Why Did Google Erase Cooper's Beloved Literary Blog?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> 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 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....
I thought we'd finally (already) won this fight in the US with Howl/Naked Lunch, but maybe not?
Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.
From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference?
The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably.
You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.
- There are time (and money) consuming technical issues in migrating to another platform, and with the dominance of software-as-a-service platforms, it's often not even possible. Can you migration comments? Is the date going to be set correctly? Can you keep your current layout and images? So even on a purely technical level, you can't "easily" get your blog running again on another platform.
- Access to content: I'm hoping he has backups. Of course, if you developed the content on-platform, it may be nebulous what exactly you need backups of. E.g., did you think to include all the images+comments? If his account was deleted, he may simply not have all the data anymore.
- Network effects (this is the big one): a web site isn't just a bunch of bits; it's a place people visit. Being down for any considerable length of time means those visitors will drift away; the attention you've gained will be partially lost permanently. And that's the best-case scenario. In many cases, you cannot keep url intact, in which case even after you restore service, people won't find you. In a very real way, companies like google and especially facebook own your social connections to others - so even if you manage to find another platform, they're not going to give you your contacts back.
E.g. if you switch phone provider, you may keep your telefone number (here, at least, even against the will of the original provider). If you migrate from facebook, you cannot keep your profile url. That's probably a bad thing for society; but it's hardly surprising companies aren't dying to prevent lock-in. Even google, which nominally allows extracting your data, the most valuable assets cannot be transferred (not to mention that the data extraction process results can't be trivially imported elsewhere because there is no standard for these types of things).
It's absurd to suggest the user has much practical freedom when it comes to switching communication platforms. Any freedom he does have tends to mean he must have had the foresight to use only a small subset of the available features, including onerous restrictions such as limited social interaction or interaction via unusual means. More realistically, if you switch platforms, you're likely to lose readers.
If "practical freedom", means to get all the best parts of a platform while expecting that you can do whatever you want, then it's not surprising that some will be shocked when such costs suddenly come due having had ignored the writing on the wall. Although most never explore the boundaries of such to make a difference in distinction to them, such "practical freedom" never truly exists in anything we do.
I learned the "hard" way, bootstrapped a company that crowd sourced data seeded from "open" graph, only to get hit with a c & d and "my" facebook used account banned indefinitely 4 years ago. I can still create multi accounts and use them, but I don't think I'll be naive enough to use them in the same way as I did "my" main used account and not expect similar results as before. And if this is related to CP, its not like this is the first time ever someone has been censored by a private entity for this on the internet prior to this account becoming another stat in that book, and considering how general society sees these things, I'd be more surprised if the author is really surprised or just upset because it finally happened to them.
They're not even as powerful as the editor of one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, never mind the man himself.
Of course, it's all just rich people controlling the discourse. Murdoch can buy pieces of Google, Facebook, and Reddit too.
Now, they just get to micromanage it. Micro-censorship, Micro-surveillance.
I think you're in a profound bubble if you don't imagine Murdoch has vastly more control over public discourse than Google.
Google provides more walls for people to hang their art, but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
Just because you (the colloquial "you") call yourself an artist doesn't compel the Met to hang your art and neither does it compel Google.
At minimum, artists and other specialty individuals need extra allowances and certainties. Were they a corporate entity, this wouldn't have happened. Personally, I value culture at least as highly as most businesses.
Actually, I do think the current moderation model of most forums are wrong. The users should be the ultimate arbiter of what they see or not. The power to block certain users should be in the hands of those who browse it, and the moderators simply give a recommendation that most users follow. Similar to how spam folder works, in that you can always override the recommendation by moving the spam into your inbox.
> but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
If not all opinions are allowed on their platform, then those they allow come with a stamp of approval from them. The logical conclusion is that they should be held liable for any libelous claims made by the users, since the users' opinion actually reflect the platform's own. They cannot have it both ways by claiming to be independent from users' opinions while simultaneously influencing and filtering them.
