Saving of public Google+ content by the Archive Team has begun
reddit.com
reddit.com
Over the last couple years it has become increasingly clear that public personal social media history is a liability. People's histories have often been weaponized against them, and mass processing of social media has been used as a weapon against society as a whole (Cambridge Analytica, etc.).
I recently deleted my Facebook account, but didn't take the time to delete Google+ because I figured it was about to disappear anyway. But now it turns out some people are building a public archive of my content, and presumably they aren't going to give me a way to delete it. This makes me uncomfortable. I have now deleted my Google+ history; I hope they didn't get much of it.
To be clear, I think the Internet Archive is good people with noble intentions. But given what we've learned recently about social media possibly being a huge mistake... this effort worries me.
Mail them from the same email you used to upload. "This must be the same email that you used to sign up to the Internet Archive".
This appears to explain how to delete something I deliberately uploaded to archive.org. G+ archiving is done by an unknown someone else. A G+ user wanting to remove all their data, won't have uploaded to archive.org, or have an account there. Even if they did that account wouldn't be connected with the archiving that's going on.
There is information specific to the Wayback Machine (WBM) here:
https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayb...
Please note that I'm not a member of Archive.org nor the Archive Team, just someone very happy that they exist (as they assure me they are as well), and am providing information as best I can.
The mechanisms of the Archive WBM and G+ mean that for your posts you can request removal of all items on or under your 21 digit numeric ProfileID, or, if you have one, a custom G+ URL.
All post URLs will match the form "https://plus.google.com/<profileID>/posts/<postID>"
Some other content, such as images and multimedia will not, though tht's generally harder to find without post and profile links in the first place.
If you have suggestions on improving the answers or remove process, please contact the Archive directly at info@archive.org or see their forums pages. I've found them quite responsive.
Mostly I appreciate hugely what archive.org does, though like the root comment, I'm much less keen on ephemeral social networks preserved. Especially as most users will never see an announcement on a specialised reddit sub or HN, so will never know it wasn't all deleted like Google announced. Yes, I know it's not sensible to rely on no copies, but most naive users probably assume that. :)
The fact that IA's WBM is a public rather than private archive helps their case, IMO. Though I don't necessarily agree in unlimited rights to mass-record all public data, doing so transparently beats private data brokers.
Google's own messaging on this has been largely abysmal as well. Don't get me started.
Admittedly, it would be harder to enforce, but IA seems to be doing a good job complying without legal action.
Obviously I have a Takeout download with my own content, but I don't really see any need for the Internet Archive to maintain a copy of it.
Internet social media is full of some the most vile verbal diarrhea to come out of the human species, enabled by actual anonymity or beliefs in obscurity that others won’t find what they said.
It’s reached a head now with all of this radicalization leading to neofascist terrorism and what’s being asked is for all online platforms to start censoring shitposting.
I’d say this removes the primary social feedback mechanism that has existed in human culture: the fear of tit for tat repercussions in the future based on past bad behavior.
Perhaps there’s something to be said about holding people To their words. I’ve been in the internet posting since 1986, I’ve said some crazy shit during my teenage years as a dick headed devotee of Ayn Rand, but I don’t want to delete them, I don’t think it’s honest or brave.
There are legit reasons for anonymity like violence of course but this isn’t the norm. We need to find ways to promote and protect people who need anonymity while also not encouraging the worst human behavior and abuse online as it seems the alternatives are either self censorship based civility or actual censorship and I prefer The former.
It seems like ultimately this ends up with most platforms shutting down comments or curating everything which is a damn shame place to end up from the internet I started on, but maybe that was a false sample being mostly academics and geeks in the 80s and early 90s.
If you are in the US, then you should understand that Anonymous Speech was the bed rock foundation of this nation, most of the discourse around the constitution was done via anonymous pseudonyms.
The Reality is "Real Names Policies" promote extremism, it does not reduce it. Real Names Policies further create eco chambers, Group isolation, and destroy discourse.
