Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work
fusion.net
fusion.net
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 not going to go around publicly accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper...
You wouldn't believe how many people I know who say things like, "Yeah I'd lose my entire PhD project if this laptop died, because I haven't taken a backup in X years" (and proceed to continue not backing up their work)
He apparently created "GIF novels", which presumably involved using some application to work on a file on his local hard drive. What did he do after uploading the finished GIF to his blog? Manually delete it from his hard drive? Why?
Maybe he wasn't even creating his own images, instead building the story through a meme generator, or something.
Oh hang on, it already exists. March 31st. http://www.worldbackupday.com/en/
Man we really need to publicize that one more.
[edit] The lesson here is: Before you start "Official Thing", actually google "Official Thing".
Or restore day.
Sure it's not a bullet-proof system, but maybe as they experience the feeling of security, they'll get a taste for implementing something more comprehensive. Lots of low-hanging fruit, too :) But this is already a hundred times better than what they (don't) have now.
I'm not sure what the right thing is here. 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. If not google, at very least a hosting company of some kind. If we want the allow social norms to change we can't stifle everything that falls outside of the norm.
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.
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. When Google deleted the account I was given no recourse or ability to appeal. It was just gone. It's not as if the account was even anything controversial, it was just my contact-me email for an old NES modding site I had.
You can rest assured, if it was child porn, they'd be obligued to keep backups as proof for law enforcement. I doubt the material is actually deleted, just hidden until they sort it out with the feds.
This may be an intentional decision to cooperate with law enforcement. If they only go silent in the case of ongoing investigations, then "Google went silent" functions in the same way as "the warrant canary disappeared" does for other sites, which could in theory jeopardize an investigation.
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?
> "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-only content can be deemed obscene and being text-only is not a reason to get total 1st amendment protection. However later cases, decided there was a division between erotica and obscene material, which is essentially decided on a case-by-case basis subjectively.
When it comes to things such as obscenity, its not really enough to go by our 'feelings' and intuition on the matter.
For instance, would you believe the US is a fully functioning, 1st world democracy, where sex toys are illegal (Alabama, upheld by State Supreme court and enforced as recently as 2009)?
To me, personally, anything that comes entirely from someones fanciful imagination, no matter how distasteful, should not be considered illegal unless it directly results in the harm of another individual.
This doesn't hold true for ... most of the rest of the planet. In the UK a man was put in jail for Simpsons porn, something that's legal in the US (although potentially a trademark violation; unless you can argue it's satire).
In Cooper's home country of France, fictional depictions are actually illegal (books like Lolita are banned).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_regarding_child_pornograp...
But as already stated, even if legality wasn't the issue, yes they are still a private company and can do what they want. The article mentions this and there really needs to be an effort to educate people that they need multiple backups, not just on-line, but on their own media.
Actually, visual incest pornography exists in the US. I am not sure why (I am within the industry, but I don't actually keep tabs on legalities that I'm not involved in), but it seems that 2 years ago VISA decided it was okay for it to take credit card payments for incest-fantasy sites, and since then there's been an explosion of mainstream studios supporting said material.
Cynically speaking, it seems to me that the adult industry is more scared of how their merchant banks will react to their content, than any chance of being taken down by the US government.
Amazing work of literature, by the way.
(I don't think Lolita should be banned anywhere. It's not a pro-pedophilia artwork.)
> Cooper used the blog to post his fiction, research, and visual art, and as Artforum explains, it was also “a platform through which he engaged almost daily with a community of followers and fellow artists.” His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.
This is something that current day harassment laws (and in some countries slander laws) already cover.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Lolita.html?id=TOQxAgAA...
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.
> If it was art that borders on distasteful to some
> then google is deciding taste and public values with
> private algorithms.
This behavior is well-known (remember Google Reader?) and expected out of Google. If you have any data on any cloud storage facility, you probably have no guarantee of its long-term persistence. You should regularly backup all your data that you value. You can get a 3 Terabyte backup drive today on Amazon for < $120, which is more than enough for most people to backup their valued data.
> I'm not sure what the right thing is here. 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. If not google, at
> very least a hosting company of some kind. If we want
> the allow social norms to change we can't stifle
> everything that falls outside of the norm.
People either don't value the ability to express distasteful opinions, or they are completely unaware of these practices in modern technology companies.
> the fact that so many people are upset is indicative of the growing technological entitlement mentality
> You can get a 3 Terabyte backup drive today on Amazon
> there are alternatives to using a hosting company
> there are ways outside of the internet to distribute information
> A mentality Google fosters constantly with virtually
> all of their products.
> The first words you see when you visit
> https://www.google.com/drive/ is "A safe place for
> all your files".
> Google may also stop providing Services to you, or
> add or create new limits to our Services at any time. [1]
> WHEN PERMITTED BY LAW, GOOGLE, AND GOOGLE’S SUPPLIERS
> AND DISTRIBUTORS, WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST
> PROFITS, REVENUES, OR DATA, FINANCIAL LOSSES OR
> INDIRECT, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR
> PUNITIVE DAMAGES. [1]
> Like what? Deeply technical p2p hosting solutions
> that are completely inaccessible to all but the most
> adept readers and publishers?
> Sure, but as we move most of our communication to
> the internet, this kind of thing becomes more and
> more problematic.
I'm not saying these aren't problems -- I'm saying these aren't Google's problems. They're running a business, not a technology charity. If you don't like it, don't use Google products and encourage others not to. It's simple cause and effect: Google treats us badly, we stop using Google. Google is free to operate however they like and I'm free to stop using their services.
[1] https://www.google.com/policies/terms/
EDIT: s/risking/risky/
Actually it kind of does -- saying one thing and doing another is a deceptive business practice, and deceiving consumers is generally frowned upon.
> Actually it kind of does -- saying one thing and doing
> another is a deceptive business practice, and deceiving
> consumers is generally frowned upon
Google specifically states they make no guarantees, so they're not "saying one thing and doing another." They're saying one thing and doing that thing. The parent mentioned that Google encouraged technological entitlement -- that may or may not be true, that would be a tough thing to have a reasonable conversation about -- not that Google is making blatantly false claims about its services.
Google was quoted above as calling the service "A safe place for all your files", and deletion is clearly not "safe", and there have been court decisions saying that fine print caveats cannot completely negate the clear English part of the advertising.
Of course, there have been court decisions saying the opposite, too, but that's sufficient for the OP's point to be better than "strawman" material even if, hypothetically, their argument turns out to be incorrect.
Then most files aren't safe. A file on your computer isn't safe.
That doesn't mean that words mean nothing, just because absolutes generally don't exist.
In this case, a "reasonable person" (which is often the litmus test that courts use) might well think that "A safe place for all your files" means that Google will take reasonable precautions to keep your files safe, within reason, given current technology and economics and practices.
Unilaterally deleting things without notice and without recourse absolutely does not fit that sort of reasonable definition, although it may well be legal nonetheless for various reasons.
And regardless of all that, there still is no reason to accuse the OP of a strawman argument, which is kind of rude unless there is a truly strong reason for it -- that's the primary thing I'm arguing, not about philosophical absolutes nor even legality.