They are, in my imaginary world, to deny me only for reasons not related to my content. For example, they can reject me if the pictures are too large or not in a specific format, but not if it expresses any views they dislike.
> The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
You give no evidence that it is the same voices. I am, for one, consistently opposed to Reddit's policy on banning subreddits and to Google and Facebook's manual interference on public discourse.
This is a tired comment. Could we please stop saying it. We are aware of this.
Yes your ISP has the right to cut off your internet access because you vote Democrats. They are a private company.
But that doesn't make it right and doesn't mean we can't be angry about it!
Yes, we know that Google can delete whatever they want whenever they want. And yet we might get angry as hell... buy we keep hosting our content with them.
You want to get angry? Sure, go for it. You want to get change, though? Then I suggest we stop giving them money to keep doing what they are doing. That, I believe, is the spirit of the parent comment .
Even Google itself said that their "don't be evil" motto is quite stupid.
I personally try to ban them from my life as much as possible. Just recently in Google Maps a window popup with history of all the places I drove to. That was a shocker but how naive was I thinking they don't keep this data. Since then I bought TomTom for cash and said goodbye to Google Maps. You should do the same!
You may be making a general point I agree with, but it doesn't apply here, assuming it indeed is child porn.
But there is also a question about what "actual" child porn is. Depending on jurisdiction child porn cartoons can legally be child porn.
Free speech does not apply. (assuming the hypothesis that this is child porn is correct)
Freedom of Speech however is a concept that applies to everyone, and everything including Google
Companies that proclaim the desire to respect Freedom of Speech, that claim to operate platforms in the promotion of Freedom of Speech, and make a profit doing so, should be HEAVILY criticized when they violate that principle
The question then becomes, is Google stifling freedom of speech? Can their impact on your freedom of speech by deleting your blog or posts be compared to the govt's impact on your freedom of speech through prosecution?
I say yes. Freedom of speech and similar laws seek to give you an immunity against govt, not because govt is evil, but because govt is powerful, and you are not. Google is powerful, and they were alive to just how powerful they were going to be when they came out with that don't be evil admonition.
Whereas Google took it upon themselves to not be evil, the writers of freedom of speech and similar laws tool it upon themselves to tell govt to not be evil. Should our societies protect individuals against entities who have power beyond some kind of threshhold? I'd say yes.
Remember, freedom of speech is only one part of the First Amendment. Those same writers also included the freedom of association. An organization like Google, Fox News, Amazon, or the Wall Street Journal is not obligated to associate with everyone.
We can change things. We can pass laws which mandate that certain things are public spaces. For example, the rise of the malls means that the migration from public shopping streets to private shopping areas, where mall owners like the Mall of the Americas can shut down protest much more readily than the police could do in a truly public area. We can pass laws which force malls to be public areas. The Supreme Court decided that in Pruneyard v. Robins. But only a handful of states have done so.
We can similarly pass laws which say that any content hosting site must be content neutral. Eg, if you want to use Stack Overflow to post your diatribes against whale hunting, SO cannot shut you down.
That doesn't make sense. Okay, so we only require that of "powerful" sites, which you suggest. Which is defined as .... what? Who gets to decide? Who gets to challenge that? If Yahoo was once powerful but is no longer so, who gets to decide when the transition occurs?
One possibility is to set up a common carrier status, where a company offers its services without discrimination to the general public. This is how the phone system works. But why would a company want to do this?
I realize that I'm suggesting calls that are difficult to make, but my wider contention is that the current status quo, legal and valid as it is, is missing something that we are going to have to address at some point.
For example, they are available to the general public so are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, and several other protected classes. California and other states place even more restrictions on their ability to discriminate.
On the other hand, you are free to discriminate as you wish. (Though not without risk of criticism; such is free speech.)
