> From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1]
> I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're not going to go around publicly accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue.
Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech. If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad..
I thought we'd finally (already) won this fight in the US with Howl/Naked Lunch, but maybe not?
Big problem here is that Google, Facebook and other US based companies are not strict just on imposing US regulations and laws, but through the censorship also very much adhere to the mainstream US cultural and moral biases. And those are not always coherent with the rest of the world, US being much more conservative about a lot of issues. And big companies being big, they can impose such rules and moral criteria to the whole planet and that way they basically colonise other cultures, forcing people to change their behaviour in order to adhere to the mainstream US moral ideas. For instance in Balkans it was very common theme for parents to take photos of their babies having a first bath and to later show those photos around to family and friends. It's a sort of ex-Yugoslavia tradition from the days of first Polaroid cameras, we all had such photos of us as kids and still keep them in photo albums. But posting your child's naked photo on Facebook will get you account banned instantly and if you are US based can get you in a lot of trouble. So people stopped doing it. And not just that, but more and more people now accepted the position that it's not morally acceptable to take such photos, thus re-aligning their sense of morality with the moral norms imposed by social networks. Such global censorship is really changing the world.
Lisa and Anthony "A.J." Demaree's three young daughters were taken away by Arizona Child Protective Services last fall when a Walmart employee found partially nude pictures of the girls on a camera memory stick taken to the store for processing, according to the suit.
The Peoria couple's attorney said Walmart turned the photos over to police and the Demarees were not allowed to see their children for several days and didn't regain custody for a month while the state investigated.
NO CHARGES
Neither parent was charged with sexual abuse and they regained custody of their children — then ages 1 1/2, 4 and 5 — but the Demarees claim the incident inflicted lasting harm.
In addition, some states have laws that are much broader in scope. Ohio's rules for instance is merely "pandering obscenity involving a minor" (http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2907.321) and involves material, not images. Writers have been prosecuted for "child pornography" that was nothing more than written text under Ohio's law. (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/us/child-pornography-write...)
Realistically, I don't think a child bath picture gets anyone in "big trouble" if common sense prevailed. But there are definitely moral panic types that would probably "report" this type of picture. (EG: Take this story -- http://www.smh.com.au/national/facebook-bathtime-posting-lan..., also there's a celebrity-gossip-news type story involving a bath photo of Perez Hilton and his two year old son you can Google if you want to witness the fun reactions on this sort of thing...)
I downvoted this for being a lazy comment, just a simple google search would provide plenty of evidence that you asked for (you might not lose in court, but there are plenty of news articles about parents arrested after trying to print their baby pictures at kodak/wal-marts).
Being arrested as a parent and potentially having your children taken into protective-services custody until you win or the charges are dropped is unquestionably "a lot of trouble".
The US might be more conservative compared to other Western countries, but there are many, many countries that are more eager to censor or hide content than the US.
It's not strictly a matter of conservatism, it's a matter of US values being enforced as universal; or IMO in the limit as you approach maximum size for tech companies, the most conservative values of every important market being enforced in all markets. In the US, people are freaked out about fathers kissing their sons, but fine with teenagers having things done to them on video that wouldn't occur to most people to be possible until they see them being done to someone too young to drink legally. There's also been an escalation against depictions of cigarette smoking in the US, but constant depictions of drinking which are frowned upon in large parts of the world that have no issue with smoking.
Every culture has taboos, but because of giant US internet companies mediating the content of people's communications, US taboos are currently more important than everyone else's lack of taboo. Ultimately, I see this leading to everyone's taboos becoming more important than everyone else's lack of taboo; I've heard of some of these platforms enforcing Lese Majeste laws.
I understand it's their "right" to censor whatever they want (well, the EU may disagree with that, though, given Google's dominant position in search, and the FTC should, too, but this is America, the land of "corporations are protected from punishment"), but it's also people's right to call them out on it. Just like it's people's right to call out Google [1], Facebook[2], and Twitter[3] for censoring links and hashtags for political reasons.
That's a very interesting point - I'd very much like to read a well-cited article/study on this if such is available, or is it just a personal observation?
When the redditor wrote "I'm calling it now. It was child porn." he didn't mean google account got removed for having Pedophilia in writing, but was suggesting that Google probably found actual child porn somewhere on this Google Account (Gmail, Drive, Blogger, Youtube, Whatever) and shut down the account.
> he didn't mean google account got removed for having Pedophilia in writing, but was suggesting that Google probably found actual child porn somewhere on this Google Account (Gmail, Drive, Blogger, Youtube, Whatever) and shut down the account.
I don't think we are as aware of what that comment means as you'd think.
Yes, we know that Google can delete whatever they want whenever they want. And yet we might get angry as hell... buy we keep hosting our content with them.
You want to get angry? Sure, go for it. You want to get change, though? Then I suggest we stop giving them money to keep doing what they are doing. That, I believe, is the spirit of the parent comment .
Well why do you think DuckDuck Go continues to thrive in the first place?
Even Google itself said that their "don't be evil" motto is quite stupid.
I personally try to ban them from my life as much as possible. Just recently in Google Maps a window popup with history of all the places I drove to. That was a shocker but how naive was I thinking they don't keep this data. Since then I bought TomTom for cash and said goodbye to Google Maps. You should do the same!
