I have mostly resigned myself to watching in unsurprised disgust as tech companies (aided by oodles of HN users who work there!) ruin everything they touch with legal impunity.
It's simple, really. You have a website where people can upload their cat photos. There's a delete button. People click the delete button, read the "This will really Delete your Thing. It's Permanent. You CAN'T GET IT BACK!" warning, and click the confirm button.
Then you get an angry email (and twitter post, and blog entry, and Reddit mob) saying "I can't believe you deleted my photo without asking. That was my favorite cat photo it was my only copy I'LL SUE YOU!@!!"
So you go into your console and flip the .isActive bit back to 1 on that photo, send off your stock apology, and get on with your day.
To run your business any other way is madness. You're not training or selling or otherwise misusing that cat photo. You just don't want to deal with that hassle every day. So you "delete" things by moving them someplace where they're not public anymore.
It's just what you do...
This is, frankly, not very important and not something that will produce a successful lawsuit so this is just harming your own mental health for no reason.
Content being moved to trash and then eventually cleaned up and permanently deleted is an extremely ordinary pattern. If you want a more rigorous deleting of your data you can use a wipeout procedure.
If some users think this, have they question the Why would they do it? Why would Google lose money that way? ToS is irrelevant when it comes to what's running on their own private infra.
And look at this, here is my latest ticket from IssueTracker, check it out xD I uploaded it here. Their automated bot kicked me out of the VRP, claiming I violated the 'Code of Conduct' just because I told the truth. To make it worse, the bot actually put in writing that this is 'Intended Behavior'! First of all, under the law, an automated bot shouldn't even have the authority to issue permanent bans without human review... and second, that idiot bot literally confessed in writing that their deceptive design is an 'intended feature'. So, if this goes to court, Google will literally be arguing with themselves, and I'll just be sitting there laughing at them xD
they probably do not immediately purge your personal video bits upon YT delete either (i mean, who knows, but they can probably afford the space).
in fact, one could argue that being able to retrieve a supposedly destroyed "personal item" for no cost as being a benefit to the consumer/user, but i understand if that is a bridge too far.
If there really were a functioning TTL (Time-To-Live), then why the hell are they lying on the UI buttons? These 'smartasses' just keep blabbering. Why does Google constantly lie, stating completely different and contradictory things in every single piece of their documentation?
As I said above, the only thing my site does with your cat photo is show it back to you when you ask to look at it. No training. No selling your data to anybody. All I'm doing is storing it because you asked me to, and showing it to the people you ask me to.
You can certainly ask me to stop showing it to people. But please don't get all excited about how your rights have somehow been violated.
The fact is, people click delete buttons without thinking about it. Those people get way more mad when they can't undo that delete than you are now.
“I don’t get it, why do people expect a promise to permanently delete your things to akshually do just that”
Such a goofball stance on the subject tbh.
Deletion means deletion. There is no such thing as 'we didn't delete it just in case you did it by accident.' That is just a convenient excuse for illegally hoarding user data, and the law strictly forbids it. What is their lawful basis under the GDPR to keep it after I demand deletion? Exactly: none at all.
GDPR explicitly permits deletion timeframes. It does not demand that files are instantly destroyed as soon as you click the button.
Yeah, right.
> You can certainly ask me to stop showing it to people.
There is much better solution: add author's websites to dnsmasq, so they stop resolving:
http://www.expatsoftware.com/ http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles https://stravaeger.com/ http://www.twiddla.com/ https://www.s3stat.com/
I only wish there was a centralized registry of websites that are controlled by parties that have galavant attitude if not deliberate misunderstanding of what does the right to privacy mean.
Beautifully crafted ragebait :D
So forwarding it to NYOB is a good choice.
First, no you have not. Second, this would be distinct from actually breaking a law.
Think about the design here for a moment. When you click delete the file goes into the "recoverable, but to be deleted" state. Then after 25 days it goes into the "to be permanently deleted" state and various backend jobs start removing it from storage under a maximum time frame of 30 days. So Google communicates that you have 25 days to recover the file (you do). After 25 days the file is in an indeterminate state because it may be deleted from various backend storage systems. After 55 days it is guaranteed to be completely gone.
This is... how most such systems work. The laws governing data deletion give time windows. They don't specify that files must be deleted instantly. "Fraud" is also a specific legal term. Just saying "well the warning says it will be deleted permanently but it takes some time to do that" is not meaningful.
I also have no idea what "mathematically proven" means in this case.
> Google is the one that will suffer the consequences, not me, because I am going to sue them. I am the first person in the world to conclusively prove this architecture fraud against them.
I remember the first time I submitted something to a VRP. I was so proud of my accomplishment. I was a real security researcher! This made me overemphasize the importance of my finding in my mind. I can understand how pushback against your report feels like a personal slight but I assure that it isn't. The reason that you are getting banned from these systems is not because you've found some great crime or something so dangerous. The reason you are getting banned from these systems is because you are a spammer now.
I can assure you of two things.
First, you are not the first person in the world to notice this deletion pattern. It is not unique to these particular files. Second, you will not successfully sue Google. This design is commonplace across the industry.
You are only causing yourself pain here.
You are using AI to write your posts. Ask it to summarize the deletion timelines required by GDPR. You are claiming that this design is illegal.
You've submitted dozens of posts on this topic to HN. You are a spammer and you are only causing yourself pain. I understand that it is exciting to see yourself as a protagonist. It is exciting to think that you are the only person to discover some dark secret. But you haven't.
oefrha•1d ago
I don’t use Google AI Studio so can’t verify, good luck.
Bitu79•1d ago