There's another difference in your example. Google provides services to the general public. You use their services. However, I do not provide a drinking-coffee service. I don't even like the taste of coffee. There is no reason I need to accept your offer to give me a cup of coffee any more than I need to accept a flyer from someone in the street. But if I were a company which provided coffee consumption services, then I would have less ability to turn you down than I do as a private person.
My wider contention is that we have plenty of historical examples of public/private space which help us understand what's going on. For example, can a company town prevent someone from coming to town to distribute religious materials? Decided in Marsh v. Alabama. Are AOL email addresses "public", so AOL cannot block spammers? Decided in Cyber Promotions v. America Online.
That's not the framework to use.
What's happening is that the government can allow "free speech" to criticize the government because they can just leave you alone. They don't have to spend money to leave you alone. Arresting everybody that criticizes the government means spending money for agents to round up citizens and also spending more money on prisons to hold dissenters.
The other form of "free speech with zero negative consequences from private entities" is impossible for a government or a society to provide for you. I'm not being hyperbolic -- it literally is impossible to give you that type of freedom. That type of of "commercial free speech" has a cost and other citizens are not going to pay for it. This leads into my response to your other statement...
>Does using Google products qualify my relationship with them as an association? In the same way that me buying you a cup of coffee is association?
You are misunderstanding how Freedom of Association affects "freedom of speech in a private business".
Using Facebook as an example, consider that some of their biggest advertisers are Coca-Cola, Proctor Gamble, and Samsung.
Let's say you want a law that forces Facebook to host posts (text not photos) espousing the benefits pedophilia. Pedophilia text is legal. Facebook user is happy that his legal viewpoint isn't deleted. This is now "free speech in private space" nirvana right? Not really. What the proponents of free-speech-on-private-platforms didn't consider is that there's no parallel law that forces Coca-Cola, ProctorGamble, Samsung to keep paying Facebook for ads. If Coca-Cola marketers say, "we don't want to run ads on Facebook that has child sex posts", they are free to abandon that platform and spend their ad dollars elsewhere. (Freedom of Association). The so-called "private treated as public space" that people wanted to spread alternative and marginalized viewpoints won't exist because nobody else wants to pay for it. ((The users of Facebook is also an "association" and if they freely leave the platform because they don't want their profiles intermingling with pedophiliacs, that will further erode Facebook's value.)
Freedom of speech on private platforms has a cost and this is why the society can't give it to you. Society doesn't want to pay for all viewpoints.
Some may think the obvious answer to the paradox of Freedom-of-Association vs Freedom-of-Speech is to collect taxes for a government-sponsored "public social network". Such a platform wouldn't be dependent on voluntary advertisers and their discretionary dollars. Unfortunately, that won't solve the problem for free speech either. If you think it through beyond the surface level appeal of such a platform, you'll see why it won't work.
No. I think it would be hard to write a policy that sought to prevent censorship on private property. How would something like Reddit (or Hacker News) work in such a world? How do you deal with spam? Or off-topic posts? Or hateful and incendiary comments? All those things are protected speech today, but that doesn't mean the relevant service wants to have them on their network.
If that's the case, why isn't Cooper in jail?
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12146920
[2] - http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/24/facebook-calls-wiki...
[3] - http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/23/twitter-user...
Every culture has taboos, but because of giant US internet companies mediating the content of people's communications, US taboos are currently more important than everyone else's lack of taboo. Ultimately, I see this leading to everyone's taboos becoming more important than everyone else's lack of taboo; I've heard of some of these platforms enforcing Lese Majeste laws.
Citation on the Legal Case law that now lists a Child Bath time photo as Child Porn that can get you into "lot of trouble" in the US
Being arrested as a parent and potentially having your children taken into protective-services custody until you win or the charges are dropped is unquestionably "a lot of trouble".
----
Lisa and Anthony "A.J." Demaree's three young daughters were taken away by Arizona Child Protective Services last fall when a Walmart employee found partially nude pictures of the girls on a camera memory stick taken to the store for processing, according to the suit.
The Peoria couple's attorney said Walmart turned the photos over to police and the Demarees were not allowed to see their children for several days and didn't regain custody for a month while the state investigated.
