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Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

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Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#321

Post by JDiculous »

Reminds me of what happened to my old Youtube account. One day it was just taken down - no warnings, no chance to back anything up (I had a backup on my home computer, but that hard drive was reformatted while I was in college). Contacted Google, and never got a response. Lost some videos I made as a kid that I would love to see again.

Aside from the obvious "back up your stuff" mantra, this points to a couple things:

1. We need a decentralized web ASAP (eg. IPFS) 2. Private corporations should have some degree of responsibility over being reasonable with their services. This guy should've at least been given the opportunity to back up his stuff, or hell even just a response from customer service.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#322

Post by Sleaker »

67726e wrote: post #269
parent5446 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, who's to say that isn't the case. The blog might still exist on Google's side, and it's just been quarantined or otherwise looks like it's been deleted from the outside.

The point is not the "soft delete" vs "hard delete" but their total lack of transparency or customer support. It doesn't matter to the end user the difference if all outward appearance is that the blog was deleted.

If there's any legal thing going on they wont be able to make any statements on it anyway...

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#323

Post by tamana »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #181
whack wrote: post #153

I found the following cryptic snippet, from the Guardian's coverage of this topic: "He had a featured post, twice a month, where he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities." I have little idea what the above really means, but it almost sounds like advertising/marketing for prostitution. My best guess at the moment, is that Google considered the above to be a flagrant violation of its rules, a…

He was taking existing ads for escorts in the wild and critiquing them as satire.

Are you sure it is "satire"?

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#324

Post by madmax96 »

rsync wrote: post #305
true_religion wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the OP who said: > "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." Because of the words 'book' and 'writing', I have the impression that everything there is written text and no certainly no pictures. This puts it in a nebulous position, at least in the USA. Dunlop v. U.S., 165 U.S. 486 (1897), ended up ruling that text-o…

Meanwhile, on google.com, I can read excerpts of Lolita, by Nabokov: https://books.google.com/books/about/Lolita.html?id=TOQxAgAA...

To be fair, it would be very unreasonable for anyone to make the claim that Lolita is erotica.

The Supreme Court define obscenity as being a work that was reasonably lude by the standards of the day, and lacked "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Lolita doesn't really fit this description due to its literary and artistic value.

I haven't read the blog in question, but obviously issues like this are trickier to decide with contemporary artists that are unestablished. Google certainly doesn't want to be labeled as being a distributor of child pornography, and you can't really compare some guy's blog to a book like Lolita.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#325

Post by nitrogen »

madmax96 wrote: post #307
kennywinker wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that so many people are upset is indicative of the growing technological entitlement mentality A mentality Google fosters constantly with virtually all of their products. > You can get a 3 Terabyte backup drive today on Amazon The first words you see when you visit https://www.google.com/drive/ is "A safe place for all your files". > there are alternatives to using a hosting company Like what? Deeply techn…

> A mentality Google fosters constantly with virtually > all of their products. This statement has no relevance to the conversation -- it doesn't magically produce any obligation for Google to act differently than it does. > The first words you see when you visit > https://www.google.com/drive/ is "A safe place for > all your files". And clearly in the terms of service (the only thing that actually matters,) it says:…

*This statement has no relevance to the conversation -- it doesn't magically produce any obligation for Google to act differently than it does."

Actually it kind of does -- saying one thing and doing another is a deceptive business practice, and deceiving consumers is generally frowned upon.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#326

Post by Karunamon »

Sleaker wrote: post #322
67726e wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not the "soft delete" vs "hard delete" but their total lack of transparency or customer support. It doesn't matter to the end user the difference if all outward appearance is that the blog was deleted.

If there's any legal thing going on they wont be able to make any statements on it anyway...

"Due to ongoing litigation we are unable to comment" would still be valuable in that case. Radio silence on the other hand, is not acceptable.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#327

Post by sliverstorm »

kennywinker wrote: post #213
modeless wrote: post #196

From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1] I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're…

It's still problematic, even if the work was distasteful or even illegal. There was no process involved, no chance for appeal, no explanation of the charges that precipitated it. If it truly is illegal materials that violate laws, then deleting it is deleting evidence and helping cover up crimes. If it was art that borders on distasteful to some then google is deciding taste and public values with private algorithms.…

To require any publishing platform to retain works they decide violates their TOS seems like a big burden. But we live in a world where publishing seemingly requires the cooperation the private sector.

Was it any different in the days of the printing press? Newspaper companies didn't have any requirement to keep around material they didn't want to print, and unless you wanted to build/buy and operate your own printing press, you depended on the private sector...

Much like freedom of travel, while nobody can stop you, nobody must provide you a free platform either.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#328

Post by Karunamon »

pgwhalen wrote: post #261
clevernickname wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions. Governments, private organizations and individuals may engage in censorship. Sounds like censorship to me, just a socially acceptable form of it…

Meme? That's what freedom of speech is. It specifically has to do with the government. Censorship is a broader term, but don't invoke "free speech" if you don't want it to apply to the government case.

That's what freedom of speech is. It specifically has to do with the government.

No, it damn well is not.

Freedom of speech is the principle, the first amendment is the law. The law protects a principle our society has deemed important. The principle exists with or without a government.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#329

Post by Grishnakh »

67726e wrote: post #227
parineum wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But possession of child pornography is what's illegal. They very well may have reported the owner of the blog to the authorities but, in the mean time, google was both possessing and distributing the material. It's not that it's violating their TOS, it's that Google thought they may have been violating the law. EDIT: At least if that's what the content was.

Then suspend the blog, and allow for some process to deal with the situation. Don't just torch everything on some suspicion of something going wrong. This isn't a new issue for Google. They're notorious for fucking with people's accounts and providing no recourse or customer support. Something happens? Better hope your uncle works at Google or your shit out of luck. Hell, I've hosted most of my personal domains' emai…

>Hell, I've hosted most of my personal domains' email accounts via Google. A few months ago one of them was deleted. I never really used the email, but I certainly had things on their I would like to have for posterity.

That's what you get for not making backups. This isn't rocket science. You're using someone else's free service, and they have zero obligation to continue to provide that service to you. Even if they didn't intentionally delete your account, mistakes do happen sometimes. Who actually thinks it's a good idea to keep only one copy of data that you value? Especially on a site with the name "Hacker News"? Do hackers these days not understand backups?

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#330

Post by snuxoll »

arundelo wrote: post #161
a3n wrote: post #71

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That person…

I've had my own domain for quite a while and have been meaning to start using an email address on that domain. The main reason I haven't is that I'm procrastinating the initial trouble of setting it up, but I'm also a bit scared from hearing stories of people who do this and then occasionally have email to them or from them bounce or disappear. (Maybe this is not as common a problem as I get the impression it is.) Ed…

Hosting your email with an established provider is easy, set up SPF records and the existing IP reputation of your provider will get you past spam filters quite easily.

Where you run into problems is when you do what I just did, I was using Google Apps, then Outlook.com with a custom domain and decided I was tired of giving other people access to my data - since I have a decent business-class cable connection at home including a static IP I bought a couple GroupWise licenses for myself, my wife and my daughter and moved our email in-home where all our data sits comfortably on my FreeNAS storage array. Since I rarely send email, and my home IP is 'unknown' to any IP reputation services at the moment getting past spam filters will require some time. It's a non-issue for me, it's a personal email account and I can tell my friends and family to check their spam folders the first time I contact them to whitelist my address, but it's not something everyone wants to deal with.

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