At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry.
Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can address?
FDA, youtube edition: alphabet is the only company approved to host videos for public consumption, because they're the only one that has an approved copyright/hate speech filter (regulated for safety, efficacy, ADA compliance, and to be non-discriminatory). All other sites are prohibited from operating unless they spend $5B to get their systems approved.
It goes like this: Large consulting companies are structurally incompetent and keep running to the ground financial and government IT projects. After starting to see their lunch taken by small specialized and competent small operations, a underground operation starts to require the regulator to force companies working in the space to get certified as "Financial Services Provider". Regulations will make sure the number of required certified professionals, minimum capital etc...Are of a nature to drive out the competent small boutiques.
Projects are of course still done, by forcing the small companies to subcontract on a 2nd and 3nd level via the now certified ( but still incompetent) large consulting companies.
We were told explicitly that this was because council needed someone big enough to sue. To this day it makes no sense to me. But that’s how it was.
Whether the reason was made to justify the existence of some parasites doesn't change the fact that it's a real reason. A company that's been in business for over a century isn't going to go out in a year, and worst case someone will have the knowledge and certs to keep the ship running.
I have personally seen one of the big consultants change entire project methodologies twice - at the customer’s expense - within 6 months, in the same project.
This is leaning more into the big business revolving door problem - but in any case, I don’t think it’s widely accepted that the big consultants reduce project risks in any meaningful way.
And quite frankly, if your strategy is to sue a company if things go pear shaped, why in gods name would you choose IBM as your partner?
Lawsuits by government agencies against suppliers are rare, and likely to result in a loss if attempted against large corporations. Companies like Microsoft or Oracle have armies of the best lawyers on retainer. Government agencies can only afford the ones that have sensible shoes and patches on their jacket elbows.
A recent case in point: The NSW Transport department had a legal spat with a huge contracting company Acciona, and ended up losing the court case to the tune of over half a billion dollars!
That specific case made me laugh out loud because the company I worked for had signed a very similar contract with the same department. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some sort of joke that nobody in their right mind would sign (on the government side). It included none of the "hard but essential" bits, and all of the easy fluffy bits. They signed it. They argued with us over non-delivery. We pointed at the contract and made them pay us 5x more than the original amount to do the actual, hard work.
The real reason that government agencies like big contractors is because they are reassuringly expensive. They're the "big name" that looks good in reports. They're chosen by people with unlimited funding, no profit motive, and the power to choose a vendor with the sole motivation of covering their ass. That's it. No need to be "efficient", or "fit for purpose", or any such thing.
These decisions are all made by a small number of people acting in individual self-interest. Optimising for their own continued employment. They're trading your taxes so that in the event of a failure they can point at the name on the report memo and say: "See! Not even Big Name Vendor could implement this! It's not my fault!"
I once got "fired" from a consulting gigs where things went wrong and I took it very hard. A salesman explained that our purpose is to be easily fire-able so that the manager at the customer can keep his job. That's why he paid us triple rates compared to a direct contractor. I was back on that site 12 months later, once everybody forgot who I was.
TL;DR: Organisations that mis-allocate punishment and reward force their internal middle-managers to protect themselves at the expense of the organisation. Big consulting firms exist to milk these inefficient organisations, and this has nothing to do with lawsuits.
Acquainted with a few pretty terminations for cause, some of which put resellers out of business.
Of course lawsuits against suppliers are rare, because conflicts between suppliers and clients are resolved through contract law. When I was managing customers' servers we had specific SLAs and service metrics that if not attended to resulted in the supplier reimbursing the customer by a _nice_ amount. A Sev1 incident on mainframes that was attended to later than expected could cost tens of thousands to the supplier.
You point to government agencies, but you forget that the consumers of these services are also large Fortune500 companies with very explicit profit motives, cost-saving policies, and relatively effective IT departments. Large companies are as leery as governments of small suppliers for the same reasons. Is the argument valid considering that there are very competent organizations that hold the same reservations?
Lehman Brothers was around for 158 years and it imploded in much less than a year.
https://about.fb.com/regulations/
Which then links to this page:
https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/four-ideas-regulate-intern...
Basically, what I gathered is that they want to create a high barrier to entry for their potential competitors, as one would expect. There is nothing useful to people in those regulations.
The bill of rights in the Constitution doesn't prohibit people from opening businesses - I don't see why an online bill of rights would do so
He’d spent years adding photos and reviews and his photo views were in the millions, then Google flagged him as doing something that violated their terms.