I wholeheartedly agree with this. First Amendment was written at the time when government was almost the only organization powerful enough to silence dissenters. Nowadays corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have more effective control of the venue of speech, and they should be subject to the same scrutiny then, not be given leeway as "private entities".
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board.
Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform.
From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference?
The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably.
You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.
- There are time (and money) consuming technical issues in migrating to another platform, and with the dominance of software-as-a-service platforms, it's often not even possible. Can you migration comments? Is the date going to be set correctly? Can you keep your current layout and images? So even on a purely technical level, you can't "easily" get your blog running again on another platform.
- Access to content: I'm hoping he has backups. Of course, if you developed the content on-platform, it may be nebulous what exactly you need backups of. E.g., did you think to include all the images+comments? If his account was deleted, he may simply not have all the data anymore.
- Network effects (this is the big one): a web site isn't just a bunch of bits; it's a place people visit. Being down for any considerable length of time means those visitors will drift away; the attention you've gained will be partially lost permanently. And that's the best-case scenario. In many cases, you cannot keep url intact, in which case even after you restore service, people won't find you. In a very real way, companies like google and especially facebook own your social connections to others - so even if you manage to find another platform, they're not going to give you your contacts back.
E.g. if you switch phone provider, you may keep your telefone number (here, at least, even against the will of the original provider). If you migrate from facebook, you cannot keep your profile url. That's probably a bad thing for society; but it's hardly surprising companies aren't dying to prevent lock-in. Even google, which nominally allows extracting your data, the most valuable assets cannot be transferred (not to mention that the data extraction process results can't be trivially imported elsewhere because there is no standard for these types of things).
It's absurd to suggest the user has much practical freedom when it comes to switching communication platforms. Any freedom he does have tends to mean he must have had the foresight to use only a small subset of the available features, including onerous restrictions such as limited social interaction or interaction via unusual means. More realistically, if you switch platforms, you're likely to lose readers.
I think your comment is just pointing out that freedom isn't free, there are always trade-offs to submitting oneself to the will to any platform.
If "practical freedom", means to get all the best parts of a platform while expecting that you can do whatever you want, then it's not surprising that some will be shocked when such costs suddenly come due having had ignored the writing on the wall. Although most never explore the boundaries of such to make a difference in distinction to them, such "practical freedom" never truly exists in anything we do.
I learned the "hard" way, bootstrapped a company that crowd sourced data seeded from "open" graph, only to get hit with a c & d and "my" facebook used account banned indefinitely 4 years ago. I can still create multi accounts and use them, but I don't think I'll be naive enough to use them in the same way as I did "my" main used account and not expect similar results as before. And if this is related to CP, its not like this is the first time ever someone has been censored by a private entity for this on the internet prior to this account becoming another stat in that book, and considering how general society sees these things, I'd be more surprised if the author is really surprised or just upset because it finally happened to them.
It's false if my point were that he wasn't being inconvenienced. My point is that he wasn't being silenced. If he wants to speak, he can put his voice on another platform. With all the news around the destruction of his blog, he might even reach more people than before if he's quick about it.
> The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion.
They're not even as powerful as the editor of one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, never mind the man himself.
I never read any articles from Murdoch's newspapers unless they're surfaced to me by one of those services. Do you buy a Murdoch paper, or do you get a link on Google News, your Facebook feed, or your favorite Reddit subs? I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case, not unique.
Of course, it's all just rich people controlling the discourse. Murdoch can buy pieces of Google, Facebook, and Reddit too.
Now, they just get to micromanage it. Micro-censorship, Micro-surveillance.
Gonna disagree with you there. It's the same kind of power, just with a different (sometimes overlapping) set of demographics. Facebook is one of the most used websites in the entire world. Just the simple act of hiding one story to promote another one changes what millions upon millions of people will see and talk about.
To play Devil's advocate, these platforms help people engage in discourse, but much like HN, has its own set of rules. HN shadow-bans and moderates with gusto, but I suppose it doesn't qualify as big enough?
Google provides more walls for people to hang their art, but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
Just because you (the colloquial "you") call yourself an artist doesn't compel the Met to hang your art and neither does it compel Google.
> HN shadow-bans and moderates with gusto, but I suppose it doesn't qualify as big enough?
Actually, I do think the current moderation model of most forums are wrong. The users should be the ultimate arbiter of what they see or not. The power to block certain users should be in the hands of those who browse it, and the moderators simply give a recommendation that most users follow. Similar to how spam folder works, in that you can always override the recommendation by moving the spam into your inbox.
> but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
If not all opinions are allowed on their platform, then those they allow come with a stamp of approval from them. The logical conclusion is that they should be held liable for any libelous claims made by the users, since the users' opinion actually reflect the platform's own. They cannot have it both ways by claiming to be independent from users' opinions while simultaneously influencing and filtering them.
They are, in my imaginary world, to deny me only for reasons not related to my content. For example, they can reject me if the pictures are too large or not in a specific format, but not if it expresses any views they dislike.
> The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
You give no evidence that it is the same voices. I am, for one, consistently opposed to Reddit's policy on banning subreddits and to Google and Facebook's manual interference on public discourse.