NO CHARGES
Neither parent was charged with sexual abuse and they regained custody of their children — then ages 1 1/2, 4 and 5 — but the Demarees claim the incident inflicted lasting harm.
----
In addition, some states have laws that are much broader in scope. Ohio's rules for instance is merely "pandering obscenity involving a minor" (http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2907.321) and involves material, not images. Writers have been prosecuted for "child pornography" that was nothing more than written text under Ohio's law. (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/us/child-pornography-write...)
Realistically, I don't think a child bath picture gets anyone in "big trouble" if common sense prevailed. But there are definitely moral panic types that would probably "report" this type of picture. (EG: Take this story -- http://www.smh.com.au/national/facebook-bathtime-posting-lan..., also there's a celebrity-gossip-news type story involving a bath photo of Perez Hilton and his two year old son you can Google if you want to witness the fun reactions on this sort of thing...)
Sure, but protected speech only protects you from government censorship. For example, Reddit recently instituted a policy of disallowing anything that sexualizes children. Pedophilic writings would probably fall under that. Should they have the right to take those posts down? Or have that kind of policy?
> If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad..
That's par for the course. You can't sell ads if your site hosts writings on pedophilia. Most platforms and social networks would probably take down his content.
If this is the case, I wonder if this opens up an attack vector against a targeted account.
If the system is set up a certain way, an email with a illegal image attachment could cause a google account to be closed and purged, with notification to law enforcement.
http://www.missingkids.com/Exploitation/Industry states "Through the Hash Value Sharing Initiative, U.S. based Electronic Service Providers can partner with NCMEC to receive a list of MD5 hash values which represent the "worst of the worst" images of apparent child pornography."
as well as "Major U.S. companies have implemented PhotoDNA, and the technology is helping them identify child pornography images on their servers that may have otherwise gone undetected."
Interestingly enough, if a provider is using just the MD5 database and not PhotoDNA, and someone could get one of the MD5 hashes of an illegal image, a bad actor could use a hash collision attach to make an innocuous image have the same MD5 hash.
Also, here is an article (from 2014 so it might be out of date) about which technologies google uses to identify child abuse images: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2461400/how-google-handles-ch...
From that article... "Google itself compiles a database of images of possible abuse that have been brought to the company’s attention, sources close to the company said. Those images are then reviewed by a human employee. If confirmed to show abuse, the company assigns each image a unique digital fingerprint, which is entered into its database. "
That has to be the worst job ever.
Of course, irrespective of hash function you need to worry about weak passwords, so you'd need to use salting and an expensive stretching function, or only permit auto-generated passwords. But that's really not a weakness in the hashfunction; it's to mitigate weaknesses in the concept of a user-chosen password.
What has been broken are various scenarios where the attack controls the source file to be hashed. That means that as a digital signature it's no good anymore.
I think it's important to emphasize this because in all the news about weaknesses and attacks, people sometimes get the idea that the sky is falling, and that it's hopeless to really stay secure. That kind of thinking quickly leads in security through obscurity. In fact, the sky is most certainly not falling. Even though many attacks are successful in improving on brute force, even ancient deprecated stuff like MD5 has not been fully broken; indeed it's most critical feature remains essentially untouched (according to wikipedia, preimage attacks have managed to reduce the complexity from 2^128 to 2^123.5 or in other words: nobody cares). And even as a signature, if you had picked MD5 and used MD5 before the attack was developed, you can be reasonably confident that that signature remains valid today.
So yes: don't develop new software using MD5, and retire software relying on MD5 for signatures. And for other applications, if you can easily migrate away from MD5 (and really, sha1 too) - do so! It's easier to reason about security if you don't need to sweat details like this. But if you have an existing application that can't easily be migrated, then don't panic either, just be aware that you need to more carefully consider what it means to have a matching hash (in short it's either the same file, or a different file the original author wanted to appear similar).