This idea that Anonymous Speech is the cause of extremist is plainly false given that most of the violent extremists post for abhorrent beliefs under their real identities.
Most Anonymous speakers are actually centrists want to engage in debate with out fear of retribution by the extremist on both sides. To remove that, is to remove the rational voices and only allow the extremist to yell at each other
We’re going to end up with defacto censorship because most if not all platforms will be threatened into it.
Fundamentally it seems online discussion for human beings has serious bugs. Self policing used to work in the early internet but it seems the volume has overwhelmed most self policing systems.
That however does not change my statement, If we regulate away Anonymous speech we regulate away Free Speech
There is no getting around that fact, so we are going to destroy free speech while claiming we are "protecting it"
Even today, a flood of racist caricatures of Andrew Yang are Flooding from 4chan onto YouTube, instagram, and twitter from maga trolls.
The reason why censorship is coming is because the trolls have ruined a good thing. We can tolerate nazi marches and extremists as long as it is off in a small discredited corner.
But when the fascists start running bots and troll armies flooding forums, making it hard to trust anything, speech has already been censored by sheer lowering of signal to noise.
If I can drown you out with online armies, I don’t need the platforms to censor you, I just need to overwhelm you and make people feel reading the comments is useless and I will have achieved my mission.
The left might be destroying speech in academia, but on the open internet it is decidedly the alt-right and radicals that are endangering free speech.
I (like the US Supreme Court) consider all speech that
1. is not a directly call to immediate violence to a specific date, time, place, and individual(s)
2. Is not defamation
"Racist Memes" is free speech and should be protected
"incitement to violence" would have to include a True Threat, which is a specific legal standard
>>Even today, a flood of racist caricatures of Andrew Yang are Flooding from 4chan onto YouTube, instagram, and twitter from maga trolls.
Of the 3 platforms you list, I only use YouTube, and I rarely look at the comments there.
I do not believe the solution to your perceived problems with memes on these platforms is for mass censorship. The platforms should provide tools for people to block, hide and ignore content they do not personally want to see but not resort to wide scale censorship.
Even if successful in this censorship what do you believe the victory will be? Will have eliminated any racist from the world, will have changed their minds, will have ended extremist? Do you think people that resort to violence are curbed because you can longer see their posts on twitter?
We know this is not the case, infact it often makes the extremism worse when it pushed underground.
>>on the open internet it is decidedly the alt-right and radicals that are endangering free speech.
That depends on your definition of alt-right, which is heavily over used and at this point has no meaning. When Left Libertarians like myself are being labeled "alt-right" because we support free speech (real free speech) the term has lost all meaning.
Authoritarian lefts believe that anyone that do not believe lock step in with their Authoritarian and Identitarian policies are some combination of racist, troll, alt-right or nazi. It is lazy and intellectually dishonest
The cost of speech and publishing has gone to zero in many ways, and with automation, trolls are going to conduct one big denial of service attack. When the founding fathers envisioned freedom of speech and press, they envisioned individuals with soap boxes speaking to crowds, they envisioned some people printing newspapers or pamphlets, they didn't imagine every single person with a megaphone able to blare at a loud volume, and even clone themselves via automation to go blast their megaphone in every hall and park.
When there are no costs, bad actors can spam. The end result in email was the institution of very aggressive spam filters, which made it partially useful again. Public online discourse is becoming so toxic and troll ridden, that either commenting is going to be disabled, or it's going to be aggressive filtered and curated (i.e. censored)
As soon as that happens, the right wing is going to claim their viewpoints are being censored by left wing tech companies. The left wing is going to claim their viewpoints are being censored by an oligarchy in bed with the US empire, and everyone's going to whine about their particular video or missive being taken down by algorithms, because quite simpler, there's no perfect algorithm for this, and the problem is beyond human curation -- even assuming humans themselves could be unbiased curators.
So increased censorship seems inevitable, no one is going to be happy, and mostly because social manners that used to keep people in check in the physical world, have essentially amplified the ability of people to wreak havok and bear no responsibility.