It's more like Google says 'yeah, you can hang your art here' then once the walls fill up, burns your artwork, moves out of the house and wont answer your texts.
At minimum, artists and other specialty individuals need extra allowances and certainties. Were they a corporate entity, this wouldn't have happened. Personally, I value culture at least as highly as most businesses.
My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution, and not being made to shut up by a private company due to the space it occupies in the world's technology and information zeitgeist, is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed. A Google kind of threat to freedom of speech didn't exist.
The question then becomes, is Google stifling freedom of speech? Can their impact on your freedom of speech by deleting your blog or posts be compared to the govt's impact on your freedom of speech through prosecution?
I say yes. Freedom of speech and similar laws seek to give you an immunity against govt, not because govt is evil, but because govt is powerful, and you are not. Google is powerful, and they were alive to just how powerful they were going to be when they came out with that don't be evil admonition.
Whereas Google took it upon themselves to not be evil, the writers of freedom of speech and similar laws tool it upon themselves to tell govt to not be evil. Should our societies protect individuals against entities who have power beyond some kind of threshhold? I'd say yes.
If you make the argument that a private company, by shutting down a user's account, is like government restriction on free speech, then how do you determine the balance between the right of free speech and the right of free association?
Remember, freedom of speech is only one part of the First Amendment. Those same writers also included the freedom of association. An organization like Google, Fox News, Amazon, or the Wall Street Journal is not obligated to associate with everyone.
We can change things. We can pass laws which mandate that certain things are public spaces. For example, the rise of the malls means that the migration from public shopping streets to private shopping areas, where mall owners like the Mall of the Americas can shut down protest much more readily than the police could do in a truly public area. We can pass laws which force malls to be public areas. The Supreme Court decided that in Pruneyard v. Robins. But only a handful of states have done so.
We can similarly pass laws which say that any content hosting site must be content neutral. Eg, if you want to use Stack Overflow to post your diatribes against whale hunting, SO cannot shut you down.
That doesn't make sense. Okay, so we only require that of "powerful" sites, which you suggest. Which is defined as .... what? Who gets to decide? Who gets to challenge that? If Yahoo was once powerful but is no longer so, who gets to decide when the transition occurs?
One possibility is to set up a common carrier status, where a company offers its services without discrimination to the general public. This is how the phone system works. But why would a company want to do this?
Does using Google products qualify my relationship with them as an association? In the same way that me buying you a cup of coffee is association?
I realize that I'm suggesting calls that are difficult to make, but my wider contention is that the current status quo, legal and valid as it is, is missing something that we are going to have to address at some point.
Yes. Though they are different associations. They are subject to federal and state laws which don't affect personal transactions.
For example, they are available to the general public so are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, and several other protected classes. California and other states place even more restrictions on their ability to discriminate.
On the other hand, you are free to discriminate as you wish. (Though not without risk of criticism; such is free speech.)
There's another difference in your example. Google provides services to the general public. You use their services. However, I do not provide a drinking-coffee service. I don't even like the taste of coffee. There is no reason I need to accept your offer to give me a cup of coffee any more than I need to accept a flyer from someone in the street. But if I were a company which provided coffee consumption services, then I would have less ability to turn you down than I do as a private person.
My wider contention is that we have plenty of historical examples of public/private space which help us understand what's going on. For example, can a company town prevent someone from coming to town to distribute religious materials? Decided in Marsh v. Alabama. Are AOL email addresses "public", so AOL cannot block spammers? Decided in Cyber Promotions v. America Online.
>My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution... is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed
No. I think it would be hard to write a policy that sought to prevent censorship on private property. How would something like Reddit (or Hacker News) work in such a world? How do you deal with spam? Or off-topic posts? Or hateful and incendiary comments? All those things are protected speech today, but that doesn't mean the relevant service wants to have them on their network.
I feel like the logical outgrowth of an argument like this is that we could compel companies to allow certain types of speech and not others. This seems like a pretty clear violation of both free association and freedom of the press. You would never think to compel a newspaper to publish a certain type of news or a certain columnist, why should Google be compelled to publish anything it doesn't like?
>My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution, and not being made to shut up by a private company ... is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed.
That's not the framework to use.
What's happening is that the government can allow "free speech" to criticize the government because they can just leave you alone. They don't have to spend money to leave you alone. Arresting everybody that criticizes the government means spending money for agents to round up citizens and also spending more money on prisons to hold dissenters.
The other form of "free speech with zero negative consequences from private entities" is impossible for a government or a society to provide for you. I'm not being hyperbolic -- it literally is impossible to give you that type of freedom. That type of of "commercial free speech" has a cost and other citizens are not going to pay for it. This leads into my response to your other statement...
>Does using Google products qualify my relationship with them as an association? In the same way that me buying you a cup of coffee is association?
You are misunderstanding how Freedom of Association affects "freedom of speech in a private business".
Using Facebook as an example, consider that some of their biggest advertisers are Coca-Cola, Proctor Gamble, and Samsung.