MD5 is (relatively) fast, and a (relatively) small datapoint to store. You're definitely wanting to store a lot of data points too; it's so so much easier to scan and de-scope OK images.....
The MD5 catalogue's intent is to allow quick identification of suspect material to drop to manual review (little bit of inference there from what I have read about Google, but I'd be shocked if that wasn't true - false positives in this context are not as bad as true positives [of course] but accusing an innocent person of having child porn is damaging).
From the GP:
>That has to be the worst job ever.
It is. I did it for a while working for a computer forensics firm. Not even slightly pleasant. We used to go through millions of images - to be honest, 99.999999999% of it was "normal" (if often slightly wierd) porn.
You do become detached from it after a while.
To be honest; the chats/emails grooming young people were the worst.
Is account deletion an automatically applied child porn sentence with no assumption of innocence and no recourse to an actual judicial system? Seems that way.
- Calendar
- Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc.
- Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that)
- Google Keep note-taking app
- Blogspot blog
- Domain host
- Secondary phone number via Google Voice
- Two-factor authentication device
- Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music
It's really, really unsettling how entangled that singular account is with my everyday workflow.
I've begun trying to compile a list of how each of these components could be migrated to something self-controlled ala OwnCloud. Perhaps I'll make it into a website when I'm done.
I am not sure what would happen to any of the Android apps I had downloaded, however. Do we as consumers get any more legal redress if the account is attached to things we actually paid for?
When we're able to identify problems and come up with solutions that only help people with tons of experience and obviously too much time on their hands, we do others a disservice.
>how is someone supposed to keep track of it?
Very carefully. No sarcasm intended. Same as one's personal finances, for example.
>and come up with solutions... we do others a disservice.
I can't speak for Spearchucker, but I devised my particular solution for my own sake, and "doing others a service" didn't factor into that process.
Nor do I feel it necessarily should. If someone without experience asks how I navigate our messy digital world (and they have), I give them my honest answer and describe my system. Sometimes I propose a few less-effective, consumer-friendly alternatives, along with their drawbacks. Yes, my solution involves a lot of cobbled-together, semi-automated and semi-manual systems. That's because these systems change so frequently that it was the best I could do to get my own system working in the first place. It seems you are implying some obligation exists to do someone else the "service" of managing their personal digital hygiene, at some arbitrary ease of use that fits their level of expertise.
It is not because I'm some blackhearted bastard with no regard for my fellow man that I don't feel that obligation. It is because that, even if I have crafted a solution that adds resilience to the failure of services X, Y and Z, which I use, I don't know what I could/would do when the other person begins to rely on service W, where W is a service I do not use and do not understand the intricacies of.
In short, I find it strange that you frame someone having shared what works for them on a service-vs-disservice axis for the broader world. I'm happy that Spearchucker has a system for, and the discipline to, maintain his digital hygiene.
This is a technical forum so I get it, but the solution for a person well versed in technology isnt actually applicable to anyone else. Consider that youre at the leading edge of a bellcurve.
Theres no one click install, no service to give 5$/mo to, nothing. Just a big pile of stuff people are supposed to squirrel away, as though theyre even good at their own finances.
We should all be sharing what works for us. But to suggest things are trivial or easy just creates a divide between people who understand and those who do not.
That is a very interesting comparison. I wonder how long it will take before people start taking their digital footprint as seriously as they take personal finance? Before digital maturity is seen as a mark of adulthood the way finance savvy is seen today?
Your analogy is apt because they are both areas that the average person doesn't understand, but is still forced to wade their way through. I look forward to the day when there are digital security self-help books and blogs like the personal finance and investing material we have now.
If someone does not respect their own security and privacy enough to do their work themselves they can never enjoy privacy and security, as by definition if you are not setting up and maintaining the systems, you are giving up control of your privacy and security to a 3rd party, be that Google, MS, Apple, or some other "Trusted" party
(I strongly recommend people compile and switch back to the old open source version.)
