've got a bunch of domains, Migadu does not. They charge by volume. You can add as many domains and mailboxes as you like. For some use cases - mine, and li…
I had a very poor experience with migrating off Migadu when they dropped their free tier. It completely soured me off them forever.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#187How 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…
Also a key right must be that when an account is deleted, you have 60 days to download all your data.
It'd their platform and a free service, so maybe it is fine to deactivate you and remove your content from the world.
But to simultaneously remove your access so you lose everything is just a demonstration that they have zero care about your work or compassion that their customers are human beings. In other words, they are straight-up psychopaths
If you care about anything, do NOT use these services for that. Great for junk accounts, but otherwise...
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#188FYI, before you chastise the OP for not backing up, please take a minute and think about the fact that this can happen with Gmail too. Have you backed up your email? I think Google has the responsibility to make it VERY clear that you can lose access to your content without notice. I don't think users truly understand that now.
I don't see how users don't understand this by now.
I will not put anything on a cloud service (let alone a free cloud service) that I rely on in any way. Including E-mail. If my only copy of some content is in the cloud, that means I have deliberately made the decision that that content is expendable and my life would not be affected if my account disappeared tomorrow.
It's really sad that we have to read these stories weekly, but somehow the word just isn't getting out there. Don't rely on someone else's computer to host the only copy of irreplaceable content! This does not absolve cloud providers from being better stewards of people's data--it's just a cry to be careful with things that are valuable. I know this sounds like blaming the victim, but how many more of these stories have to be posted to overcome everyone's "It won't happen to me" attitude?
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#189The videos were only stored on YouYube???
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#190Mea 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…
AWS Glacier or some similar service on Azure. Super cheap. Cloudflare will store and stream 1000 minutes for $6 a month.