Let's say you want a law that forces Facebook to host posts (text not photos) espousing the benefits pedophilia. Pedophilia text is legal. Facebook user is happy that his legal viewpoint isn't deleted. This is now "free speech in private space" nirvana right? Not really. What the proponents of free-speech-on-private-platforms didn't consider is that there's no parallel law that forces Coca-Cola, ProctorGamble, Samsung to keep paying Facebook for ads. If Coca-Cola marketers say, "we don't want to run ads on Facebook that has child sex posts", they are free to abandon that platform and spend their ad dollars elsewhere. (Freedom of Association). The so-called "private treated as public space" that people wanted to spread alternative and marginalized viewpoints won't exist because nobody else wants to pay for it. ((The users of Facebook is also an "association" and if they freely leave the platform because they don't want their profiles intermingling with pedophiliacs, that will further erode Facebook's value.)
Freedom of speech on private platforms has a cost and this is why the society can't give it to you. Society doesn't want to pay for all viewpoints.
Some may think the obvious answer to the paradox of Freedom-of-Association vs Freedom-of-Speech is to collect taxes for a government-sponsored "public social network". Such a platform wouldn't be dependent on voluntary advertisers and their discretionary dollars. Unfortunately, that won't solve the problem for free speech either. If you think it through beyond the surface level appeal of such a platform, you'll see why it won't work.
This line is getting way over-used. Please notice the last sentence in grandparent's comment: "This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue".
No in the US the 1st amendment protects you from Government Prosecution, codifing the Concept of Freedom of Speech into the very foundation of our Legal System
Freedom of Speech however is a concept that applies to everyone, and everything including Google
Companies that proclaim the desire to respect Freedom of Speech, that claim to operate platforms in the promotion of Freedom of Speech, and make a profit doing so, should be HEAVILY criticized when they violate that principle
The first amendment protects Americans from Government prosecution for expression their opinions. Freedom of speech is a principle that extends beyond the US Constitution.
>Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech.
Sure, but protected speech only protects you from government censorship. For example, Reddit recently instituted a policy of disallowing anything that sexualizes children. Pedophilic writings would probably fall under that. Should they have the right to take those posts down? Or have that kind of policy?
> If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad..
That's par for the course. You can't sell ads if your site hosts writings on pedophilia. Most platforms and social networks would probably take down his content.
Is it? That might only apply in some jurisdictions and is likely something many will keep making laws against until one sticks. If it is protected under the first amendment is something that could easily switch, being so many loop holes have since been created for it.
I wouldn't doubt that Google participates in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database of child porn hashes in order to identify and shut down accounts with illegal images in their Google Drive or Gmail.
If this is the case, I wonder if this opens up an attack vector against a targeted account.
If the system is set up a certain way, an email with a illegal image attachment could cause a google account to be closed and purged, with notification to law enforcement.
http://www.missingkids.com/Exploitation/Industry states
"Through the Hash Value Sharing Initiative, U.S. based Electronic Service Providers can partner with NCMEC to receive a list of MD5 hash values which represent the "worst of the worst" images of apparent child pornography."
as well as
"Major U.S. companies have implemented PhotoDNA, and the technology is helping them identify child pornography images on their servers that may have otherwise gone undetected."
Interestingly enough, if a provider is using just the MD5 database and not PhotoDNA, and someone could get one of the MD5 hashes of an illegal image, a bad actor could use a hash collision attach to make an innocuous image have the same MD5 hash.
From that article...
"Google itself compiles a database of images of possible abuse that have been brought to the company’s attention, sources close to the company said. Those images are then reviewed by a human employee. If confirmed to show abuse, the company assigns each image a unique digital fingerprint, which is entered into its database. "
You'd think they would move to a better hash function by now... MD5 has been broken for many years. There's a little program from a few years ago that let you create colliding blocks in seconds on a PC of the time.
MD5 still has not been broken. Certain aspect of MD5 have been broken, but as a one-way hash function it remains unbroken. In particular, if I (a non-hostile party) pick a file to hash and publish that hash with or without the original file, a hostile attacker still cannot find the original file (nor any other stream) to generate that same hash.
What has been broken are various scenarios where the attack controls the source file to be hashed. That means that as a digital signature it's no good anymore.
I think it's important to emphasize this because in all the news about weaknesses and attacks, people sometimes get the idea that the sky is falling, and that it's hopeless to really stay secure. That kind of thinking quickly leads in security through obscurity. In fact, the sky is most certainly not falling. Even though many attacks are successful in improving on brute force, even ancient deprecated stuff like MD5 has not been fully broken; indeed it's most critical feature remains essentially untouched (according to wikipedia, preimage attacks have managed to reduce the complexity from 2^128 to 2^123.5 or in other words: nobody cares). And even as a signature, if you had picked MD5 and used MD5 before the attack was developed, you can be reasonably confident that that signature remains valid today.
So yes: don't develop new software using MD5, and retire software relying on MD5 for signatures. And for other applications, if you can easily migrate away from MD5 (and really, sha1 too) - do so! It's easier to reason about security if you don't need to sweat details like this. But if you have an existing application that can't easily be migrated, then don't panic either, just be aware that you need to more carefully consider what it means to have a matching hash (in short it's either the same file, or a different file the original author wanted to appear similar).
MD5 is long-broken as a security mechanism, but as a broader identifier of hashes, a soft match (or matches with potential false positives) might actually be preferred. In this case it might not inherently be a bad idea to use (as opposed to for password hashing).