If it is a 1 in a million (or less) chance, then its safer than storing them on your own computer, which I think would fit the definition of safe. You're requiring that Google meet an extreme defintion of safety that is beyond what a reasonable person would expect (since a reasonable person woud likely not backup files, or back them up locally, both of which are less safe than google).
You're conflating control with safety. As in, you're committing the same fallacy that people who are afraid of flying on airplanes do. An airplane is safer than a vehicle. Drive is safer than a computer. People are afriad of airplanes not because it is more dangerous, but because they are sacrificing control.
>there still is no reason to accuse the OP of a strawman argument
I didn't. That was someone else, but I appreciate the downvote nonetheless.
You're too paranoid. I don't yet even have the ability to downvote people; my rating is too low.
> the same fallacy
Gee thanks. We're not just in disagreement, I'm the idiot who can't reason correctly.
I think your logic is unreasonable. I already said why; google isn't living up to what a hypothetical "reasonable person" would expect -- such a person wouldn't expect deletion with no recourse.
And if it happened to you, obviously you would change your attitude about what is and is not reasonable; no one wants their stuff deleted. So arguing about it seems possibly disingenuous, regardless of the fine details.
> You're requiring that Google meet an extreme defintion of safety that is beyond what a reasonable person would expect
Actively deleting files is included in the definition of "safety"? I think not.
However again, my main point isn't whether the above person is correct, it's that his point is reasonable enough that it is uncalled for to say he's arguing a strawman.
Managing consumer expectations in a way that does not reflect reality is the same as false advertising, however.
It's true that no obligation is created under our current legal structure, but I think the statement still has relevance. Your stance reminds of me people that said, in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, "well those loans were legal and the people who defaulted were free not to take them." Yes, that is true, and we definitely would all be better off if people took the accountability and personal responsibility to avoid getting into these situations.
But really, what does that argument achieve? It absolves the centralized powerful entity of any responsibility, shifting it to a decentralized collection of individuals that lack cohesive power to effect change. In terms of pure efficacy, I don't think that style of reasoning is going to move the needle on actually getting the desired result out of the system. In other words, would it be easier to educate all of those people on proper usage of online services, or to maybe change some legal language somewhere so that these services have some responsibility to their users?
I think we can try to encourage personal responsibility in people, and simultaneously acknowledge that it would also be good if the services that hold power and influence were more accountable to their users, because that's just going to be better for everyone collectively.
> It's true that no obligation is created under our
> current legal structure, but I think the statement
> still has relevance. Your stance reminds of me people
> that said, in the wake of the subprime mortgage
> crisis, "well those loans were legal and the people
> who defaulted were free not to take them." Yes, that
> is true, and we definitely would all be better off if
> people took the accountability and personal
> responsibility to avoid getting into these situations.
There's also this key component: the average user is not Google's customer -- they never pay a penny for the services they receive. I think that you and I both agree that consumer protection laws are a good thing; if you pay for access to Google's data storage services then it should be illegal if they suddenly revoke that access. That is an obvious case of breach-of-contract.
Outside the context of a customer-business relation, this amounts to the government ordering Google to supply a service at no charge. Note that certain things (I believe in the states water) have to be given freely to people who request it, but I wouldn't dream of suggesting that access to data that you knowingly stored some place with questionable data persistence guarantees is as fundamental as access to water. You may disagree.
In the end, I suggest educating consumers about the generally sketchy cloud data persistence guarantees is easier and wiser than requiring companies to offer free services. You and I both probably agree that the cloud is a significantly easier approach to organizing, storing, and using data than traditional approaches. Since it has become so ubiquitous, its users should know the dangers. This avoids setting a somewhat strong precedent that such a protection law would make.
After a quick Google (heh, the irony!) there doesn't seem like there's an easy way to backup cloud data. This seems like it might actually be a good personal project for me...
Personally I would like to see society move in this direction. The data persistence guarantees should not be questionable, they should be legally enforced. I'm pretty sure we could come up with some terms that aren't realistically that onerous to Google (and other providers), but give users some assurances.
We're treading new ground with the concept of digital goods that are extremely cheap to manufacture, distribute, and store, and this idea that ubiquitously useful services can be provided to everyone for free by extracting value from the data generated by their usage. In the pre-digital era, the government "ordering Google to supply a service at no charge" would probably be an untenable precedent, but today that could happen with almost negligible impact to their business, because it already operates like that.
You and I both probably agree that the cloud is a significantly easier approach to organizing, storing, and using data than traditional approaches.
This is exactly why we should recognize it as a public utility and endeavor to reduce the inherent dangers, just like we go to great effort to make clean water available instead of teaching everyone how to test and treat it themselves.
I appreciate the discussion and your thoughtful and forthcoming attitude:) Makes the internet much more enjoyable to use when disagreements are carefully examined rather than the usual tendency in comment threads to degenerate into being just plain mean.
I believe that argument at hand is that massive digital services providers, by power of the market forces, had become just as essential part of our infrastructure as banks. Their behaviour has played a huge role in establishing this position and setting this expectation.
So, the philosophical question is whether Google, AWS, Facebook, et.al. are now "too big to fail" to be subjects of regulation due to their critical role in ensuring preservation and accessibility of human knowledge. They are already being regulated by tons of parties, domestic and foreign, to keep some (lots?) information inaccessible.
[1] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Disclaimer: Alphabet employee, but not related to the takeout service.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
You can download all your google data from there. I wish all cloud services provided such a feature.
You're responsible for making backups or taking out whatever insurance you think is reasonable for your data.
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.
But I know. Either Google hosts a platform for other people to share their life, in which case Google should not have done anything without a warrant. Or Google owns the entire platform and all content, in which case they should be held liable for every bit of disputed content on their servers (including Youtube).
There is no middle ground. Either you are a (de-facto) common carrier, or you're not.
Child pornography is contraband. It's the virtual equivalent of a kilo of cocaine. If, as a service provider, you come across someone's artistic expression that is reckoned to be close enough to the line you have a problem. You need to worry about whether there's an elevated risk that the next post will cross the line, you shut it down.
Your freedom of speech doesn't require a third party to broadcast your speech.
Child porn is not a TOS issue. It's a legal issue, and he has legal recourse. He can sue and get a judge or jury to decide his case. Google is doing what the law requires, so if you have a problem with that you have a problem with the law, not with Google.
With real net-neutrality protections, I believe this is false. You are free to connect your own server to the internet and serve your own content through it. Also, if you do host with a third-party, it still makes sense to do backups of your data so if something like this does happen, you can move to another host.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ohio-coke-head-call...
Sounds like mostly a TOS violation type thing though, which, if he sues, we'll delve a little deeper into I suppose.
A former in-law was detained and deported by the USA, leaving family behind. I hate this man and all he's done. So while my liberal pinko commie sensibilities opposes everything done to him, and how it was done, it couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
Being conflicted like that is a terrible feeling. It shows the need for rules. If the rules are applied unevenly, especially against those we don't like, they're no longer rules but state sanctioned grudges.
I'm... confused.
Do you mean it wouldn't have happened to a nicer person?
"couldn't have happened to a nicer person" suggests this individual is the nicest person you've ever met.
Edit: completely missed the ironic usage.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/it-couldn-t-happen-to-a-nic...
Only obscene photographs of actual children (and apparently 3d models with photographic skins) are considered to be child pornography (and those primarily because they are artifacts of child abuse).
