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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm sensitive as a NZer, but would you feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon etc?

Though while giving a warning is clearly inappropriate, they should certainly have explained what they did.

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Yes, I would feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon.

If it is not shared with anyone, why should a cloud provider get to decide what I can and can't store?

I want to be able to use that storage as an extension of my local hard drives/SSD's with the ease of use of accessing it between different devices. I still consider it my data.

That those bits and bytes happen to represent a document for a nuclear weapon shouldn't matter.

Now if you were to ask if I believe people should store a video of the Christchurch shooter? No, I full-heartedly believe its kind of sick that someone would want to store/archive that, but I don't want a cloud provider making that decision.

it remains their property on which you store your preciousness

We had that sort of thing in 'real property' too. Today most jurisdictions limit the supervision landlords can decide to implement over tenants (who in fact have a 'property right' in many cases over the property as well as the freeholder, and the right to 'peacefully enjoy' (without intrusion) their home) .

It seems like eventually the law will have to change so that these companies have to start treating users like tenants rather than serfs.

Because it's their ToS, their hard drives, their business. Doing it without at least a day prior notice seems to be a very big no-no, but it obviously did not matter to their bottom line. The general public does not care about these issues enough, because there are other issues in society that seem to be more important for the plurality. (Just to name one crazies shooting people.)

The video of the christchurch shooter is a primary source for a historical event, in the same way that combat footage is.

When primary sources are not available to the public then lies have the same footing as truth.

Recently I have discovered that google has nuked hundreds of North Korean videos. This upsets me as needless destruction of the historical record. I wonder how people would feel if something like google was around after world war II and censored hundreds of videos of nazi atrocities. It is wrong for a public forum like Youtube or public resource like google drive to restrict content based on subject matter with very few limited exceptions. All political and war footage should be free from restriction.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/14...

Stimme Koreas is now gone too.

It's never too late to join the digital hoarding initiative.

Well it kind of is too late when the historical videos are pulled down and you do not have another source besides Youtube. I am sure that academic and even possibly open source intelligence researchers are similarly frustrated assuming they did not all download the videos many of which had been on the platform for many years.

Nuclear weapons aren't all that complicated, it's the enrichment that is hard. It's a large scale industrial process that requires a well equiped specialized facility. We can detect these activities from space, that's how big we are talking.

You can get a rough idea of what is needed from Wikipedia. They are simpler machines than a automobile engine, at least in the sense that there are fewer parts involved.

It's kind of a tough trick to get them to detonate properly.

A analogy, you can probably find full schematics of a Tesla, or close to it, but that isn't the problem. The car factory is the problem. How do you get one of those? If you have the resources to obtain one, you also have the resources to hire engineers to design a car for you.

Yes, and you can legally and readily get all the information for all steps of the manufacture.

As far as encryptions and data go I just echo that "not your drive, not your data" remains true and that encryption is not going to stop a cloud provider from deleting your encrypted content. Feels like I've been saying this for 10 years now (I have) but I truly do not believe cloud use is the future for computing. Drives and mass storage are always getting cheaper.

> would you feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon

Those two situations aren't even remotely comparable - nuclear weapon plans are straight-up illegal for individuals to own in the US, so by removing one of those, Google would be complying with federal law.

The Christchurch shooting video was not illegal under any law that I'm aware of, so Google was not legally required to delete it, and it was a primary source for a historical event, so Google shouldn't have deleted it, especially not from users' private drives that they weren't sharing (as then you can't even claim that they were spreading extremist material).

There was a legal case in the US about this … the government accidentally declassified the blueprints for a nuclear bomb.

A magazine tried to publish the blueprints. The government argued all nuke related info is classified regardless of actual legal status.

The federal government dropped the case, fearing they would lose.

Why would you delete historical footage ? No one would even think to destroy or censor the footage from Auschwitz

During WWII, Roosevelt and Churchill new about the holocaust and actively censored it from the press.

They didn’t want political pressure to stop it.

Yes, for US citizens the right to information is almost unlimited. Even plans for (nuclear) weapons is protected unless it’s stolen classified material, you intend to develop a nuclear weapon, or you intend to export that information.

Having principles mean you support those even for the people you disagree the most with.

In this case, people could have had the video because they agreed with the shooter, to using it to show people how horrible terror really is.

Regardless, I fully support peoples right to have videos of terrible events.

I hear you, even though you are downvoted. Right here in the ~10 comments you have from Americans we can see the "double standards" that people adopt. There was no outrage (actually some "anti-outrage") when Apple, Google and AWS censored Parler, an app that allowed "freedom of expression".

People draw the line when it affects their beliefs, in that case they say it was justified for Google, Apple and AWS to censor an application that potentially can be misused. But they get outraged at the thought of removing a video of a massacre, and also they outrage at the thought of limiting their access to tools that are made for the main sole purpose of killing people.

Go figure!

If you want to compare apples and apples, no American would think to remove videos of 9/11 or the Floyd murder.

But it's not even about Americans, I'm from France and it's the same, no one would think to remove videos about the 11/13 except to keep it off Facebook so that kids would not see it.

Parler is/was a company with millions of dollars and millions of users.

It's entirely reasonable to handle that differently from someone's personal data storage.

I'm as much for my rights to hold whatever digital data as probably most other people on this thread.

But at the same time there are abominations of pure evil that should never exist, not even for "historical interest".

Somewhere in the middle there's a line.

Video of a tragedy, while deplorable, is not on the same planet as plans for a nuclear weapon. Are you also of the opinion that thing like live leak should not exist/be accessible?

You do know that liveleak shut down this year, right? We are truly entering an era of restricted speech.

It is a very slippery slope. Would you feel the same if it was a genomic sequence of a novel respiratory virus? Would you say it is a plan for a bioweapon and hence must be forbidden?

And the slope keeps slipping, what if new virology startups are gatekept by having their research materials flagged as bioweapon precursors?

Thankfully those are even more "mutually destructive" than nuclear weapons.

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