Actually, precisely for applications such as password hashing MD5 has not been broken. MD5 is broken only in collusion with the author of the original stream to be hashed. For passwords, that would mean an attacker who can pick the password and already has access to the system might be able to pick a password such that other passwords also grant access... who cares?
Of course, irrespective of hash function you need to worry about weak passwords, so you'd need to use salting and an expensive stretching function, or only permit auto-generated passwords. But that's really not a weakness in the hashfunction; it's to mitigate weaknesses in the concept of a user-chosen password.
But why use MD5 anyways? Google has quite an impressive image searching algorithm. Why not just use that? Using MD5 won't do anything because, almost certainly, a false positive is /not/ the same image. You'd need some kind of rolling hash that gets longer the longer the file is. Then do a soft check on that.
> You'd think they would move to a better hash function by now
MD5 is (relatively) fast, and a (relatively) small datapoint to store. You're definitely wanting to store a lot of data points too; it's so so much easier to scan and de-scope OK images.....
The MD5 catalogue's intent is to allow quick identification of suspect material to drop to manual review (little bit of inference there from what I have read about Google, but I'd be shocked if that wasn't true - false positives in this context are not as bad as true positives [of course] but accusing an innocent person of having child porn is damaging).
From the GP:
>That has to be the worst job ever.
It is. I did it for a while working for a computer forensics firm. Not even slightly pleasant. We used to go through millions of images - to be honest, 99.999999999% of it was "normal" (if often slightly wierd) porn.
You do become detached from it after a while.
To be honest; the chats/emails grooming young people were the worst.
As I said in reply to that comment, the problem with the lack of transparency is that, how could an innocent person in Cooper's position defend themselves against accusations like that which could ruin their reputation?
It's pretty scary that when Google (or BigTechCompanyX) deletes your data, people will automatically assume you must be a child pornographer.
Is account deletion an automatically applied child porn sentence with no assumption of innocence and no recourse to an actual judicial system? Seems that way.
Lolita contains erotic descriptions of sexual acts involving a child — the scene where Dolly is on Humbert's lap. But yet, it's a work written from the perspective of an unreliable sociopath. Things aren't so simple.
“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.”
Article reminded me how much I use my Gmail account for, and what a colossal inconvenience it would be were it to be deleted. Just off the bat:
- E-mail
- Calendar
- Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc.
- Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that)
- Google Keep note-taking app
- Blogspot blog
- Domain host
- Secondary phone number via Google Voice
- Two-factor authentication device
- Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music
It's really, really unsettling how entangled that singular account is with my everyday workflow.
I've begun trying to compile a list of how each of these components could be migrated to something self-controlled ala OwnCloud. Perhaps I'll make it into a website when I'm done.
I am not sure what would happen to any of the Android apps I had downloaded, however. Do we as consumers get any more legal redress if the account is attached to things we actually paid for?
Some friends of mine have similar concerns, and it surprises me. I have multiple Exchange 360 accounts and multiple Gmail accounts, and OneDrive. I use offline .PST files in Outlook to copy everything older than 3 months into. Everything on my OneDrive is on my local hard drive. To be fair I don't do cloud music - my entire 80Gb collection is on my hard drive and duplicated on my phone. Do you just have so much stuff that something like what I described isn't feasible?
Are you serious?
Nevermind all the complexity your solution introduces, how is someone supposed to keep track of it?
When we're able to identify problems and come up with solutions that only help people with tons of experience and obviously too much time on their hands, we do others a disservice.
I have a different, but effectively similar, setup to Spearchucker for managing and backing up my data, identity, etc.
>how is someone supposed to keep track of it?
Very carefully. No sarcasm intended. Same as one's personal finances, for example.
>and come up with solutions... we do others a disservice.
I can't speak for Spearchucker, but I devised my particular solution for my own sake, and "doing others a service" didn't factor into that process.
Nor do I feel it necessarily should. If someone without experience asks how I navigate our messy digital world (and they have), I give them my honest answer and describe my system. Sometimes I propose a few less-effective, consumer-friendly alternatives, along with their drawbacks. Yes, my solution involves a lot of cobbled-together, semi-automated and semi-manual systems. That's because these systems change so frequently that it was the best I could do to get my own system working in the first place. It seems you are implying some obligation exists to do someone else the "service" of managing their personal digital hygiene, at some arbitrary ease of use that fits their level of expertise.
It is not because I'm some blackhearted bastard with no regard for my fellow man that I don't feel that obligation. It is because that, even if I have crafted a solution that adds resilience to the failure of services X, Y and Z, which I use, I don't know what I could/would do when the other person begins to rely on service W, where W is a service I do not use and do not understand the intricacies of.
In short, I find it strange that you frame someone having shared what works for them on a service-vs-disservice axis for the broader world. I'm happy that Spearchucker has a system for, and the discipline to, maintain his digital hygiene.
> Very carefully. No sarcasm intended. Same as one's personal finances, for example.
That is a very interesting comparison. I wonder how long it will take before people start taking their digital footprint as seriously as they take personal finance? Before digital maturity is seen as a mark of adulthood the way finance savvy is seen today?
