Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU
thebriefing.ie
thebriefing.ie
For instance:
SELECT country FROM `bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads.geo_spend` FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 6 DAY) GROUP BY country;
BigQuery supports a sort of "time travel" / point-in-time querying. By default and for those datasets it's enabled for 7 days which means you can query data as it was up-to 7 days ago.
1. Create a GCS bucket
2. Open https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?ws=!1m4!1m3!3m2!1s...
3. For each table under google_political_ads, run the following query: SELECT * FROM `bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads.<TABLE>` FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 6 DAY) GROUP BY country;
3. Export as CSV in GCS
Another procedure that is probably better but requires BigTable is:
1. Open https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?ws=!1m4!1m3!3m2!1s...
2. For each table, click Snapshot and set Snapshot time to Sep 23 (Sep 24 works as well)
However, this is still a noteworthy story because they aren't complaining about their own data being deleted. It's all data history for political ads, and it's whole point of existing was for transparency (it's even in the URL of the Google site). This is a reversal of an almost 10 year old policy
If we want to preserve something, then it's up to us, to ensure that it's preserved.
If we pay someone else (like you) to do it, then we expect them to preserve it, but not if we aren't paying for it.
That said, preserving stuff; even electronic stuff, is a challenge.
Agree. They're a company with (I assume) a PR department that continues to allow the company to make some really bad choices that continue to erode their reputation.
Right or wrong (evidently wrong), the common assumption has historically been that the Internet giants like Google assumed the mantle of facilitating, and to a lesser degree, preserving, the digital commons. Having your own backups and general data practices is still going to be the best strategy, but I don't think it's fair or good faith to act like everyone who got bit by this and similar instances is just an idiot.
What does this mean?
Sure the tone would be different, but anyone who was totally shocked by Google pulling a service is definitely an idiot. How much worse could Google's reputation be at this point. It's Google. They pull stuff.
That it happened on any particular day? Yeah, that is surprising. What are the odds. Could have been any day of any year.
That it happened? Not a surprise. If it matters to you, you should have done something.
I agree, but by the same notion jumping to the conclusion that this was a bad faith move from Google is overlooking the fact that the ad transparency site is still up and working for other countries.
This only impacts EU countries, even though most of the comments have assumed the entire ad archive is gone (meaning they didn’t even skim the article). A true good faith curiousity perspective would be to wonder why it’s the EU specifically.
A role Google was happy to fill for so long. We shouldn't forget that, and we shouldn't let them simply throw away the responsibilities they endeavoured to undertake, just because it's no longer beneficial for them.
I imagine many of these old ads do not comply with the new rules so Google removed everything just to eliminate the risk of a fine or enforcement action.
If these are important, people shouldn't rely on the ad agency archiving them.
They didn’t delete the entire archive. Only something specific to the EU, potentially due to some upcoming regulations there.
No wonder we are getting left behind. We literally pay thousands of people out of our taxpayer money, to make life difficult for anyone that wants to do business. That’s all those bureaucrats in Brussels literally do: come up with yet more rules.
The neo liberal dream of completely unconstrained markets leads to only monopolies and no competition.
The EU does not regulate keeping historical records though. Google deleting them is almost suspicious because we can't imagine a good reason they'd go out of their way to have someone spend time on deleting information.
You're right about expectations from an Ad company though. Imagine people using their browser or phones thinking "privacy".
My experience dealing with GDPR and other EU regulations across several companies is that the laws are very vague in their wording. We encountered a lot of scenarios where the law was just vague enough that our lawyers advised us to avoid anything that could be interpreted as infringing. The penalties assigned in some of these laws are indicated as a percentage of global profits, so we would play it safe to avoid any possibility of some EU politician trying to score political points by getting headlines about a big fine they extracted from a tech company.
I don’t know about their political advertising laws specifically, but I would not be the least bit surprised if they deleted these ads to be 100% safe in dodging potential fines under vague laws.
> because we can't imagine a good reason they'd go out of their way to have someone spend time on deleting information.
Note that they didn’t remove the archive for non-EU countries. They only did this in the EU. By this logic, they spent extra effort exclusively doing this for the EU while keeping it for other countries. That suggests to me that some EU specific reason is in play.