Free speech was never freedom from responsibility. Someone deciding not to work with you of your public statements or behaviors or criticize you was always the check and balance.
The thing with authoritarian leftists on campus, and the alt-right, is that the people getting hyperbolic over pronouns are a minority and not an actual threat. They're also pretty public about it, and don't need to hide who they are. They're not shooting up mosques or synagogues or churches or blowing up Oklahoma federal buildings. In the 70s, the left wing actually would commit terrorism, trying to sabotage property and the establishment, but that has mostly abated.
What we're seeing over the last few years, is a rise in nationalism and ethocentrism, a 'great unraveling',and I worry about that a lot more than I worry about someone on campus demanding their trigger warning safe space.
We have nationalists now at the levers of power, one in fact, the most powerful man in the world. When we have a President who is going to punish people for using the wrong pronoun, I'll start worrying about that.
That is largely your left bias showing, where you completely discount the positions of everyone not on the left when it comes to things like Border Security, and Economic Trade imbalances, left positions that have largly be the cause of the right extremist rising in base few years because the left dismisses them and calls anyone that has a non-left position on the topic "racist" leaving people that do support limited immigration or limited economic protectionism to become more radicalized
Also the fact you call Trump a "nationalist" feeds into my belief you are a far left authoritarian, Trump is alot of things, but for the most part is a Traditional Republican, his policy positions are not that much different than the historic positions of the Republican Party, Actually he is fairly moderate sharing many of the same positions of the Bill Clinton Era Democrats (including immigration policy.
The Simply fact is the Democrat party has moved VERY VERY left... The Republicans have no shifted that much.
You completely ignore and excuse the violence of AntiFa and then go back to the 90's to pull up extreme Right Violence. These are attempts to construct a Strawman to support your narrative that the Right is more violent and a bigger threat than the left therefore the upcoming censorship of the right is some how justified
Nixon proposed national healthcare and created the EPA. Ronald Reagan raised taxes multiple times, gave amnesty to illegal immigrants, and signed the Montreal Protocol to salvage the Ozone layer, he even came to support Gun Control. George Bush Sr signed the ADA, strengthened the EPA, Clean Air Act, signed the Global Climate Change Research Act, etc. George W Bush created Medicare Part D. These Republicans would be considered RINOs in todays party.
Trump isn't a Republican. He supported national healthcare. He came out for gun control. He was anti-Abortion. He supported a wealth tax. One could say, if anything, he was an opportunist, and has no discernable consistent ideological core other than nationalism and racism. He lacks neither the economic conservative libertarian values, nor the social conservative religious values.
You can see this by going back to his politicking in the 80s, where he was constantly harping on the Japanese back then, and where he was involving himself in cases like the Central Park 5.
If you want to gauge if the Democrats are "far left" you need to survey the American people, and when you do so, on issues like Gun Control, Health Care, Education, Benefits, you find they line up with the majority of Americans. By large margins, ranging from 60-80%, the public supports common democratic positions. So if they're far far left, of whom?
No one supports infinite immigration, other than some old school extremist libertarians, that's a strawman used to attack Democrats. Most people acknowledge there is some limit or capacity to absorb people, since there's a limit to how fast housing, schools, and other infrastructure is even built.
But illegal immigration has been declining for decades, and was at a record low in 2016 compared to its heyday in the 80s, 90s. It was a "problem" that was on its way to self-correction. The fact that it has been made a front and center issue for the last 2 years is entirely a racist xenophobic phenomena, no different than the people who were scaremongered over Sharia law in the US.
Given it was a declining problem, not a crisis, one has to suspect other factors driving the interest. This is not a 'left' position, it's a logical one -- why are so many people so upset over something that had already declined by 3x and during supposedly a red hot economy with low unemployment? Why are the Trump supporters still angry at the immigrants in a supposed "time of plenty"?
I really really don't want to get into a debate about this, but it is patently obvious that reactionary politics are using the immigration issue as a way to distract from all of the other problems we are facing: widening income inequality, a healthcare affordability crisis, an education affordability crisis, environmental crisis, etc because to address those issues would require the government actually taxing and regulating the winners in the economy, and their stooges in Congress needed to come up with a way to divert people's attention.
