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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

It'd be interesting what a technology bill of rights looks like, but one form I could easily support would be saying any account that acts as an identity provider (i.e. oauth) requires a judge ruling to be deleted. It'd require additional identification measures to prevent spam upon creation, but the tradeoffs might be worth it. One of the larger impacts of having your gmail deleted is how many other services likely rely on it - it doesnt just remove Google services, it often nukes an entire digital identity requiring months to fix.

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Also a key right must be that when an account is deleted, you have 60 days to download all your data.

It'd their platform and a free service, so maybe it is fine to deactivate you and remove your content from the world.

But to simultaneously remove your access so you lose everything is just a demonstration that they have zero care about your work or compassion that their customers are human beings. In other words, they are straight-up psychopaths

If you care about anything, do NOT use these services for that. Great for junk accounts, but otherwise...

Maybe a little trickier than that. Should they continue to give a user 60 days of access to child porn they might have uploaded? That might constitute distribution of child porn.

If we permit immediate removal, what are the reasonable boundaries? Legal/illegal is a court decision but you can't run all such decisions through the courts. So now we're back to Google just deciding what they will remove and it's on you to back things up. Sucks but that's probably reality we'll have to live with.

Or just copy-righted or copy-right disputed content. Share the access to download option and you will soon find groups repeatedly exploiting this. Pirated content being accessible for 60 days for free is already pretty good.

Good points, and all easily manageable via a few adjustments to the rule.

If it's cporn or other felony content, then fine, shut it all off.

For anything else, allow download only from the last three IP addresses the owner personally logged in from, plus two (if they've moved or are nomadic), plus maybe the same two or three last logged-in-from MAC addresses. Limit to three successful copies downloaded, then shut off.

Alternatively, if you still think that zero future sharing through their site must be the rule, then at least provide the content on a media copy at a nominal fee such as [cost of media]+ [50% service charge] + postage.

Finding fault is the easiest thing in the world. But if you apply your brain to finding a solution instead of merely a problem, things work better.

The reason felony content is a problem is due to liability issues, but it doesn't only apply to that. The lines aren't always clear, so they would probably err on the side of being overly aggressive to be safe. Can you relax that paranoia legislatively somehow?

Yes, tho it seems that as soon as they are not publishing it, i.e., only holding it for private storage by the single posting party, the only problem is with strict liability content like cpron, which mere possession is a crime?

Additionally, the hosts like Google/YouTube, etc. can say that they have found that the material has potential legal issues, and they will hold it for release when the courts sort it out.

Again, the key here is to have some kind of recourse. Anything less is psycopathic - they make a fair exchange by providing a "free" service in exchange for the users' attention, and then when someone puts in 2/3 of a decade of attention and content-building, to simply cut it off with no recourse is just massive theft or vandalism, at best.

And, if they are not going to provide that, they need to provide at least constant prompts that Damocles' sword is hanging over their heads and they need to make local backups.

Yep, effectively Gmail is your internet driver license.

TIL comments can be downvoted enough to be grey but upvoted enough to float to the top of the subthread.

https://i.imgur.com/tqlQeTW.png

I would say Gmail is your auto pilot. If you have an internet driver license, you know how to operate your own mailserver ;-)

Note: Yes it ain't easy and it ain't fun, just like driving a car during rush hour.

I'd say shadow bans would work better. We did this at a company I worked for (back in the day) When a user posted things we didn't like, we stopped showing it. The only person who could read the post was the poster.

This works in the content creation sphere.

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