Unless he crossed that line, there's still no legal cause to pull down his material. It's worth remembering that there are stories of Google deleting accounts due to pictures of cherubs as well, so there is reason to doubt Google's reasons for bringing the account down.
Even if you find the material distasteful, it's not a reason to condemn someone, nor condone the censorship of that material. Remember, there are some who consider images of women not covered by a hijab to be distasteful and obscene.
Sounds like censorship to me, just a socially acceptable form of it. The "only governments are capable of censorship because my understanding of the idea of freedom of speech deliberately stops at the First Amendment" meme needs to die.
However, this does not mean that a private company is obligated to give you a free platform to disseminate your speech. You can go make yourself a sign and stand on a street corner if you want, but no one has an obligation to listen to you, or to help you spread your speech.
This is why the distinction about government censorship is so important. People like you seem to think that private entities have an obligation to host other peoples' speech. If some neo-Nazis knocked on your door and asked to post a bunch of their signs on your lawn, would you agree to it? It's only a problem when the government censors because there's only one government, and they have enforcers who can use deadly force. If a private party censors you by refusing to help air your views, you can go somewhere else, like a street corner, and you don't have to worry about going to jail or being shot.
I would add that it's also because the government can censor people when it otherwise wouldn't be involved - a person hosting a blog with a third party, for example. Ordinarily, only that third party gets to decide whether or not to provide a platform for your data.
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.
Which literally nobody here suggested that they should be obligated to do so. What's your point?
Going a step further, there's nothing inherently wrong with censorship.
So long as they're censoring the things you want them to censor. Of course, everybody would like something different to be censored, which is why it's better to err on the side of "no censorship". There's a reason librarians tend to fight against any form of censorship.
On a side note though, if it's fictional stories and art involving under age people, that's actually legal (kinda/sorta/not tested often in court) in the US and Japan but not in most of Europe (including France).
For example: drawing of Bart fucking Lisa Simpson. Legal in the US (and if you argue it right, possibly not even a trademark violation under parody/satire -- depends on the judge really). In the UK, that exact drawing sent a man to prison and put him on the sex offender registry.
> Censorship: the system or practice of censoring books, movies, letters, etc.
> Censoring: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable
If you have N copies, assume the next state will mean have N-1. What would you do different if you could postpone the state change? Do it.
This phenomenon of "private" corporations amassing the power of governments without the responsibilities of governments is a relatively new chapter in history and still needs to be sorted out.
It's the artist's own fault that he didn't make a backup.
Any kind of writing with a purely puerile sexual-intent, lacking in any redeeming scientific, cultural or educational merit, is considered pornographic.
Considering the writing is pornographic... then the fact it used literally representing of people under the age of 18, would make it 'pornography involving children' or... as a short hand 'child pornography'.
Let's not argue over definitions here. If you feel that this man shouldn't be prosecuted because no real people were harmed, that's a good place to start. Obscenity laws need to be clarified.
As children (even depicted imaginary ones) can't give consent, its automatically rape material.
In the US and a few other countries, yes, images where no real person other than the artist was involved is classified as Child Pornography.
It's disgusting and squarely in the realm of thought crime, but no one cares because once you think of the children you can do almost anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Handley
That law currently stands.
The standard currently used for obscene is
(a)whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole,appeals to the prurient interest
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
Now, would the 'average American' find lilocon/shotacon to be excessively focused on sex? (yes) would it be found offensive under applicable laws, in this case child porn laws (yes). Would the 'average American' take any random manga as having serious literary or artistic value? (no). So, is lolicon/shotacon illegal? It sure is.
The problem with the above is it is not a measurable standard, it is left up to interpretation, and that interpretation will come down on the side of obscene with anything that is not regarded mainstream. Not that long ago homosexual porn was, and in some states it's still difficult to sell sex toys because of obscenity laws. Obscenity laws are used as an end run around the First Amendment for these cases, as it was here. You can say it wasn't because of the PROTECT Act, but the fact remains he had to plead guilty to possession of shotacon and he was facing the penalties of the PROTECT Act because the court could go ahead and call it obscene to bypass the problem of explicitly calling something illegal.
Images of children engaging in sex, or lilocon/shotacon are considered illegal in the US as kiddy porn, either by the PROTECT act explicitly in jurisdictions outside that courts ruling, or by obscenity laws in general. And that is disgusting because it is a thought crime.
The exception would be Oregon which shot down general obscenity laws in their entirety.
if its true, its an issue for law enforcement to address, not you or I
if its false, you've just smeared a man's name out in a public and effectively permanent forum.
(Fyi, I try to avoid the now-popular term "child abuse imagery" because that is both too loaded and too narrow.)
I teach the definition of child porn to forensics students because they will be running into it in the profession. It is massively complicated. My child porn lecture goes as follows: Here are the rules (cases, laws etc). Then I show a series of images and clips that, given the definitions we just went through, cause the cops in the room to reach for their handcuffs. Then I show where the clips are from: popular pg13 movies and TV shows, none of which would ever be considered illegal. I do this to illustrate the lack of bright lines, and how definitions and treatments change based on context.
To avoid uncomfortable discussions best done only in person, let me simply say that there exists a range of material at issue here, from 1 to 10. 1 is stuff that while it trigger flags clearly isn't illegal. 10 is stuff where there is no debate. The law declares everything above 5 a crime, but nothing below 8 is ever prosecuted absent political pressure (webeweb et al). To be safe, Google moves against anything a 3, as happened here. So there is a range of stuff, from 3 to 8, that may or may not be illegal. It will be deleted/reported by the likes of Google but will never result in prosecution.
This is yet another a horrible story of an artist suddenly finding himself in that gray area between 3 and 7. His stuff is probably not illegal, but nobody can say for certain. Google has chosen to run in fear, but we outsiders, most of whom have not seen the material, tend to side with the artist against the big evil corporation. And nobody want to speak openly for fear of the labels that attach. It's a messy area full of emotions and pitfalls. Society needs to address this problem.
Or the alternative, google didn't want to continue hosting the questionable content since it resides on their servers.
If there is nothing criminal here- Google is absolutely within its rights to delete his blog. However given the power that Google has a gatekeeper to information, I think the public should be highly interested in how Google allows or disallows information to be published using its services. Especially if they are censoring materials they find offensive or in poor taste.
Anal fisting: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fphotos1.bl...
Naked children from 1970s calendars: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogs...
And something in the vein of bestiality (whether it is or not, I have no desire to know): https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogs...
I'm expressing no opinion here about what qualifies as art (or not) or what is legal (or not). But it is the type of content that, taken together, could cause a blog to be deleted for TOS violations.
It seems to me that if you want a free place to publish photos that appear to be necrophilia, anal fisting, and bestiality, well, maybe pay $5 a month to host your site somewhere yourself? I suspect that any free blog hosting service is not the place for you.
What bothers me about the lack of transparency is that it makes it very difficult for any person in such a situation -- whom I think should be presumed innocent until and if they're proven guilty -- to defend their reputation against such presumptions.
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 persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect.
The technical lesson that should be learned here, beyond backups, is to have your own domain. You can still use services with your own domain. I've used many ISPs and email services, and I've had the same domain since about 2000. I used to use gmail (with me@mydomain.com). I use fastmail now. I've never since 2000 had to tell anyone to change my email address, because it's never changed, even though providers changed. The subject of this article would have a much easier time of reconnecting, had he used his own domain.