>If you want to gauge if the Democrats are "far left" you need to survey the American people, and when you do so, on issues like Gun Control, Health Care, Education, Benefits, you find they line up with the majority of Americans. By large margins, ranging from 60-80%, the public supports common democratic positions. So if they're far far left, of whom?
No they really don't, not when you get into the actual issues with actual facts, not bumper sticker rhetoric like "Do you support Reasonable Gun Control" without specifying what they gun control is or "Do you support an assault weapons ban" without saying what an assault weapon is.
On Gun Control most people support the level of Gun Control when having today once they are educated on the actual laws we have, and generally reject the massively expanded democrat policies once they are explained in full to them
Democrat's are good at marketing and pulling the wool over people's eyes
>No one supports infinite immigration, other than some old school extremist libertarians, that's a strawman used to attack Democrats.
Better tell that to the leading democrats as they call for open borders. AOC for example is huge open borders advocate
>widening income inequality, a healthcare affordability crisis, an education affordability crisis, environmental crisis, etc because to address those issues would require the government actually taxing and regulating the winners in the economy, and their stooges in Congress needed to come up with a way to divert people's attention.
That is funny given that all of those problems were caused by government in the first place.
Government creates problems it never solves them
It has become pretty clear that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is not the whole story even if (arguably) some lower signal/noise venues would get fewer random offensive comments even if only because any level of identity verification will get in the way of casual drive-by shitposting.
But I don't really disagree with your basic point. There are nuanced topics I simply won't wade into online--which is probably fine as I probably don't have anything particular to add--as I may enrage someone who will make an issue of it within social/professional circles relevant to me.
Most Anonymous speakers are actually centrists want to engage in debate with out fear of retribution by the extremist on both sides.
Not only would require significant evidence, but would need to specifically address the current issue of automated political speech online in order to be taken seriously.
I have yet to see significant evidence proving there is an issue with automated political speech online
I see left activists claim that anyone that disagrees with the authoritarian left to be either "alt-right" or "bot accounts" but little by way of actual evidence
Sure Twitter and other Tech companies like to talk about how they "banned thousands of bot accounts" but they offer not proof on how they came to that conclusion and given the bias of the companies I am not sure they are not just banning libertarian and conservative moderates under the guise of "abolishing bots"
The mechanisms by which they've fought spam and fraud have been documented and there are numerous academic studies on the bot networks, actively tracing Twitter bot accounts back to their country of origin, and tracing by traffic analysis all of the reposts and reshares. You can find lots of papers written on publicly available data on pre-print services, like https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291.pdf
It wouldn't take you more than a few minutes to Google for this and read some of the papers instead of speculating in ignorance. The idea that they're somehow detecting libertarian messages and banning them is paranoid conspiracy theory nonsense.
While I do not dispute there are bots out in the world, bots are a convenient excuse for censorship allowing them to also suppress opinions they dislike under the guise of suppressing "bots and spam"
Your assertation that "Google has been fighting spam" as proof is an ironic example of that because Google fights hard to prevent what they call "bad advertisements" which more or less equates to any ads not shown through one of googles many ads networks.
Google Spam == Good
non-google spam == BAD.
Liberal Opinions == Good
non-liberal Opinions == Bots
That being said, while I generally post publicly, with some mind what I say is public, over the span of many years, the tidbits you leave online reveal much more about you than perhaps you intended when you said them. Aggregate data is concerning to me, more than someone having a clip of me gushing over being a Glass Explorer.
While I share some of your concerns on quality of discourse, I actually think anonymity can help with discourse in some ways. For instance, posting without a real name, gender, or race, entirely removes attacks or judgments based on your physical traits, and tends to lead people to converse on actual merit or argument alone.