Within a week his whole account had been taken down and there’s no way to speak to a human about what happened.
Never even received confirmation of which post was in violation and what the issue was.
How did we get to a situation where the people that spend the most time using the platforms end up losing the most and having no way of getting support.
But of course this would require the creators of the automated systems for detecting violating content to have a healthy measure of self-doubt regarding the perfection of what they build, which is the kind of thing Google's hiring process seems likely to weed out from what I've read.
Thus my conclusion Google is unlikely to ever build an automated system that will take as a central precept that automation is imperfect.
The flip side of this, is where YouTube/Google is finding excuses to conduct "purges" of data and older accounts. They know what they're doing is wrong, but it has plausible deniability to it.
So easy to pull, "Don't blame us, blame the algorithm." As if it isn't people programming and supervising it, and there isn't loads of user complaints as to what's going on.
They’d go out and photograph places that had poor photos on maps to improve them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Worth giving a go at least...
My anecdotal experience (just poking around) is that Google never deletes publicly-facing data, because it's cheaper to just keep it. So there may be a reasonable chance the photos are tucked away somewhere, along with the metadata pointing them to the account in question.
Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately.
No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an argument in favor of why they should.
Use services of companies you can trust, and or host your own content. If the content is important, pay for its hosting, because that's the rational thing to do, buy the service level to match the value of your content. That's the correct solution to this problem. You can't trust YouTube in that sort of use case and we don't need a giant new federal agency to make YouTube host videos long-term against their will, it's absurd. Hosting those videos on Hetzner or DigitalOcean or similar would be inexpensive for a small business (or use a paid video hosting service, I'm sure there are several of those around).
The content owner likely wanted to use YouTube because it's free. That turned out as one might expect.
Then, one day someone at the gallery decides that the art contains something that doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s a peach, in the background, that looks like a butt.
So, to resolve the problem, they burn all of your art to the ground.
The fault is not with gallery destroying copy, but with destruction of the original.
The real & lasting solution is to not try and build a business on something that unreliable. It is up there with storing emergency supplies for a flood in the low point of a floodplane. Any level of thoughtful contingency planning will reveal that storing all your videos on a YouTube channel with no personal backups is going to be a disaster if anything goes wrong, ever. As has been revealed, this woman had no control over her (very valuable) data. Y'know, whoopse. Lots of sympathy but this is a potential ending to giving all your data to Google.
Of course there is room for interpretation here what is included in "personal data". Nevertheless, I would recommend to any EU citizen who finds her/himself in a similar situation as the OP to inform the data protection authority with jurisdiction over her/his place of residence.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I know It is easy to say to own your own things / Video. In reality a reliable storage system is not easy nor cheap. A BTRFS / ZFS system that is Turn Key solution with drive redundancy and error correction by default. And that is ignoring other things like security.
My dream solution would be something like an Apple TimeCapsule that also works for iOS. And may be a bundled subscription that give you offsite backup and snapshots.
It's not a highly redundant enterprise solution, but it's decent for home and small business users, especially since the alternative is usually 'nothing'.
Only Qnap offers ZFS and Synology offer BTRFS. And none of these file system are default option. ( I dont think they do scheduled scrubbing by default either ) They are also only available on mid range model. Qnap had third or forth security issues with Bitcoin ransomeware. Synology requires lot of work to turn off All internet facing features. To the point they dont want you to do it because all Internet facing features are their product differentiation. I think most user want more like a DAS ( Direct Attached Storage ), or NAS that is only accessible via Intranet.
Once you have that setup, a DS220+ with two 4TB NAS Drive and a usable 4TB storage cost $500. ( Or $400 if you use non NAS / Long Warranty Drive )
I am not sure if $500 / $400 for 4TB is cheap or affordable to average consumers.
Unfortunately there aren't much R&D into optical disc technology. Would have been nice if we get 1TB per disc.
That said as said in the other comment M-DISC is really the way to go. Burn a couple of these, store them separately. They're rated for 1,000 years of storage if stored even somewhat properly. You can get them in 100GB sizes, so perfect for this kind of job. Burners aren't crazy expensive, 100GB discs were around $10/disc last time I bought.
[1] https://kobol.io
A stack of DVD's in a book shelf.
It’s a little late now. But the answer was for her to backup her videos on $60 USB hard drive and pay a service like Backblaze.
Comparing an agency that is there to make sure people don’t die from bad food and drugs to wanting a government agency to regulate third party content storage that can easily be backed up is nonsensical.