Admittedly this is not perfect, but I am comfortable with the level of security it provides. I think it is also roughly comparable to users who have a 2FA app on their mobile and a password manager syncing to the same device.
Along with multiple alternative apps: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=otp&fdpage=1...
The issue here is that Google accounts are a "free service" (obviously advertiser funded), and they're not even really tied strongly to real people. A given account could be shared between people, or change owners over time.
I've always felt that, done right, this could be a revenue opportunity for Google - offer a premium account where you give them your proper identity details, and tick a few boxes about how you want your account to be managed if you lose login access (reset to someone who can show ID? destroy?). I'd gladly pay a non-trivial amount to get decent service like that in an emergency.
As it stands, you're not paying Google anything. You're not the customer, you're the thing being sold.
With no revenue from users, it's understandable that they won't entertainment appeals about their decisions.
I suspect they wouldn't want to offer a premium account though, due to the bad press of admitting the problem.
Now I only have a non-apps account for Google Scholar. Besides that I have moved everything off Google. The most painful thing was losing all paid Android apps, but since I planned on moving back to iOS again I took the loss. All the other stuff was not hard: I switched to Fastmail for e-mail, who have a nice migration tool, calendars and contacts are on iCloud (since my wife uses iCloud as well), files are on Dropbox.
If possible, I would like to switch away from Dropbox to something that is end-to-end encrypted. We used Bittorrent Sync for quite some time, but I had serious problems in the last few versions (basically, it corrupted its own metadata and re-added all shares from scratch). Syncthing is not really an option (too hard to share with family/colleagues).
I don't believe they have a free tier, so I suspect they have a sustainable revenue model - basically everyone's on their equivalent of Dropbox Pro, with no free account leeches eating up their marketing budget.
edit: minor grammar
There is something about not feeling like a product that is so satisfying.
Already had a domain, so found a neat hosting in EU, 10GB of space with ActiveSync, CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP.
>- Calendar
Email hosting has DAV, which syncs to all clients.
>- Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc.
This is the only thing the gmail account is still being used.
>- Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that)
Using Dropbox (because I can rely on it) and MEGA
>- Google Keep note-taking app
Remember the milk todo app, I enter notes in a Notes list, or even make to-dos directly
>- Blogspot blog
Jekyll blog, hosted on github, with own domain
>- Domain host
Gandi
>- Secondary phone number via Google Voice
Don't have the in the land of dragons (outside US).
>- Two-factor authentication device
Authy
>- Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music
Fuck the cloud, local music in iTunes synced by iSyncr Android app.
At first it all looked like a pain to do, but now I can't imagine going back into the Google silo. The gmail/google account now serves only as Play Store account, YouTube account (when will G+ finally die), Chrome Sync account. The location, web search and targeted ads are paused and disabled.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091003234700/http://denniscoop...
EDIT:
DC has also been untruthful in interviews about the blog's removal, claiming
"I never used pornographic imagery and most didn’t even show the escort’s genitals. "
That seems like adequate evidence for scrutiny, and it is possible that Google plays it safe in cases like these (I have no idea what their official policy is).
Since when do companies have an obligation to offer a platform for engaging in illegal activity?
An interesting issue, what if the author of the blog would be from a country where it's legal - what right should, for example, a social media platform have to limit their speech?
(Especially in an age where some social media platforms are without alternative)
They just need to open-source one Parsey McParseface and poof, the entire world thinks that Google is their cuddly big brother who would never do such a thing as ruin a man's livelihood without really giving a fuck about it.
I like Google, they do some good stuff but some practices are clearly just very shady. What happened to "Do no evil" google?
So it is a bit like when the cat trips, falls down the stairs in some undignified way, then immediately stands up keeps walking like nothing happens, looking like "Yeah I totally planned to do that, it was not an accident"
Perhaps after so much time has passed and so much stonewalling, it is just too late to admit that they made a mistake apologize and restore content. (Well and compounded by the fact that there is probably no content left to restore). It seems in their best interest to keep quiet and stonewall the issue until it goes away.