Point is, if you publish something at a publicly accessible URL, anyone, any organization, any individual, can crawl it, archive it, transform it, make it findable, make it accessible. That is the whole value proposition of the internet and it's the whole value proposition of public publishing. It's why hopefully, future archaeologists and anthropologists can read what kind of people we were the same way we dig up dead cultures and read their published works, their letters, and their creations.
There's a danger in the empherality and bit-rot of our current digital culture in that it can be erased from history.
I have pointed you at my pre-Google blogs before, so you know my position on this has nothing to do with my employer. I am for distributed, decentralized publishing, and permissionless reuse, and I'm a copyright minimalist.
Before G+, there was USENET, there was LISTSERV, there were BBSes, as an enormous treasure trove of conversations going back decades on the internet and online world. Being able to archive and find those conversations is of enormous historical importance.
Aggregation is already a fact of life, and there are numerous websites already that you can use to look up your criminal history, job history, social media history, financial history, household history, and education history combined in a centralized report, all in ways that are far scarier and less accountable than big tech.
I don't necessarily like it either, but it is a natural consequence of network bandwidth and computation becoming cheaper -- it's democratizing surveillance. It's like getting angry about cameras everywhere. When the cost of cameras falls to near zero, and the cost of bandwidth (5g) is cheap and plentiful, there's going to be a natural gradient, decentralized, of wide spread surveillance and live video sharing AND processing.
I might suggest widening your view a little bit beyond Google towards the fundamental economic changes taking place that will make it very hard to avoid surveillance, even if you don't use any big tech company products.
And there's a point in that what I may have felt was acceptable at the time may not be in years to come. And my online presence is significant enough I can't personally remember everything I've ever said, much less the context in which I said it. But I'm still responsible for it if someone digs it up. I can't make a guarantee it is purged from the Internet, but I should probably try to keep it somewhat in check.
There's definitely a tension between preserving the historical content of the web for future generations given that companies and the content they host come and go and letting rot occur naturally. Some of that rot is (almost) unquestionably bad to the degree it's an important part of the historical record.
But many people also have an understandable desire to not have every public utterance they've made on the Internet tied to them for all time. And anonymity is rarely guaranteed.
Personally, I'm happy that pretty much everything about me that's on the Web per-adulthood filtered through an editor first.
BTW, Archive Team is not the same as Internet Archive but they can mostly be treated as equivalent for this purpose.
What counts as legitimate?
There's a lot of historical hypocrisy or inaccuracy from public figures and even news organizations.
If you can't remember who said what, and when, I fear an Animal Farm future, where "no one could any longer remember" things, and historical perspective is lost in the internet fad of the moment.
https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims...
> We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.
In the past years, IA has said that it would ignore robots.txt directives when it came to government and military domains:
https://blog.archive.org/2016/12/17/robots-txt-gov-mil-websi...
> The Internet Archive is collecting webpages from over 6,000 government domains, over 200,000 hosts, and feeds from around 10,000 official federal social media accounts. Some have asked if we ignore URL exclusions expressed in robots.txt files. The answer is a bit complicated. Historically, sometimes yes and sometimes no; but going forward the answer is “even less so.”
If you don't want this to happen, you can request removal of specific items through the Internet Archive's procedure: https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360018138951-How-...
They're removing, presumably just your data (you can't just ask them to delete it all I'm guessing) at your request.
> To have your item pages removed, please email info@archive.org from the email address used to upload the files.
What does "...from the email address used to upload the files" mean?
If my posts in Google+ are "archived", >>I<< do not have an email address which was used to upload the Google+ contents... . What am I misunderstanding/overlooking ? Thx
There is also a DMCA request process, which I've posted to this thread.
nit: G+ is only seven years old
(Disclosure: I work at Google, though not on Plus)
Hopefully you now better understand security and will not compromise information you wish to remain private in the future. But what's done is done. You can't revoke it once it's out there in plain text.
Cat is out of the bag, not archiving it isn't going to help. It could in some cases help define what really was on someone's public facing profile on X date.
"often" is hyperbole. Most people's social media histories are never weaponized against them in any sense whatsoever.
