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Comment by fuzz_junket | Hacker News Reader

Archivist here. Google is not an archive. Neither is Tumblr or Flickr or any other platform that might delete your content at any time. They're companies and it's their job to make money. This is why my profession exists. We don't make money, which is why we're not well funded, but we have a whole lot of training, technical knowledge, and professional ethics around saving information and making it accessible. If you want to preserve your records, talk to an archivist because you can't assume some faceless corporation will do it for you.

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I commend you for your work and I think it's incredibly important, and I fully agree with what you've posted here.

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

The data is not yet deleted but will be in 2 days, would you be interested in archiving it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45412855

Yup. Thanks for your work.

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.

I think the reasonable position here is that it's within Google's rights if they want to take data down, but at least give us warning and an archive of the data. If they'd said "we're going to take all this data down in two months but here's an archive of all of it if anyone wants to download it", I think very few people would have a problem with it.

> Google is not an archive.

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.

I don’t think it’s PR’s job to tell the company what to do. It’s their job to spin what the company does in a way that’s beneficial to it.

That's an interesting point. But then I might have said instead that Google, the company, is sure making their PR department's jobs much more difficult.

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