> That suggests to me that some EU specific reason
That was my point as well - Google is being shady for no apparent reason. I guess we’ll never know, or they’ll release some clickbaity statement like Apple’s recent “commentary” on the DMA. Baddies gonna do bad things.
> Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
At the very least, google has some responsibility in helping out web archivists...
First thing you should do if you find useful data is to archive it somehow.
They were introduced to allow for scrutiny of campaigns, and also to provide a historical record so we could go back and look at what had been promised, and what had been spent, and to see if this lined up with what happened later.
This erasure of our political past feels dangerous, for scrutiny, for accountability, for shared memory, for enforcement of our rules - for our democracy."
It's a rather reasonable demand that they should keep a record of the political campaigns and psyops they make their dough from, at least if nuking Alphabet from orbit is not an option.
The groups that have the power to demand they do this are the same ones involved in the chaos and have no onus to ensure that google keeps this data around, and as much as the US flip flops in political power it can go from they must keep this data one year to they must get rid of it the next.
No, the only reasonable demand in a world that has already embraced insanity is that you keep the data and share it with others. Why not get together with others of the same mindset and form voluntary entities that keep this data safe.
Trusting the government to keep the audit data on itself won't always work, and the 4th estate of the large media has been bought off by large companies that are much more apt to work in the governments interests to make as much profit as possible at the cost of democracy.
Is this your view on corporations having to keep and make public their accounting records as well? If not, what's the difference?
Clearly that has changed, but you’ll have to forgive folks for treating the internet as it has been in the ~20 years previous to the current chaos.
Like, maybe it's just me, but if you as a corporate entity are going to subsume all your competition under the weight of your size and ability to lose money on tons of things so you can make even more on the other, I think it's a pretty fair ask in turn for them to not... I dunno, arbitrarily delete a shit ton of useful data for no reason?
Speculation is that some EU regulation might overlap with the site: Maybe it’s technically against some law to share that customer information or perhaps the upcoming laws about political advertising don’t have a carve-out for historical ads, so any such archive might be infringing.
If they were out to eliminate all transparency they’d just shut the site down, but they didn’t.
It'd be one thing if it was 20 petabytes of cat videos, but this is content that Google was literally paid to serve to people.
The whole discussion is cosmically ironic.
Stadium ads are not free either. But (ditto).
And 'broad'cast advertising is a different beast from hyper-targeted advertising that nobody but the intended recipient sees. In the latter case, political advertising archives offer insight into otherwise hidden advertising.
My goodness, I wonder how long it took them to think this statement up? I imagine they revised it again and again asking the editor "does this sound scary enough?" to the point it bears little resemblance to reality.
Google didn't delete your political history, it deleted it's own. You lost something that was given for free, thus could be taken away at any time.
Apparently it was so important that it would be "dangerous" if it went away but the author couldn't put in a minimal amount of effort to make a copy of it.
> Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below):
Is there some sort of EU data retention law at play here?
>but to do it themselves would require mandating Google to share the data with them to begin with
The data was already public
Could you link specifically to the datasets about political advertising reach available via that website? I get no results
> The data was already public
Where?
You asked "how could the government do this"? Come on, bro.
>Where?
The linked article explains where they were getting the data before.
And you gave a generic link showing that they could share "data" in general. Not this kind of data.
Like "come on bro" both Ireland and the EU already have generic data portals...
> The linked article explains where they were getting the data before.
Yes, from the company who choose to share the data. There's no way to get the date from inside the company. In order for the government to publish the data they need to rely on the very same private company to supply them with it indefinitely, don't they? Again, "come on bro"...
Google made huge profits on political ads and when it no longer suits them to spend paltry disk space on them, it's dropping them like a hot rock.
Stop pretending like Google was somehow offering a platform that people were freeloading on. Rather, these political ads were 100% the funding that sustains the platform and makes them and all their shareholders money.
If they find important to keep those ads get funding for their project and store it themselves. Ideally without further burdening taxpayers.
I'm grateful for the piece regardless if only to inform me that the service exists (and, well — now doesn't for some countries).
I want to be able to at least browse headlines and titles about Jeffrey Epstein after 20 years, when they start erasing all history about him.
Links:
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - Year 2025
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024 - Year 2024
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - Year 2023
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2022 - Year 2022
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2021 - Year 2021
And history isn’t “erased”. It still happened. It’s up to you to remember it.