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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

#211
post #172

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…

>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. I know It is easy to say to own your own things / Video. In reality a reliable storage system is not easy nor cheap. A BTRFS / ZFS system that is Turn Key solution with drive redundancy and error correction by default. And that is ignoring other things like security. My dream solution wou…

I would describe an off-the-shelf NAS as easy and cheap. A 2-bay model with drives costs It's not a highly redundant enterprise solution, but it's decent for home and small business users, especially since the alternative is usually 'nothing'.

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

#212
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure how my parents would be able to run their own email service or manage a backup routine if they went the POP3 & SMTP route. The reason why cloud services have grown so much is because they make computing services accessible and easy to use for a much wider portion of the population. I think it will take multiple generations of technological fluency indoctrination before we can get to the point where peopl…

There's a big difference between free and paid cloud services.

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

#213

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…

I've tried and failed to migrate off Gmail a few times. Mostly due to the number of SAAS accounts I've created with that email address. I like your suggestion to search for "verify your email" etc. I tried searching my Gmail inbox using search you suggested: “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification”. I got 3 results despite having hundreds of signups since starting the account back in 2006.

Something that would be super useful is a script that can be run against a local Gmail mailbox file that does a comprehensive search for "account created" type confirmation emails and produces a CSV of domain, date, etc. Something that would enable user to delete old accounts, or migrate them to a new email service.

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

#214
One very important thing for everyone to remember is to NOT USE ANY GOOGLE SERVICES BESIDES YOUTUBE.

If you get banned from Google for something on your Google Drive, and lose your YouTube account, there's no alternative YouTube. You're fucked. But if you lose your ProtonMail account there are plenty of other email vendors, you'll be fine.

STICK TO YOUTUBE ONLY.

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

#215
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They did, but they also have a feature that will tell you about everything you’ve purchased, mined from your email.

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

#216
post #187
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

Maybe a little trickier than that. Should they continue to give a user 60 days of access to child porn they might have uploaded? That might constitute distribution of child porn.

If we permit immediate removal, what are the reasonable boundaries? Legal/illegal is a court decision but you can't run all such decisions through the courts. So now we're back to Google just deciding what they will remove and it's on you to back things up. Sucks but that's probably reality we'll have to live with.

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

#217

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 it's important to be pragmatic here. I'm (slowly) in the process of moving away from 'big tech' services where I can, but I still plan to use them where it makes sense (WhatsApp, Discord, YouTube).

I'm also evaluating e-mail for a small business and we might be going with Microsoft, even though I would never choose them for my personal e-mail (I left some comments on that topic recently).

Taking back our privacy is a noble quest, but I think it's bad to deal in absolutes.

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

#218
post #121

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.

Takeout + store encrypted in AWS S3 or even Glacier? Preety cheap storage and supposedly high redundancy. I guess it's better to not use Gmail email address to create that AWS account.

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

#219

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…

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 did enjoy Migadu and want to support them, but I had more than one important business email get filtered on the receiving end as spam because of the host. I found myself having to check in with people on sensitive matters to ensure they got my email, which is not a great look.

This was back in the free tier days (though I had a paid account), so maybe its improved now.

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

#220
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate? Were you using something like IMAP sync and having trouble or are you moreso talking about timelines and their comms?
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