(Added to that, in the "backup" theme, download all your email as it happens. I use thunderbird, and it does that for me. I once resolved a dispute with a former employer because I had email that they had no incentive to find.)
Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Your registrar can decide to sell your domain to someone else, and if your consumer rights were violated it's going to be difficult to reclaim your domain. In the future I think we're going to need meta-domains that can't be transferred, that are our identity, but I don't know how that would be implemented.
I said this person has been disappeared, which was a provocative use of the word (this isn't Argentina or Chile in the seventies). But thinking more broadly, consider that as our lives are lived more and more online, any government could compel a provider to remove you. Even if it was unjust removal, it could be so expensive to restore your presence that you just can't do it. Harder to fight a government than it is to fight Google, if the government decides it won't be moved. We have a no-fly list now that has no associated due process. I can imagine a no-communicate list.
Which is all to say, try to be as self-sufficient as is practical, and as is warranted by the importance of your communication.
"Speech" appears twice, but is only capitalized when referring to legislators' speeches:
"and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place"
"or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
Technically speaking, persons always had a freedom of association, but the court made it explicit during N.A.A.C.P. v. ALABAMA [1].
[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/357/449.html
There are plenty of paid services that will lock you in and will terminate your account if something big enough happens.
What we need is a new decentralized Internet. We need not only open source software (for security reasons), not only open hardware (for security reasons) but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored.
Why does it need to be non-commercial?
Personally I see commercial (with healthy competition) as a good sign that something will stick around for a while.
We already have a commercial Internet, we don't need a second one. Commercial interests would make the second Internet also a target of control.
This is a great question. Possibly related: I don't know the answer. :)
The solution clearly goes on that direction, but this is not enough. And I'd really like to see this one problem solved before we have to start asking something like "and what if somebody takes control of your brain, or you lose access to it?"
Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.
Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew email for other forms of communication.
I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and provide standards based communication.
I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push for it to get better.
It's like saying email isn't open source because it has to have a connection to the Internet to be useful.
Domain getting stolen by a registrar? That's a crime, treat it like theft, there ought to be some justice for that theft.
Big business doing something awful/scandalous/inappropriate? Change the laws, and work to persuade people that it ought to be societally unacceptable to violate those laws.
I see this a lot on tech-oriented forums, that you can "fix" social problems with the right kind of code, or you can get out of legal repercussions with the right set of legalese, and really, no, stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff.
Treating business and law like a black box, or something to be worked around, as though there were sufficient cleverness to solve everything without engaging with larger society, well, no, that's not gonna get you anywhere.
So you effectively agree that solid ethic opinions help fighting this. Then why you started your comment with "No, ..."? :)
Fastmail et al. show that you can run a business on a protocol, even if it won't necessarily make you a unicorn.
It was very hard to imagine how Twitter the company would make enough money to justify the investments it had taken by that point if Twitter the service looked more like Diaspora. You on,y have to look at Diaspora today to see that it's not obviously meeting the mission that Twitter serves today.
One interesting aspect of this is you had people like Alex Payne voting with their code in the form of the API and later with his feet after the company was clearly going down the ad-supported route (and hiring a lot to support that model -- you need to build a large amount of revenue-oriented infrastructure in that world). The API then had to be pulled substantially back because it didn't fit the revenue model, something the developer community still hasn't forgiven Twitter for.
It's amazing to me how much of what looks like corporate BS can be traced to individual personalities and their debates, or the echoes of their debates.
[to be clear, all of what I've outlined can be gleaned from media reports, books and presentations about Twitter over the years. While I am an ex-employee, this history is available to anyone who either was paying attention back then or has a small amount of investigatory skillset.]
My conclusion at the time was that they wanted to keep the percentage of users of the IMAP service below some value, and every time the jerked the config around, they'd see a dip in the graph on their end. My setup is currently non-functional. The maintenance cost was too high. Mission accomplished.
Note: now that I think about it, maybe the cert rotation issue was on (e)SMTP, not IMAP. Same diff.
But what that doesn't show is that they then changed it back, and forth... for a while. It was just a UX issue that only affected computer literate people. THE BEST KIND. :(
I remember when some combination of Gmail features* enabled me to upload my old mbox with years of personal email into my GAFYD account... emails from before Gmail publicly existed. And now I could SEARCH them! The future was bright.
I certainly felt confident that I would be a gmail user for life. I certainly didn't consider the possibility that they'd one day just deny my access to the whole thing because I spoke ill of them in a HN comment. ;)
* access external pop3 account and auto-rewrite message headers so messages would be associated with my gmail address even though they were originally delivered to a different domain... Brilliant.
Sorry I'm being a bit thick, but did this happen, or does the emoticon at the end mean it's hypothetical?
The first paragraph about message modification is: "Sites MAY modify submissions to ensure compliance with standards and site policy. This section describes a number of such modifications that are often considered useful." From is typically modified to comply with SPF and/or DKIM.
The sections on header rewriting are essentially examples of what the document describes as "modifications that are often considered useful", they're not an exhaustive list. The only MUST NOT rule that concerns email address rewriting is about destination addresses.
(Well, almost unrestricted. The results have to be syntactically valid.)
There's an explanation of this phenomenon that doesn't assume malice: there are N (> 1) servers with different certificates, and you're not hitting the same one every time.
The impression I have formed is that gmail will have whatever features google's gmail-for-businesses product needs. If a considerable percentage of customers (ie. the ones who pay per month and user) use a particular feature, then that feature stays and is maintained.
I know from my experience in hwops that plenty of people on the corp domain DO believe that they are working towards a better world--and that making more money will only accelerate progress towards that goal.
The question is: are they wrong? Has Google lost its way?
Let's look not just at this IMAP issue but also at the OP as we ponder that.
Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility.
Suppose Dennis Cooper forgets his online banking password today. Does Google have a responsibility to somehow deliver the forgot password email?
Did not the initial Gmail marketing say something like "This will be free forever! Don't delete your old mail, archive it! Use search on the records of your own life!"
Sounds like a utility to me.
The law isn't always right. Times change, for example.
I believe that 1. the majority of individuals aren't TOS savvy and 2. the majority of individuals believe that they have a right to a persistent email account.
If property laws and corporate policies and user habits tend to visit tragedy on users... Well, something should change!
The USAmerican Congress does have a history of designing rules to serve the common good and forcing tech giants to play by those rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
One rule could be that service providers must make a reasonable effort to give users their data in a functional, useful form in the event of account termination. For the good of society.
Another might be that critical services (online banking password recovery) cannot be revoked without due process.
Oh, does that one cause a big effing problem for Gmail, Outlook.com, etc? Well so be it. Online service providers made that problem for themselves when they fought tooth and nail to become important parts of everyone's lives.
This kind of thing is what Government is FOR.
Title II of the 1934 Comms Act required interoperability between networks. In modern times, that might mean implementing a open format, or open protocol. Maybe another rule would prohibit offering a message delivery service to consumers if said service doesn't implement an open protocol.
That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way.
I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc.
https://todoport.com/index.html
In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider.
It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least!
Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services.
I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.
