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A bit of a cautionary tale for those of us using the cloud
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 29, 2016 at 08:11 PM
Just saw this article, and thought some of the folks here might find it interesting:
“Either way, Cooper’s ordeal is a chilling reminder that those of us who use the Internet to house our creative work do so at the mercy of the platforms who host us.”
Steve Z.
Posted by Tester
Jul 30, 2016 at 03:18 AM
Thanks for the article, Steve. Yes it is interesting - but much more less dramatic than I thought at the beginning. ;-)
Blogger/Google surely made two mistakes:
- They did not inform Cooper that they would erase his blog (so that he would have a chance to save the material). Moreover perhaps the deletion only of the problematic parts of the blog would be a solution too.
- They obviously refused to communicate with him also after the deletion.
On the other hand Cooper made two serious mistakes too:
- It seems that he did not save the material he uploaded to his blog on another place. Data backup should be a standard procedure whenever the data is of importance to me.
- He posted material that obviously violated Blogger’s terms of service. Not often (he says) but it happened: On the one hand something that had to do with escort ads (in some literary way edited by Cooper, as it seems). And on the other hand some crazy fantasies (again in the form of literature) about the wish to see children dying. - If I were the owner of a platform I would not accpet such material too.
With these two severe mistakes, I think that Cooper to a large extent is responsible himself for the disaster that now he seems to have lost all the material of 10 years blogging.
On the other hand it seems quite plausible what a former Google employee said to Cooper:
«She guessed that the whole thing was a clerical error of sorts—the result of a policy reviewer who “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.»
From this point of view: Yes, we should all be aware that a data loss could happen whenever we send something to the cloud.
Posted by Andy Brice
Jul 30, 2016 at 09:34 PM
Anything important to you in the cloud should be backed up to your own device. Especially if it is a free service.
From my own experiences with Google Adwords, it seems that Google employ lots of poorly trained, outsourced staff to enforce the subjective parts of their policies. So you could be found to be in violation of terms of service, even if you haven’t done anything wrong. And there is generally no right of appeal. They are judge, jury and executioner. You might not even find out what you were supposed to have done wrong (cf Kafka’s ‘The trial’).
Desktop applications still have many advantages…
Posted by dan7000
Jul 31, 2016 at 12:54 AM
One nice thing about cloud services that sync to a folder on local devices (e.g. Dropbox, Evernote, Tresorit) is that if the service suddenly disappears you always have the local copy. This is a reminder to me not to use Dropbox’s “selective sync” on all my devices—at least one device always needs to sync all of my dropbox folders. Selective sync is also a much-requested feature for Evernote but these stories remind me that the feature comes with a big drawback: at least as it is now, I always have a full copy of all my Evernote notes on all my Windows machines.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 31, 2016 at 08:52 AM
Good move. As a small business, we also use synchronisation services of various kinds (Dropbox, Evernote, but in particular Soonr), and have dedicated one of our microservers to backing up these services in a one-way sync operation (so even if something truly awful happens and all data held in a synchronised account is deleted in such a way that the deletion is propagated across multiple machines, we’ll always have a completely independent backup - well, several, in fact).
It’s worth bearing that two-way effect in mind, incidentally. Your data is vulnerable even if your service provider doesn’t suddenly die a death, because synchronisation “giveth, but also taketh away”. While I appreciate the versioning in Dropbox and Soonr, it’s no match for a totally independent backup…
Cheers,
Bill