Interestingly, that notion is one of the two uses of the word "invisible" in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. It's the very abitrarieness and randomness of consequences which is the primary mechanism of effectiveness:
Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms. But the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle. In an ancient battle there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him. In these circumstances, and among troops who had some confidence in their own skill and dexterity in the use of their arms, it must have been a good deal less difficult to preserve some degree regularity and order, not only in the beginning, but through the whole progress of an ancient battle, and till one of the two armies was fairly defeated. But the habits of regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command can be acquired only by troops which are exercised in great bodies.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...
(Actually, "invisible" is used twice in that passage, vs. once in the better-known, and grossly misrepresented, passage.)
Waybackmachine for corporate sites, NGOs, public information - I get.
But G+ is essentially a social network. I don't think people really would chose to have that information arbitrarily saved.
I don't want to have to tell some stranger on the other side of the planet to 'stop saving stuff about me'.
I think the parent comment is apt, and I don't think we need to be saving the information on social networks unless there's something specifically (not casually) public about it.
It's a 'social network'.
Fully.
But that people shouldn't be taking advantage of people's naivte, especially for some kind of ostensible 'public good' like 'internet history archive'.
Zero surprises if Visa, FB, the NSA and 'some insurance company' were doing this, for their own selfish reasons, being able to claim 'hey, it's public, so it's legal' type thing ... but I'm not sure that the local librarian should be doing this.
I think sometimes good intentions mean some different things to different people. We HN-er types tend to live a little outside of 'normal' as I'm often reminded every time I visit my parents/siblings homes and am reminded of how normal folks live.
No they are not that at all - they are not good nor noble. They are dispassionate observers and recorders.
That is the intent (I think)
https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/R58WgWwN...
Archived copy: http://archive.is/4kpvd
Also infrastructure-like breakage, through APIs, and particularly images:
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/07/less-than-a-mon...
Public posts by notable people like this are a really good thing to archive.
-- Quinn Norton
https://medium.com/message/hello-future-pastebin-readers-39d...
With most online services, some entity X (Google in this case) says 'I will host this data.' Eventually it stops being worth it for X to host that data, and the data is lost forever (unless someone archives it like this case, which just changes the X to some other entity).
With distributed content sharing networks, the data is retained as long as anyone is willing to bear the cost of storing and distributing it. After I upload a file I may eventually decide that it is no longer worth sharing, but as long as someone thinks it is a useful file to share they can have it seeding from their computer. The file is only permanently gone once nobody thinks it's worth sharing. And with a large population on these networks, that is equivalent to the file having no actual value - except for historical research perhaps.
This is actually better than what the parent (mavhc) suggested, because with the donation method there is still one entity in charge of sharing the data. Others can archive and share it (if allowed by the primary entity), but there is still a discoverability problem that is solved by IPFS/BT.
If ipfs suffers the same problem - noone knows which hash to look up - the files will be irrevocably lost.
This it was it says about the rights you give Google by/if you are using their services:
"The rights you grant [to Google] in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."
The only rubric archival could possibly fall under would be "promotion", but that feels marginal at best.
Seems like whatever legal theory the Internet Archive is using must apply to everyone, including Google, unless Google waived whatever that is.
But unless there is a lot of public support it could easily backfire, as when everyone realize how the "promotion" clause can be interpreted, the TOS suddenly look quite a bit more onerous.
I'm leaning to the latter.
#A&EruListening?
https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725
Discussion as methods and questions emerged, often involving the pioneers of the field. LeCun, Bengio, Krizshevsky, Goodfellow, etc. Ranging from the days when people were starting to realize you could implement theses thing for a GPU instead of just CPU, to days when it's arguably rehabiliteted "A.I." as credible in the popular imagination and spawned a multi-billion dollar industry.
Admittedly it's the only thing I'm aware of on G+ which I'm anxious to see archived, but that's probably mostly for lack of looking. These are interesting times. It would be a shame if the records of them are lost just because we put them on a medium which will self-destruct in absence of active maintenance and then failed to put in the maintenance.