But they cannot, at least not for a foreseeable future. Both are used in enterprise environments, who would flee the first platform in droves which would disable IMAP/POP3.
And even if they'd both disable IMAP, people would write adapters.
Fundamentally life is about trade offs. For most people closed platforms are the better choice.
When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed.
1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party.
Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third parties.
Google: "Let us make many consecutive requests to your webserver, download and store copies of your content." You: "Agreed." You: "Let me make many consecutive reuqests to your webserver, download and store copies of my own or other people's content." Google: "Sorry".
Then Google makes your content available to others, but only for a few searches at time[2]. To add insult to injury, it sells advertising and, if the regulators are correct, promotes its own websites -- all serving user-generated content -- as people are searching through publicly available information.
"Middleman" or "service"?
2. Any attempt to collect in bulk results in IP ban. Compare Internet Archive who encourages users to crawl their collection.
Organizing public information sounds like a lovely goal for a company, until you realize it will be access controlled (it's public information), laden with ads (because the company cannot support itself without advertisers), user tracking for the advertisers and that the changes to the algorithms that include or exclude results are secret. And there will be no index. You can only access the data through search.
Moving beyond the first page of results is OK only so long as you do not go "too fast" or go too deep -- you will never get to page 100 witout first being banned. WTF?
Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.
Just as I move my domain around between email (and other) providers, I could then move my IPv6 block around. Instead of asking Linode for an IP address out of their block, I could tell them "serve this block." (Or can we already do that? For a reasonable price?)
If you control the DNS there's no real need for owning your own IP addresses as you can just change what they point to. That's usually also much faster to do in a pinch than find a new party that will announce your block and convince the old one to stop doing so. That's usually hours if not days in lead time.
Though if you truly care enough about it you'll also want your own DNS servers and own gTLD in order to own the whole chain.
However what you describe -- building out your own infrastructure -- still remains a lofty but worthy endeavor for anyone with the skills and determination.
Businesses of all sizes rent stable IP addresses. Some ISPs in some countries also provide them to non-business subscribers as part of the standard subscription.
It's really not too difficult to have a persistent IP address for an individual who only needs reachability and is not trying to run a high traffic, global enterprise. Avoid the popular large, high-volume providers. Obviously do not use something like AWS.
1. Misconfigured servers: This is the hardest part. Rule number 1: keep it as small as possible. Disable everything, and then only enable what you need. Rule 2: READ, I mean read every document, blog post etc you can find about e-mail, email attacks, etc.
2. IP address: The normal address you get from Digital Occean or Linode for example, are normally horrible as a lot of spam has been sent from them. If your lucky it might work, but check the lists for those IPs. Try to change if you can, until you find one with low scores. Also, I dont know if this helped, but i had my domain on both Gmail and Outlook servers for a while before migrating to my own servers. I dont know if this helped me to not get stuck in their filters etc? Or I was just lucky i guess :)
I finally moved because I did not have the energy to keep up with the server etc, and when i noticed that i had not even logged on to the server for 3 months, i just moved it to gmail. I am however looking at migrating away from google, as i don't like the web interface (use it from the iPad now). So who knows where I'll end up next.
Email dates back to timesharing, when people shared computers, each user having an "email account" on a single computer.
For people today, each with their own computer, it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other instead of connecting to "email providers".
This is grassroots. Not meant to leverage existing "email provider" ecosystem.
What's America's largest ISP? I think Comcast? Good luck passing SMTP in either direction over Comcast's residential network: https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-...
I agree with your general point, but it's hard to keep up with this sort of thing, even for geeks. For the Muggles it's impossible.
You are sending email to people you know, on a port you have agreed to, who also have reachable IP addresses and will accept connections from your IP address.
ISP's are not going to do DPI on open ports like 22, 80, or 443 or any high port, in order to filter out SMTP traffic. Why would they bother?
If you must use the existing "email provider" system -- e.g., you need to send commercial email -- then you must use the standardized ports they use, and yes, you must jump through their hoops. And you will experience spam and other nuisances. It's supposed to be open and decnetralized, but the reality is it's quite centralized because everyone relies on "major email providers".
But there's nothing about SMTP protocol that requires anyone to use an "email provider" or any specific port, nor to accept email from all IP addresses.
Two people can communicate directly via SMTP on a non-standard port and can choose to filter by IP address.
Maybe no one does this anymore, but I've done it; it's possible.
It's not that difficult to set up. The showstopper is not the set up, nor the ISP filtering port 25. It's that most people do not have a reachable IP address.
If the internet didn't exist, an artist would have bought storage for his art. Why this artist feels that a service he didn't pay for owes him anything is baffling to me.
Turn it around, though: if Google feels like it's not responsible for anything it hosts, shouldn't it say so, loud and clear? Say, a banner that says, "Hey, we'll delete your stuff any time we feel like it," at the top of every Gmail page?
Google's users aren't parasites. There is both a relationship and an exchange of economic value. That's why Google has worked very hard to be trusted by everybody, to be seen as responsible stewards of vast amounts of often very personal information.
If Google doesn't want people to trust them, they should not work so hard to be seen as trustworthy. That the artist believed them is not an error on his part.
Typing out words on a forum and hitting "reply" is easy regardless whether you support the victim or not. Don't see your point?
Sure, the TOS says "we can delete it whenever"/"no promises", but the advertising and general pitching of the product have heavily indicated otherwise. I don't see the service going away, and when you have so much identity tied to your email, it's pretty shocking to realize that it could all disappear in a flash.
If Google were to kill my email accounts, I would be _seriously_ disadvantaged.
Saying that only fools trust Google to keep your things forever is true, but also lacks empathy.
Sure, he's not paying, but Google doesn't ask for payment. They provide a service which is backed by Google's implicit guarantee that their web hosting is safe and reliable, and they've broken that guarantee. Google may not have a legal responsibility to not delete everything this artist made, but every time something like this happens, the rest of us should notice it and reconsider whether Google is a good platform to trust with our work.
Edit: I'm not even considering running my own email server; I know that's a full-time job. Just something like forwarding my custom email to my Gmail address, which is the type of thing I've heard the aforementioned scary stories about (though a quick web search isn't turning up many such stories).
Problems arise when you run your own server, because of fairly detailed authentication settings. If you pay a provider to run their servers, they take care of that.
Of course, it's important to keep backups of everything (configs, logs, mail, etc), and test. Just slowly port everything over, as you gain more confidence that your not missing anything. Most email providers also will let you put a rule in place that lets you bounce mail to both addresses.
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.
Tho FWIW I use Postmark to do my email delivery because then at least I know my email will end up in the inbox of the recipient vs their spam box which my hosted server was having problems with.
Good point; your domain can be seized for various sorts of percieved IP violation.
I've got an exit plan for my email, but I'd lose at least $200 of apps.
It's really easy to become dependent on a service.
One thing I worry about thought: what happens when I die? My credit cards will eventually shut down, my Linode will turn off when my card gets declined, and my domains will fail to renew.
But the same thing happens the other direction. Github could shut down Github pages one day, or they could even go out of business. Geocities is gone (although I think Archive.org backed up a lot of it) and there are tons of services that have gone belly-up over the years.
Even in our age of massive data retention, it's still interesting to see what's gone, and what may never be recovered if it wasn't indexed by the Wayback machine.
