That is a rather unfortunate position to be in. My 2 cents this is important enough you shouldn't have to keep playing around with their UI and support. Get a lawyer to speak to their lawyers about your data, that way at least you are gonna get a respectful answer even though the answer might be we deleted the videos and you can never get it back.
Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
351–360 of 454 posts
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#352Earlier 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.
This is completely wrong. We should expect more from business. You should always be able to extract your data, period. Let’s not defend customer-hostile business models.
So let's say some startup runs a back up service with unlimited data. How many exabytes should a user be able to upload random data to them? And how long should it be available?
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You haven’t bothered to carefully read the post.
I did read it. And I consider value of data lost to be exactly zero as originals were not deemed worth saving. So I see no issues with Youtube's actions here. The user did not value their data so neither should Youtube.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a digital life equivalent of a motorcycle accident I think. The risk is catastrophic, so any incidence rate is enough to require being prepared for it.
At first I thought that losing access to my gmail would be pretty bad, but now that I think about it, I don’t see anything particularly troublesome if it happens tomorrow, let alone catastrophic. Can you give some examples?
If you owm the email's domain you can switch the domain Mx record and continue just fine. But over the years a lot of accounts end up tied to Google SSO and if you are just using a plain old @gmail and have tied all your accounts to it you are probably in trouble.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably not that expensive. Vimeo cheapest plan is $7/month (w/ limits) and $50 for unlimited plan and cloud storage (for backup) is cost competitive. Even having it on a local disk would probably be enough. But... it's not your fault. It's just that despite the propaganda these companies don't give a fuck about their users.
cost competitive against free? lol
Free is perfect for content that is free to make. If your content has clear monetary value in workhourse, why not pay at least fraction of that for actual service?
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Or just copy-righted or copy-right disputed content. Share the access to download option and you will soon find groups repeatedly exploiting this. Pirated content being accessible for 60 days for free is already pretty good.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tr…
Clearly many users here want it. Maybe even with these pop-on level forced notification boxes. And thus I recommend they fully start pushing such big red warning letters in the services they work with.
And size should have nothing to do with it. I believe treating most SaaS providers the same.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#358FYI, 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 agree. People quickly jump to "you're not paying for it so what did you expect" but without a warning in big red letters saying "we could fuck you over any day" this has the same vibe as a drug dealer giving you you first hit for free. I lost access to my Yahoo mail address from teenage days and consecutively the YouTube account associated with it. The videos are still up and it's just random shenanigans, but still…
I hope that everyone here has taken action to push for those big warnings in their own SaaS and like products. And from now on always remember to tell that in their sales pitches. As anything else is just evil...
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think GDPR rules would be cleared with Google effectively deleting all the data, which could be their laziest solution to a legal request…
No, they actually have to keep the data safe for their users. Deleting the data is a GDPR violation.
To be clearer : they're free to delete the data in normal times. But once you request it, they can't delete it between receiving your request and answering it. They're free to delete it again after answering.
Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
#360Thanks for the reminder. Personally I do my part to caution all of my friends and family to not host things they don't want to lose somewhere where they aren't paying the bills. It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.
“ It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.” But that’s Google’s business model. The service is free.
To serve them to public with adds showing. Now make it private and take the view count down... Yeah, should be obvious to anyone.