Your analogy is apt because they are both areas that the average person doesn't understand, but is still forced to wade their way through. I look forward to the day when there are digital security self-help books and blogs like the personal finance and investing material we have now.
Whats absurd is saying "how complicated could your system be?" Not the solution.
This is a technical forum so I get it, but the solution for a person well versed in technology isnt actually applicable to anyone else. Consider that youre at the leading edge of a bellcurve.
Theres no one click install, no service to give 5$/mo to, nothing. Just a big pile of stuff people are supposed to squirrel away, as though theyre even good at their own finances.
We should all be sharing what works for us. But to suggest things are trivial or easy just creates a divide between people who understand and those who do not.
Data Security and Privacy are never going to be convenient.
If someone does not respect their own security and privacy enough to do their work themselves they can never enjoy privacy and security, as by definition if you are not setting up and maintaining the systems, you are giving up control of your privacy and security to a 3rd party, be that Google, MS, Apple, or some other "Trusted" party
AFAIK your Two-Factor is not connected to your google account. Or maybe we're talking about different things. Mine is an app that happens to be made by Google but it has no connection to my google account. If I Google kicked me off the two factor app would keep running
Eh, it should be highlighted that the Google Authenticator app on the Play Store is NOT the one on GitHub, which is a much older version. The current version is closed source, and cannot be assumed to keep working if a Google account is banned.
(I strongly recommend people compile and switch back to the old open source version.)
My recommendation for backing up 2FA is to print the QR code that you set up your phone with, and lock it in a very safe real world place. Do not keep a copy on a digital format.
I don't know of any CLI clients (that would be perfect with a Bash alias) but I just store the initial 'seed' passcode in my password manager. When setting up a new device, I manually enter that instead of scanning a QR code and it works perfectly.
If you store your 2FA recovery codes in the same place as your passwords, there is effectively no point in you having 2FA, because compromising one factor, your password manager, compromises both.
You are correct but in my use-case I have my browser remember the passwords and use a standalone password manager for storing credentials that I infrequently access. An exploit compromising the browser would next have to compromise the password manager's encrypted database.
Admittedly this is not perfect, but I am comfortable with the level of security it provides. I think it is also roughly comparable to users who have a 2FA app on their mobile and a password manager syncing to the same device.
I was in the same place, when I started hating the Lollipop release, which turned the great working Nexus 5 with Kitkat into a piece of crap (Google Play Services drain, memory leaks). Being a Nexus, I could downgrade it back, but couldn't disable updates, since they're handled by GPS now. Then I realised what else beside the device I paid my money for Google owns.
>- E-mail
Already had a domain, so found a neat hosting in EU, 10GB of space with ActiveSync, CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP.
>- Calendar
Email hosting has DAV, which syncs to all clients.
>- Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc.
This is the only thing the gmail account is still being used.
>- Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that)
Using Dropbox (because I can rely on it) and MEGA
>- Google Keep note-taking app
Remember the milk todo app, I enter notes in a Notes list, or even make to-dos directly
>- Blogspot blog
Jekyll blog, hosted on github, with own domain
>- Domain host
Gandi
>- Secondary phone number via Google Voice
Don't have the in the land of dragons (outside US).
>- Two-factor authentication device
Authy
>- Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music
Fuck the cloud, local music in iTunes synced by iSyncr Android app.
At first it all looked like a pain to do, but now I can't imagine going back into the Google silo. The gmail/google account now serves only as Play Store account, YouTube account (when will G+ finally die), Chrome Sync account. The location, web search and targeted ads are paused and disabled.
Like you, I've moved away from relying on a Google account; the only exception is Keep, since I'm yet to find a decent FOSS alternative - not that they're bad, but Keep just fits so well with how I approach note-taking.
Even as a paying customer of Google Apps (albeit only for one user), I've got no way out without losing access to all my paid apps - and that's Support's official answer. I suspect in Australia I could take Google to small claims court and get some money back but I'm not sure I have the time or energy.
That's my situation as well. The customer service agents pull the "it's not my department" card whenever I try to cancel my apps account and move my Play library over to a standard Google account.
Half a year ago I used a Google Apps for Business account for pretty much the same things (minus Blogspot, domains, voice, plus address book and Hangouts).
Now I only have a non-apps account for Google Scholar. Besides that I have moved everything off Google. The most painful thing was losing all paid Android apps, but since I planned on moving back to iOS again I took the loss. All the other stuff was not hard: I switched to Fastmail for e-mail, who have a nice migration tool, calendars and contacts are on iCloud (since my wife uses iCloud as well), files are on Dropbox.
If possible, I would like to switch away from Dropbox to something that is end-to-end encrypted. We used Bittorrent Sync for quite some time, but I had serious problems in the last few versions (basically, it corrupted its own metadata and re-added all shares from scratch). Syncthing is not really an option (too hard to share with family/colleagues).
Regarding moving from Dropbox to something encrypted, you might look into SpiderOak - I've not used them, but they've been around for quite a while and "encrypted zero-knowledge" is basically their selling point.
I don't believe they have a free tier, so I suspect they have a sustainable revenue model - basically everyone's on their equivalent of Dropbox Pro, with no free account leeches eating up their marketing budget.