That correspondence was, and remains, important to me.
Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it?
The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have.
But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want.
From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail, and agree to store my archive for me.
That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every sense of ownership.
The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.
What is a reasonable law that won't, say, make services like Snapchat illegal (which many people seem to find useful)?
I don't know the legal language, but requiring a text box with a tick mark or equivalent that presents a legally mandated predefined statement designed as a short and simple (unlike most TOS and EULAs), in clear and visible text, should not be impossible.
For example, "I agree that $corp may delete my data without notice and opportunity to back it up" if the $corp isn't willing to offer a TOS that grants the user those rights. Possibly another similar one about privacy.
This level of personal responsibility would be much better, IMO, than falling back on the government to coerce facebook into better behavior.
Unfortunately it is not. Issues like this are the reason why government and state occasionally can be useful.
Yes, because you gave them those rights when you agreed to their terms of service. The US Post Office makes no similar claim of ownership over the mail that i'm aware of, so the metaphor really doesn't work.
While I see the same problem you do- that we're all at risk of losing the correspondence and history that we care about, man do I think your reaction is super weird.
Facebook and Gmail are private web sites, and always have been. You are mistaking them for public services, when they are not and never were public services. Your mistake in no way means that laws should change or that Facebook should be required to archive and provide you access in perpetuity. You made a choice, and if you realize now that your choice comes with implications you don't like, you should start correcting that choice yourself. You should collect and gather your digital assets out from Facebook and Gmail, and archive them yourself.
Facebook is not the post office. If you want the post office, use the post office. The post office services cost you money, and Facebook's don't. The post office does not archive your correspondence at all, while Facebook does. The post office delivers physical goods, while Facebook only delivers digital goods. I am just not seeing any reasonable way to conclude that you can treat Facebook like the post office in order to suggest that Facebook be required to provide you what you wish for.
Your language is so strange to me - "That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff". You gave them your stuff. If you don't want them to have it, don't give it to them.
I'm completely lost as to how the laws are unfairly balanced in this situation. I'm normally in favor of all kinds of regulation, but this just seems unreasonable to me to suggest that we should have laws that require Facebook to provide you with permanent archive access. Do you want to pay for that archive access, or are you demanding that the government ensure that Facebook has to pay for it forever? The post office isn't required to keep archives for you, how how does your analogy work here?
I do see your point, but I don't feel they should be able to advertise themselves, effectively, as utilities and then refuse to carry the burden of that claim. If Google says you'll be able to store their email with them in perpetuity, one of two things should be true: either they should be legally treated as a utility, or they should be taken to court for false advertisement.
To be honest, I can't say I've ever seen an ad for Facebook or Gmail. They entered my world like I imagine most people -- because I heard about them from friends.
One of the biggest problems, I think, is user education: the average user sees these widely-adopted services online and assumes they're equivalent to meatspace, where real utilities have been created over time by institutions -- not private corporations. If anything, we need a legally enforceable way to set up true virtual utilities, or for more people to internalize what the media has been telling anyone who listens carefully for years: your data, once handed over, no longer belongs to you.
Facebook and Gmail are private websites. What is privacy we talk about? Ownership? Investment? Is that all there is to it? Suppose the government wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course they would. Why would the public object at the closing of a private website? After all, they don't own it, so what's in it for them? Whatever is in it for them is what I'm arguing needs to be protected, and not necessarily under Facebook's or Google's terms.
My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's email address. Think about that for a minute. I receive payments for work I do using PayPal. My ownership of my PayPal account, and hence access to money I've worked for, is directly tied to my Gmail address. If Google can take away my Gmail address, they are, effectively, taking away my PayPal "bank account." Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is "a private website"? I don't think so.
I didn't give Gmail my stuff. They offered to carry my communications between me and those I communicate with. I derive value from it, and so do they. It's a business transaction like any other, even though no money changed hands between them and myself. The world has come to know that David Wanjiru can be found at dwanjiru@gmail.com. That arrangement has suited David Wanjiru. That arrangement has also suited Gmail.
The question then is, who owns "dwanjiru@gmail.com"? If a prospective employer who's had my CV for three months wishes to talk to me, they'll fire an Email to dwanjiru@gmail.com. If my PayPal account becomes compromised, PayPal will send remedial steps of action to dwanjiru@gmail.com. When the higher education loans body in my country wants to pursue me for my college student loans, they send Emails to dwanjiru@gmail.com.
How then can it be proper that Gmail owns dwanjiru@gmail.com, so much so that at the press of a button, dwanjiru@gmail.com ceases to exist? And that this is done without any reference whatsoever to this David Wanjiru person?
Do I pay for Gmail and Facebook? No I don't. But me and Facebook, or me and Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should be protected too.
If they no longer wish to provide me that service, fine. But they can't block me out at their own will. They can, and the terms of service I agreed to say as much, but that's what I'm saying should change.
I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they want to cut costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage. When I first opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB. Megabytes. When it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others, and so on. I didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said 6MB. (If I'm not mistaken, I could pay for more if I wished to).
Now they offer me unlimited storage (with a few caveats). If they want to revert back to 6MB mailboxes, they can't just unilaterally do so and get rid of my excess. They'd give me a chance to save my stuff, just as they've done in the past when they shut down services like 360 and Geocities. My argument is that the opportunity to save my stuff should be mine by right, not simply because Yahoo has good basic manners.
Yes. Ownership. Operational funding as well. Not paid for by tax dollars, but paid for with income from the products sold by the private company, as well as private investments.
> Suppose the government wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course they would.
That's speculative, but the government has shut down many private companies, with and without objection. Should public objection prevent the government from shutting down a private company that is breaking the law? If Google was selling your private email, should they be required to continue to do so, simply because a lot of people enjoy the convenience?
> My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's email address. Think about that for a minute... Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is a "private website"? I don't think so.
Did you catch the part about the person who's email address that was shut down may have been violating child pornography laws? Not only can Google shut that down at will, they are literally compelled by law to turn it off immediately.
But even in general, Yes, I do think private companies can and should be able to discontinue their products at will, as do many, many people. I'm not hearing a compelling argument why they should be required to provide a public service without tax funding. You are suggesting a public service.
> The question then is, who owns "dwanjiru@gmail.com"?
Google does, plain and simple. If you have organized your life so that you depend on your gmail address, and loss of it would compromise your livelihood, I humbly suggest that we stop talking right now and you go make some backup plans.
> But me and Facebook, or me and Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should be protected too.
Facebook is making money by showing you ads. Their primary business transaction is with advertisers, not with you. They are selling your browsing habits and information about your social network to the advertisers, and that's how they make money. They protect their advertiser's interests first, your interests are only protected as far as it keeps you on the site looking at ads.
I'm not sure what you mean about protected business transactions, but your business transaction is already protected as far as it can be. The transaction is that Facebook delivers your message to your friends in return for your allowing them to tell advertisers about your behavior. That's what they agreed to do, that's what they did, and the transaction ends once they did what they agreed to do. Why are you expecting the government to extend the scope of the transaction beyond what the company promised?
> I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf
You have that opportunity right now. Take care of it right now!
If they have to shut down your account for you violating the law, then they cannot legally offer you the option to download your content.
If they have to shut down because they run out of money, then they can't legally force employees to stay there and provide this service to you.
