Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Very much a slippery slope.

Their cloud doesn't mean its their content. If said content is public, I mostly agree, but not if its private.

When I hire a storage box and put stuff in it, I don't own the storage box. Yet still it cannot be searched by anyone, not the company nor the authorities, unless there is a credible criminal suspicion.

View on HN

The storage owner can have a terms of service - i.e. you can't store flammable material/liquids. They also probably reserve the right to enter your unit to perform repairs.

Right, and to keep this analogy consistent, do storage owners routinely open all storage units, then open up all your boxes and search through them to check for flammables?

No, but that's primarily due to a lack of interest/manpower. They (probably) reserve the right to ensure that you aren't doing things that are against their TOS. There's (probably) no right to privacy.

They don't give out free storage. If you aren't paying with money you're paying with something else and you have no expectation of privacy when you agree to terms that say as such.

I guess the question is, if someone emails you an archive of jpg files to share on your public website, will you? Without looking at them?

I think that would be crazy. When they end up being CSAM or whatever, you're the one that will go to prison for possessing them, not the person that sent them to you.

So, after Google/YouTube have been aided in growth by the safe harbor clause, they now think that site owner responsibility is not such a bad thing after all?

Sounds more to me that they are pulling up the ladder to impede competitors.

I belive this is a really good take on the matter, and somehow you are the first person I see bringing it up.

The EFF has raised this issue repeatedly (that stringent requirements on content filtering will be an advantage to the large players who can afford to do it).

It's very likely you only start getting 'requests' from 3-letter agencies asking you to scan content once you reach some large mass of hosted content, especially since the technology for even doing so is locked up, with NCMEC and Microsoft being the arbitrators for who gets to use it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/PhotoDNA/CloudService

That's why I made the distinction between public hosting and a private album.

For public files, I fully agree with you. For private ones, not at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com