That's the big thing that stuns me every time Google does this. For people dependent on their services, Google is effectively giving them an online death sentence. Without access to your email, you may have a lot of difficulty regaining control of accounts of yours all over the Internet as well, depending on their email change policies. If you've been using Gmail for as long as a lot of us have, ten years of your online correspondence is just... gone. And if there was a clear avenue of appeal or communication, this wouldn't even be so bad, but when Google gets rid of you, they won't even give you a chance to talk to them about why they did.
The issue here is that Google accounts are a "free service" (obviously advertiser funded), and they're not even really tied strongly to real people. A given account could be shared between people, or change owners over time.
I've always felt that, done right, this could be a revenue opportunity for Google - offer a premium account where you give them your proper identity details, and tick a few boxes about how you want your account to be managed if you lose login access (reset to someone who can show ID? destroy?). I'd gladly pay a non-trivial amount to get decent service like that in an emergency.
As it stands, you're not paying Google anything. You're not the customer, you're the thing being sold.
With no revenue from users, it's understandable that they won't entertainment appeals about their decisions.
I suspect they wouldn't want to offer a premium account though, due to the bad press of admitting the problem.
Exactly. The cost of them making a premium option would pale in comparison to the loss of reputation they would gain for admitting they need one. That's why you'll never be able to pay for privacy with Google: Google doesn't want people to realize that using their free services compromises their privacy.
These escort site ad reviews are mentioned in the article as being the exception in terms of erotic content. Regardless of sexual explicitness though, all the men appear to be of legal age. How are you concluding 'child pornography and solicitation thereof'?
It is possible that Google or some governmental entity believed that one of the many naked "18 year olds" was not actually 18 when the posted photos were taken. The comments on the linked post suggest that at least one reader of the blog believed that at least one escort was not 18.
That seems like adequate evidence for scrutiny, and it is possible that Google plays it safe in cases like these (I have no idea what their official policy is).
Indeed - as anyone hosting pornography knows, it's generally on the people who took the photo, the people who uploaded it, and the people who are hosting it to have proof that their models are over age. If it turns out they're not, there's a risk of everyone who handled the photo being complicit in distribution of child pornography.
I was wondering for a few minutes trying to find out what you mean, until I realized in the US that is illegal.
An interesting issue, what if the author of the blog would be from a country where it's legal - what right should, for example, a social media platform have to limit their speech?
(Especially in an age where some social media platforms are without alternative)
I googled and found that escort ads are not illegal - not unless they include sex. Which is obviously pretty easy to work around by simply not mentioning sex, but even so: escort ads themselves are not illegal in the US.
I don't understand why Google won't just explain what the problem was and give him a way to extract his data, even if they won't let him use Blogger anymore. Would the precedent really be so bad? They're getting some not-great PR — I feel like most companies would try to work something out.
This seems most likely maybe it's not worth the hassle for them but legally releasing any illegal material back to him cannot happen so they're stuck doing essentially nothing.
Because Google is too big to care, both organizationally (too many people, too many hands that don't know what the other is doing) and in terms of its market reach. It's much like too big to fail for banks, really: they assume they can get away with anything they do, so they have no real incentive to not do it.
I think, it's simply less of a hassle for Google to deal with this by way of their automated PR machinery than to get an actual human into their system.
They just need to open-source one Parsey McParseface and poof, the entire world thinks that Google is their cuddly big brother who would never do such a thing as ruin a man's livelihood without really giving a fuck about it.
> “saw something on the blog they interpreted as out-of-bounds from Google policy and took it down.” The disastrous consequences probably stemmed from “just a stupid mistake,” she said.
So it is a bit like when the cat trips, falls down the stairs in some undignified way, then immediately stands up keeps walking like nothing happens, looking like "Yeah I totally planned to do that, it was not an accident"
Perhaps after so much time has passed and so much stonewalling, it is just too late to admit that they made a mistake apologize and restore content. (Well and compounded by the fact that there is probably no content left to restore). It seems in their best interest to keep quiet and stonewall the issue until it goes away.
But on the other side, given that content there -- which included slightly edited explicit ads, it is probably not surprising Google did what they did. I imagine for every site with content like that, Google employees would go out of their way to see maybe the user is a known artist or writer and this is just art. That's understandable, however what is not understandable is not having a way to restore, warn before, or explain what happened afterwards and have a way to revert the action.
I imagine at this point Google is pretty much a monopoly. If it decided to charge to use GMail, or force me to listen to a 5 minute ad every, I don't know if there is an alternative that has email, docs, calendar, and others at the same level of quality.
Other sources have implied the blog in question was hosting something Google considered erotica featuring kids. Unsurprisingly, Google does indeed delete the child porn they encounter, not keep it as a "data point".
Really? I would have guessed that they absolutely had a copy, if only to hand over to law enforcement - and more likely, to submit as training data for PhotoDNA if they don't have their own similar work.
Sure, but that doesn't take particularly long and is probably automated to minimize employee exposure. They certainly don't keep copies of child porn on their servers indefinitely (this would obviously be illegal, among other things).
It's BS speculation from the tin-hat wing, frequently cut-and-pasted on this site. At Google there is a finite time between when you delete something and when it has to become unreachable through all frontends and APIs, and when it later has to cease to exist, and then finally when the last backup of the data must have been wiped. Source: I personally had to implement the monitoring and alerting that ensures this is the case for a major, privacy-sensitive Google product.