If they decide to shut down your account because the service is losing money, then leaving it on means losing more money. Why should they be required to pay to leave it on? Your dependence on the service and failure to plan doesn't, and shouldn't, bind them to anything.
> My argument is that the opportunity to save my stuff should be mine by right...
Still as wild an idea as before, and I just don't get where you're coming from, I'm sorry. I agree about the problem, but this proposed solution baffles me. I'm sure you're not the only one, and you're clearly a smart person, but I'm surprised that it feels correct to expect private companies to be legally obligated to fulfill your dependencies. I don't see how it's even possible to fulfill this right you propose.
There is "Gmail for Work" which does provide some of the guarantees you are looking for. Though none regarding illegal content, as per the laws.
Since they are paying to store this data, and you agreed to let them do that for you, then yes they can.
But it's not in some kind of escrow. They even make it easy for you to get all of it for your own storage:
https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/ https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
With Facebook, well, I guess you agree to them being able to delete your data at their will via the little box you tick on sign-up. And as long as you accept those terms, law won't help.
Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation.
And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?
Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.
"I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities."
Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.
It is a failure of ethics to then delete that indispensable thing.
There were laws in the old USAmerican West about horse theft. Strict laws! And similarly strict laws throughout history in shepherding cultures, regarding livestock.
The justification for draconian punishments for livestock theft has always been that the animals (property, items) were indispensable. You can't go around drastically changing or possibly ending people's lives by taking the things they depend on away from them. It's wrong!
Very few people backup their Google account regularly (or at all), even though Google Takeout is available. People should, but I'd argue part of the burden is on Google for misleading them into thinking they don't need to.
That's a dick move through and through. We can wag our fingers and say 'you should have known better' but clearly if this were the case all the time, with all our free services, this model of business would fail. It is 'free' so long as it's profitable or has the potential to be profitable to them.
These services have no explicit guarantee that they will last, or protect your stuff, but we expect them to. It's implied in the marketing or usability of the thing. You pay a merchant for an item, you don't explicitly pay to secure your credit card with hashes and salts in a DB, it's implied in the service. I suppose it's your fault if your credit card is swiped because you should have used cash... or gold bullion.
If Google was a storage facility and did this, free or no, they would be liable.
Though could be different for different storage facilities.
For example, lets reverse this a little bit. Lets say you're storing a clients data, backups, 100tb of data with offsite redundancy. The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive. It's now costing you money to maintain and service this data. What do you do?
EDIT: This post isn't as well written as I'd like it to be, but parent is bullshit and I think the core argument of "This is not an analogous situation" holds. I need to leave in a few minutes though so I don't have time to write a better argument, sorry.
As a short version though, if this was an analogous situation where google had tried to contact this person to take down whatever was objectionable, and warned them that they should back up their stuff immediately since they could decide to take it down on any business day, I bet this guy would have been right on that.
They didn't though. Giving them social credit like they did is ridiculous.
You always have to inform the user first, even if it's in the contract.
Now compare that to what google did. They were owed exactly 0 dollars for 0 months, they make no attempt whatsoever to contact the client, and they shredded the data without trying to send it back.
It's more like Chad informed the police of the dead body he found in his garage, and they removed it. Chad called to let you know after the fact, because you are obviously not his first priority in that situation.
What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms, TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I think worth having a conversation about.
He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."
I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world" and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.
Even if that's the case, it is not impossible. It's just a choice that they made about how to structure things. The US government has hundreds of millions of citizens, but each one of those persons has rights, responsibilities, and privileges. The Catholic Church has hundreds of millions of members, but each one can have a personal relationship with a priest.
If Google is really indifferent to what people have entrusted to them, that's a choice.
I think the angle your father was coming at this was, computers are deterministic. There are lots of times when computers don't act deterministicly, flipped bits for one, also edge cases like Race Conditions etc
Loss of access, or unauthorised access, I'm not so sure of.
Actually, I suspect Google can do better than almost anyone at keeping black hats out. It's the risk of getting denied access yourself that's probably greatest. Some or much of which is outside Google's hands, via legal requirements based on activity.
But that should operate under law enforcement, not as administrative fiat.
My argument is that if using an online service isn't safe for a child pornograpger or terrorist, it's not safe for anyone.
(Substitute rights activist or homosexual in a highly conservative country if the morality of the first examples blocks yor thinking.)
There are several things we can do to reduce the risks, but after a certain point they become counter-productive. That's also a force of nature, by the way. At least of "human nature", what means, it's a force of nature as long as you are dealing with humans.
But yeah, there's plenty of room for arguing about that optimum level of risk. Software industry contracts are beyond absurd for decades already.
It isn't what we should expect from google, but it still stands that the artist shouldnt have relied on simply one thing to keep his stuff safe. Accidents happen places, perfectly reasonable (albeit unfortunate) ones. This is the main reason for having backups. The fact that the guy didn't have some of this already in place is, indeed, his fault. It is unfortunate that there is little to no human interface.
The interrupt to his interaction with fans/customers is more unfortunate - that is more difficult to replace. However, if he had another website or public communication form, Some of these folks would look him up. The main problem with this seems to be the sort of art he produced, which wasn't welcome on all platforms.
"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, and hence, shut down his page immediately.
I can understand if Google considers certain aspects of his page to be unacceptable, but I wish they had notified him of the reason for their decision, and given him a week's time to download all his data and transition to a different website. As someone who relies on gmail/drive very heavily for important documents/correspondence, reading something like this makes me feel quite uneasy.
I use my own domain and private email service but I do run my blog on blogger. But, I have done the experiment of converting Google Takeout data for my blog and hosting it on my own server. My default is to use blogger because I like how comments are handled.
Services that Google and Facebook provide can be useful, but I view that as a small add-on to my own web properties.
Edit: I also find it convenient to sometimes use gmail, but my important personal and business email goes through a separate service that I pay for.
I have "Feature announcements" on from Google, but never heard of this. Anyway, thanks mucho!
[1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cautionary-tale-google-decides-...
It looks like it used to be closely associated with the Google Plus branding more so than Account Management, so that may explain why it's not as widely known.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front
[2] http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-silent-release-o...
http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...
http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...
But now I'm really confused. That page still exists as of this minute: http://www.dennis-cooper.net
The link from the fusion.net story is: http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/
That blog does not exist. So maybe we're talking about two different things?
Even if you personally don't care about erotic pictures, if your grandma starts associating google with porn (because a case like this became high enough profile to get covered by the local news), and then you e-mail her from your google account, now you're having an uncomfortable conversation with your grandma. Or your wife or mother or sister or really conservative friend or whatever. Which isn't enough to make everyone leave, but it's enough to make some people leave, and pretty soon Bing or Yahoo would have bigger mindshare.
It's a lot easier for Google to just say "ToS violation = deleted" and be done with it, and occasionally have to reverse a decision if there's too much fallout.
But a local copy will almost certainly be easier to police for "uncorrelated risks in the ways that matter".
Can't Google (and others) program their bots to send a warning like "we have received complaints about x. You have 14 days to resolve".
The nuclear option seems quite abrupt/harsh/final.
Edit: Clarity
Google really should have an option to freeze the account while allowing the user to download their content, but it seems that they don't.