But on the other side, given that content there -- which included slightly edited explicit ads, it is probably not surprising Google did what they did. I imagine for every site with content like that, Google employees would go out of their way to see maybe the user is a known artist or writer and this is just art. That's understandable, however what is not understandable is not having a way to restore, warn before, or explain what happened afterwards and have a way to revert the action.
I imagine at this point Google is pretty much a monopoly. If it decided to charge to use GMail, or force me to listen to a 5 minute ad every, I don't know if there is an alternative that has email, docs, calendar, and others at the same level of quality.
Google never deletes anything. Ever. The "deletion" is just another data point for them. The content is certainly retained.
However you should note that if you used a managed Google account, such as educational or corporate account, your ability to truly delete anything may be curtailed by your domain's administration.
Hanlon's Razor would just dismiss that as "CDN's are hard", but it doesn't explain why the one picture owned by the author that they emailed Facebook about finally went away, but others they had the URLs for did not.
Whether it be malice or stupidity, I think the sane default belief is that "delete" doesn't actually remove the bits in most cases, and that goes double for PII brokers like Facebook and Google. Act accordingly.
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/nearly-3-years-later...
The lesson is obvious: host your most important content on your own server that you control; and make backups.
Some people will say that self-hosting isn't a practical solution. But when the alternative is the potential for devastating data loss, it seems eminently reasonable.
Now if by "self-host" you mean to host with a company that doesn't have AI bots scanning for objectionable content, I guess you could host anywhere EXCEPT the big boys. But consider that Google, etc could be providing the AI bot service to anyone and everyone (I'm sure there's a market), so I'm not sure that any form of self-host can really protect you.
So the answer is a) control your own domain, b) backups
Think iCloud for example. My Router; Airport Server / Time Capsule Server. Will have all my iOS / macOS backup, as well as Photos, video, game saves etc. All iOS update and macOS update, App update are done through this proxy / cache. I will have all my documents inside this little server. And a Backup of these files will be done in the Cloud. So in the worst possible scenario, You can cut off my Cloud backup and wipe it. I will still have all the info inside my Router / Server.
You can provide me a Blog platform on my little server, and insert ads on it all you want when it reaches your cache/proxy/CDN. But when you take down my blog, all the content i spend my time writing is still on my server. In my procession.
Sometimes with Cloud, i just get the feeling my precious data are being held as hostage.
And if our storage options are more reliable we might not need the could at all!
I will take some time and read the other links someone posted below, but the story and the lack of human response parallels many other postings around Google support.
You need your contacts, email archive, another credible email address to re-establish contact, alternate credentials for SSO sites, and it needs to be somewhere outside the political sphere that could cause this.
What does a resilient online identity look like? These companies own the primary media of your relationships, which are the things people need to survive.
Someone has to have done this already and then abandoned it because it failed to thrive.
You also need a decentralized publish/subscribe system and a useful decentralized search system, both resistant to attacks. The former has some good solutions buried in people's PhDs, the latter not so much. Then you need a lot of UX research and people working on the low-level protocol, high-level domain logic, and the UI.
It'd be a project on the scale of one of the largest open-source projects currently in existence, IMHO.
"Google hosting child porn site."
Google ends up catching a lot of heat for this (rightfully so) if only because so many people use their services. High-traffic youtube videos filled with racial slurs and abuse staying up for 2 months before the abuse department finally takes action, or important pieces of cultural history getting nuked without explanation or recourse, or people's gmail accounts getting utterly destroyed with no ability to transfer the address or take a backup. In the end nothing can be done about this stuff because in many cases, nobody actually knows what happened.
The youtube case was especially troublesome because I went to great lengths to get it dealt with, and in the end it was a result of policy issues combined with bad technology - the human oversight was prevented from doing anything about the problem, and as a result vulnerable kids were exposed to torrents of hate and the uploaders reaped the ad revenue all while stealing another person's work.