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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

#191

Post by Archelaos »

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.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) includes a "right to data portability" in art. 20. Its central part states: "The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided ..."

Of course there is room for interpretation here what is included in "personal data". Nevertheless, I would recommend to any EU citizen who finds her/himself in a similar situation as the OP to inform the data protection authority with jurisdiction over her/his place of residence.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

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

#192

Post by stackedinserter »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #78

FYI, 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.

Seriously, we've been in this for a decade at least. There was enough time to learn this single lesson: data stored in someone's cloud is not your data.

In 2022 it's plain stupid to keep your email in Gmail or rely on Google Photos as the only storage for your family archive. People pay $15/mo for Netflix, but can't pay $50/year for a email address? Nobody will lend a random person $1000, but people still happily give their work, worth orders of magnitude more, to a company that has literally zero obligations to them.

I sincerely sympathize with this couple and wish they will eventually recover their stuff, but c'mon, let's be proactive and prevent such incidents (and educate/help others)

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

#193

Post by [deleted] »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #78

FYI, 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.

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by gurumeditations »

I agree with others that users need a technology bill of rights. We also need heavy handed breakup of the tech giants into their constituent parts so that more competition will make smaller businesses fight over how well they can treat people instead of how big they can grow.

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

#195

Post by devwastaken »

Had something similar happen years ago. 3x bogus copyright strikes and the entire channel was removed. Can't appeal. Even big content creators get bogus strikes, but they have representatives or something that dispute it with YouTube. Don't use YouTube for anything important.

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

#196

Post by searchableguy »

rnotaro wrote: post #183
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…

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.

I've been worried about someone taking over domain in recent years as well.

I've bought a bunch of decentralized domain for this reason on handshake, sol, etc. They aren't super usable yet as most email services won't resolve the alternative DNS but who knows what future holds.

Namecheap acquired namebase (namecheap of handshake world), recently.

https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/

So I've hope it will go somewhere.

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

#197

Post by elyobo »

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…

Have heard the "big enough to sue" which is also "big enough to afford the indemnity insurance in case they're sued" is a common problem in Australian government contracting.

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

#198

Post by coffeefirst »

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…

Another pro-tip: forward to your new email, and set up a filter that labels all the items sent `TO` your old Gmail. This becomes a record of items you missed, and can update (or better yet, unsubscribe) as needed.

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

#199

Post by hda2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #188
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #78

FYI, 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 stor…

> It's really sad that we have to read these stories weekly, but somehow the word just isn't getting out there

It's because companies - sometimes purposefully - continue to make it difficult to maintain an off-line backup of cloud data in a reasonable way, and people can't be arsed to figure out how each service allows users to backup their data (if at all). The most accommodating cloud service on this front, google with their google takeout service, offer scheduled multi-GB zipped archives for download.

Backups should be automatic and standard. Offer a standard incremental syncing api (not downloads) and integrate it as an opt-out (not opt-in) step for signing up. Then have an industry-standard app (like how google authenticator is standard for otp) handle backups.

Anything more complicated than that and will continue reading stories like this.

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

#200

Post by fsckboy »

sneak wrote: post #130
alasdair_ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence

I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.

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