> It’s gone because it was kept entirely on his blog
Take backups.
0. It's not a backup unless you know it restores
1. Always take backups
2. Backup the backup
Now, if they only could add a periodic option...
Easily installable via homebrew.
You can mitigate this by having your own domain and host the email on Google Apps -- that way if they take away your access you just update your mx record to point to somewhere else. But you can also easily lose your domain name (due to malice or accident).
BTW, if an emergency does happen, anyone have a recommendation for a decent web email client that I can point my MX record to? Preferably one that has both hosted and self-hosted options. Or something that I can spin up easily on a cloud service such as AWS.
[1] https://squirrelmail.org/about/ [2] https://www.horde.org/apps/webmail
As an aside, VestaCP [3] - an open source hosting admin panel that you can install within a few minutes via ssh - will install squirrelmail automatically:
No backups to deal with and no procrastination-until-the-end-of-your-life. Save the planet and get away from your past.
I happen to like my past and want to keep it, even if I don't habitually refer to it.
Having said that, I did continue scrolling and the article goes on to say
> More generally, relying on the internet as an archive is dangerous.
And it is, at least, another point toward helping me feel vindicated for being that person who always says "and you have off site backups for when your house burns down, right?"
3 copies
2 different forms of media
1 offsite
Partially unrelated I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups. On that note, their backups are not my backups. Their backups are never my backups.
If they save my butt one day, awesome. But that day was already terrible if I'd managed to lose all of my backups.
I have two off-site backups located ~150 miles from each other. If I (we) lose everything, chances are that there are more important things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
When my music collection was smaller, I had everything backed up onto an external as well as had them all physically burned onto like 50 DVDs. Since my collection has grown beyond a terabyte, however, I haven't had the time or energy to keep that up. Now it's just an external, a travel external, a redundant external, and a cloud backup.
So Disk (HDD) and Cloud is fine. Two HDDs (spinny platter style) would indeed fail the test. If you want to argue it you could probably get away with different manufacturers or different batches but I'd prefer my backups to play nicely with the rules rather than try to avoid them! Far-fetched as it is but lets say for example you have a power surge that takes out your external disk (is that even possible?). Chances are high whatever did that would also do that to your other disk. Or maybe a wall caves in and decimates your PC (or you just sweep the desk somehow and knock everything off it. Maybe the desk has collapsed) - The spinny disks may be destroyed if they are both hit hard enough. Mixing an HDD and SSD, the SSD would probably be more hardy against shock damage.
From another comment I made in this thread somewhere "I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups [so it's different to just a raw disk]"
Edit: I use too many brackets here. I am going to attend my next available parenthesis anonymous support group.
Sometimes, when people buy multiple drives at once for servers, they wind up with drives from the same batch. If the drives are subtly defective, and if they're always run under identical conditions (such as in a RAID array), then I've seen multiple drives fail within days of each other.
Disks exists in two states: failed and failing.
[0]: please feel free to let me know if you know any previous references to this rule.
He had 2 copies on floppy two on disk (in a separate building) and another set at home on floppy's
That's why in 1979 I used to by 8 inch floppy's in multiples of thousands
Silly if you consider how from a technical and practical standpoint nothing prevents you from carrying a backup of every important document you've ever owned and a good deal of photos and such with you in your wallet on an encrypted mini-SD-card. Wallet gets stolen? Make a new backup. House burns down? You have your backup. Drop off a card at friends or family, keep one at your employer, hell, stick them on the Christmas cards you send out each year to your nearest and dearest; with proper encryption you are the only one able to use them anyway.
It also doesn't help that people blindly trust the big tech companies to do this for them.
From the article:
Cooper should’ve backed his work up, or known to be more cautious with drafts. ... ... Admittedly, not everything has vanished. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has saved bits and pieces of Cooper’s blog dating back to January 3, 2012, but they are just snapshots of the blog’s front page for a given date, not capturing the blog in its entirety.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256
Did his work fit this definition? I doubt it, because he would have been in jail by now, given that he never concealed his name. Also Google is notorious for heavy handed treatment of smaller AdSense publishers, which makes me doubly sceptical.
http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-googl...
So the usual will happen, public shaming of the "artist" into some pseudo-religious organization, where he/she/it can be forced by the "believers" to uphold some the marriage/basic-income-for-beauty Contract. Another horrific social machine from the past.
Could we at least pressure potentially creative persons into something socially useful? He/She/It who makes the biggest scientific contribution of a group of three, gets a good life and "surveilanced" freedom, the median gets publicly outed and "surveilanced" freedom, the least contributing goes to some prison. Repeat every year.
The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.
So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time.
The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site.
As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!!
Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.
And even if it seems to be working fine at the moment, there are no practical guarantees that this will not be subject to change: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA. Even someone as high profile as Linus Torvalds had to resort to the classic method of public shaming in order to get a prompt response.
Lastly, there is not much incentive even if I cared about privacy - my typical recipient is anyway a Gmail account, so Google can definitely construct a shadow profile for the sender even if the sender does not use Gmail.
Again, it is a classic problem of a heavily centralized internet.
> I’ve asked about whether the work on Cooper’s blog has been deleted permanently or is simply on a server somewhere, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.
[1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work on the blog was only on the blog.
It's as if I worked in artistic welding but, never learned anything about the dangers of highly pressurized tanks of gas and then get surprised when leaving the tank valve open causes a fire and ruins your artwork.
He didn't have any backups anywhere else. He just completely relied on Google to do it for free forever just because. After a decade of making work that controversial, you never just save that stuff to jump drive?
This person is incompetent and irresponsible. Google owes him nothing.
https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en
It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this help.
i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog.
This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_ aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you should keep backups.
The title seems like click-bait.
Oh, and to help him and more importantly everyone else who is hit by google service department.
Really? Because you didn't take the necessary steps to create your own backups!??
Edit: Reading some of the other comments about the ... um ... content ... of his blog, no wonder he didn't keep backups!!!
On top of that, this person chose not to take the simple step of using Google Takeout to back up the years of data that he couldn't afford to lose. If my business or mental health depended on that data, I'd be doing that every couple of weeks at least.
I do think it would be nice if Google would, when they remove an account, give you a couple of days to go to Takeout and download the data.
Just deleting it with no warning seems very rude indeed, especially when you consider the amount of advertising revenue they generate from serving people's data.
Google should also make less claims about, "A safe place to store your data"!, if they continue to remove people's data without warning or recourse.
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: Point 2, I agree completely, it seems way too draconian to just delete immediately with no warning. With the size of google, there's always going to be the chance that an account is removed by mistake. At least give people a couple of day's chance to get their data before it is removed, if only as a goodwill gesture of thanks to the millions of people providing free data for Google to serve and make advertising revenue from.
Uh, aren't Google News Archive and Google Groups still alive and well?
You could also ask your "fans" to send you their cached copies. Or you could search your local browser history. Or you could hire forensic analysists to examine any drives you may have had the data on.
You could also pay lots of fees and bloat up the bitcoin blockchain with it, if you don't want to lose it again.
With a desktop client, an e-mail provider like gmail is able to terminate or suspend my account and prevent me from using my mailbox, but they can’t block me from accessing the e-mails I have already written or received.
Even if you're using blogspot, that's no reason not to have a backup.
Whew.