However you should note that if you used a managed Google account, such as educational or corporate account, your ability to truly delete anything may be curtailed by your domain's administration.
It's not a totally insane belief to have. Facebook infamously held onto a "deleted" picture belonging to an Ars Technica writer for well over three years. [1]
Hanlon's Razor would just dismiss that as "CDN's are hard", but it doesn't explain why the one picture owned by the author that they emailed Facebook about finally went away, but others they had the URLs for did not.
Whether it be malice or stupidity, I think the sane default belief is that "delete" doesn't actually remove the bits in most cases, and that goes double for PII brokers like Facebook and Google. Act accordingly.
The lesson is obvious: host your most important content on your own server that you control; and make backups.
Some people will say that self-hosting isn't a practical solution. But when the alternative is the potential for devastating data loss, it seems eminently reasonable.
More practically, or instead of and will suffice. That is, if you lack the expertise to set up your own server, it's okay to use someone else's provided you also keep local backups of all your work. For most people, keeping local backups is far more practical than running your own server.
since reading the prag prog book a decade ago, I started putting everything I can in version control. saved my ass several times so far. used
my own svn server for a while, now using a combination of GitHub and AWS git (I think it's called codesource)
It has been like 14 years since I've had my own physical server in a data center. I don't think self-hosting is a thing anymore for individuals. Today with my symmetric FIOS I could host at home. But then I risk having Verizon pull the plug on my internet if they disapprove of something I post.
Now if by "self-host" you mean to host with a company that doesn't have AI bots scanning for objectionable content, I guess you could host anywhere EXCEPT the big boys. But consider that Google, etc could be providing the AI bot service to anyone and everyone (I'm sure there's a market), so I'm not sure that any form of self-host can really protect you.
So the answer is a) control your own domain, b) backups
Slightly off topic: I think someday may be, once our Internet connection are fast enough, we will go a full circle and have our own server and the Cloud will be a dump storage or backup.
Think iCloud for example. My Router; Airport Server / Time Capsule Server. Will have all my iOS / macOS backup, as well as Photos, video, game saves etc. All iOS update and macOS update, App update are done through this proxy / cache. I will have all my documents inside this little server. And a Backup of these files will be done in the Cloud. So in the worst possible scenario, You can cut off my Cloud backup and wipe it. I will still have all the info inside my Router / Server.
You can provide me a Blog platform on my little server, and insert ads on it all you want when it reaches your cache/proxy/CDN. But when you take down my blog, all the content i spend my time writing is still on my server. In my procession.
Sometimes with Cloud, i just get the feeling my precious data are being held as hostage.
The only thing that stands out for me here, and I think directly applies to Google's business overall, is the lack of a human factor. Google wants to move into the enterprise, enterprises generally like talking to people -- especially when dealing with support -- that isn't a strong suit.
I will take some time and read the other links someone posted below, but the story and the lack of human response parallels many other postings around Google support.
As an EU resident he can simply fire off a subject access request (referencing the local Data Protection Acts) to Google and they have to tell him everything they have on file about him.
Brings up the question of what are some good tools to manage this kind of risk.
You need your contacts, email archive, another credible email address to re-establish contact, alternate credentials for SSO sites, and it needs to be somewhere outside the political sphere that could cause this.
What does a resilient online identity look like? These companies own the primary media of your relationships, which are the things people need to survive.
Not really. All the low-level pieces simply don't exist as usable code yet - yes, you can pay money in a convoluted way (compared to buying almost anything else) to have a piece of data added to a globally distributed ordered list, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to build every piece of interaction on the network on top of that system. "Pay 5 cents to send a tweet!"
You also need a decentralized publish/subscribe system and a useful decentralized search system, both resistant to attacks. The former has some good solutions buried in people's PhDs, the latter not so much. Then you need a lot of UX research and people working on the low-level protocol, high-level domain logic, and the UI.
It'd be a project on the scale of one of the largest open-source projects currently in existence, IMHO.
Another example in the long, sad history of algorithm-driven companies having no respect for art or creativity or culture. It's not really something out of spite or distaste, but eventually you end up leaving a trail of bodies in your wake because you can only solve so many problems by having people watch over the algorithms, and your revenue takes priority over protecting culture.
Google ends up catching a lot of heat for this (rightfully so) if only because so many people use their services. High-traffic youtube videos filled with racial slurs and abuse staying up for 2 months before the abuse department finally takes action, or important pieces of cultural history getting nuked without explanation or recourse, or people's gmail accounts getting utterly destroyed with no ability to transfer the address or take a backup. In the end nothing can be done about this stuff because in many cases, nobody actually knows what happened.
The youtube case was especially troublesome because I went to great lengths to get it dealt with, and in the end it was a result of policy issues combined with bad technology - the human oversight was prevented from doing anything about the problem, and as a result vulnerable kids were exposed to torrents of hate and the uploaders reaped the ad revenue all while stealing another person's work.
Did you even read the previous comments from the earlier submission of this article? People likely complained about the nature of his content in addition to it being against their TOS.
> From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1]
> I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're not going to go around publicly accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue.
> [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper....