Google Removes 'Pirate' URLs From Users' Privately Saved Links 58
To date, Google has processed more than seven billion copyright takedown requests for its search engine. The majority of the reported links are purged from Google's search index, as required by the DMCA. Recently, however, Google appears to gone a step further, using search takedowns to "moderate" users' privately saved links collections. TorrentFreak: A few hours ago, Eddie Roosenmaallen shared an email from Google, notifying him that a link had been removed from his Google Saved collection because it violates Google's policy. The reason cited for the removal is the "downstream impact," as the URL in question is "blocked by Google Search."
"The following saved item in one of your collections was determined to violate Google's policy. As a result, the item will be moderated..," Google writes, pointing out a defunct KickassTorrents domain as the problem. Initially, it was suggested that this removal impacted Google's synched Chrome bookmarks but further research reveals that's not the case. Instead, the removals apply to Google's saved feature. This Google service allows users to save and organize links, similar to what Pinterest does. These link collections can be private or shared with third parties.
"The following saved item in one of your collections was determined to violate Google's policy. As a result, the item will be moderated..," Google writes, pointing out a defunct KickassTorrents domain as the problem. Initially, it was suggested that this removal impacted Google's synched Chrome bookmarks but further research reveals that's not the case. Instead, the removals apply to Google's saved feature. This Google service allows users to save and organize links, similar to what Pinterest does. These link collections can be private or shared with third parties.
Re:Enshitification (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck putting the shit back into the anus. Fuck Google. Fuck Chrome. Fuck Clouds. Oh and an obligatory Fuck Apple. Just on principle. Use Firefox and your own data. Have a nice day.
Use Waterfox instead of Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
Use Waterfox and really own your data.
https://www.waterfox.net/ [waterfox.net]
Just do https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/... [github.com] to get rid of that Firefox sign in nag.
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But, but fire>water. No? This better be good.
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Water douses fire.
All fire can do to water is make it change it's state to steam which eventually precipitates back down to douse fire.
Fire is so needy that it needs oxygen and fuel to keep going, it can't handle water.
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I would like to introduce you to Hell. Here there is no water. Only Fire. Bring a hose. Bring a supertanker. Bring an ocean. It will matter not.
The fire is waiting....
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Au contraire, it's been a while so I may be misremembering some details; but my recollection is that there's definitely plenty of water in and around hell. You have to cross the Acheron after the vestibule just to get there, after all. The Styx divides the upper and lower levels and has an estuary with wetlands. There's a river of boiling blood down there somewhere. And the 9th circle pretty much consists entirely of a metric fuckton of ice.
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Nah. All that lava and fire and brimstone? Clearly is VERY volcanically active. And it has been so continuously since at least biblical times. Hell's ecosystem is already adapted to stay mostly in the liquid water zone with massive amounts of excess carbon dioxide (And a lot of other nasty crap.) in the air.
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I would like to introduce you to Hell. Here there is no water. Only Fire.
And Oracle, Windows Server (any version), and systemd.
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Water > Fire for sure.
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LOL, but so true. I can't comprehend why would someone save internet shortcuts on Google or any cloud rather then their computer. There's no safer place than your own. Making a backup copy of them can't hurt, but it's safer to keep them somewhere at hand than on an Internet server, blimey.
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And what exactly is stopping them from implementing this in browsers?
"private" means something different to Google (Score:4, Insightful)
"All your data on our servers belongs to us...."
Sure, it was consistent with Google's Terms of Service. I wonder why anyone stores anything "private" on any "cloud". Apple has at least provided a way to encrypt stuff in iCloud (but it's not the default mode, and it's a pain to set up across a bunch of devices. And if you have one "too old" device, you can't use the encryption.)
But then, the only "cloud" I trust is my own. At least I know what the privacy policy is, how data is shared, and who to blame when there's compromise or data loss.
Re:"private" means something different to Google (Score:5, Insightful)
"Private," to Google, means "other companies have to pay us to get this."
Re:"private" means something different to Google (Score:5, Informative)
These link collections can be private or shared with third parties.
A feature of Google link collections is that they can be shared. If Google allows you to use their link-sharing feature to share links they have been directed by law to remove then Google is potentially legally liable for sharing the links in violation of the DMCA notice they received...
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It's pretty much what every company these days means. "What's your stuff is our stuff, and what's our stuff is none of your fucking business".
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If freedom is something you need to be able to afford, it's better called a feedom.
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Whenever someone gets caught doing something horrible & they cry, "That wasn't me. I wasn't myself. That's not who I am." that's exactly who they are. How free do you feel when the "freedom" crowd roll into town?
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We're still allowed to use Brave and its encrypted sync chain.
Brilliant move - they have no snooping compliance costs.
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So because a company that you pay** to give you special treats on the internet is regulating those treats to comply with (inter)national law, the USA isn't a free country.
Very selfish definition there.
Fortunately, you're free to use another browser, and not use Google for anything if you really want.
** If you think you aren't paying Google for their services, there's your first problem.
Who trusts Google with their bookmarks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like a really bad idea. Oh, and look, it is.
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What does this have to do with bookmarks?
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Saved link = bookmark. Even if some vendors are trying to corrupt the language.
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Bookmarks on the whole are a bad idea, except for use as shortcuts to frequently accessed sites.
For preserving links for later use, you rely on the content staying up and not changing. Sometimes the Wayback Machine can help, but often not.
These days I just clip the whole page into Joplin. Saved forever, and with a link if I want to check for updates.
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You must be bookmarking vastly different pages than I do. My bookmarks keep working and the only cases where I had to use Internet archives are links put into documents by others.
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Same. The only real times that this doesn't work is when a website goes down or restructures itself.
But most of my bookmarks are shortcuts for things that are dynamic so freezing the page wouldn't serve my needs very well (granted, my needs may be very different then AmiMoJo and good for him for finding a tool to work for his needs.)
Are these your links? (Score:2)
Where did you get them? Who taught you how to do this stuff?
You, alright!? I learned it by watching you!
Please note (Score:5, Informative)
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However it is still over reach. There are valid reasons to include links to pirate sites, which would include people working to protect copyrights.
I'm still sharpening the tines on my pitchfork just in case Google get more bright ideas about where to reach too next.
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google docs can be public too, shouldn't they be included?
The more things that make people realize the cloud is poisonous the better, I say.
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Before everyone gets out their pitchforks....
Nothing you said should keep people from getting out their pitchforks. Google is altering its users' saved data to remove references to websites. Not only should people be throwing their pitchforks at Google, they should be using this as (yet another) wakeup call to not use other people's servers to store important data.
There is nothing keeping Google from extending this policy to trawling your Google Docs documents and altering them in whatever way they see fit, or doing the same thing to your Chrome bookm
You Know Where You Can Stick Your Policies, Goog! (Score:5, Insightful)
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What I need, but lack the ability to code or the will to learn it - a browser extension that records my Google search results and the text from pages I visit, them dumps them into a private search engine. And that same extension should inject its own results into the top of future Google search results.
My own personal Google backup so they can't become a Ministry of Truth and destroy the most easily accessed records of the past.
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For saving things locally, just press ctrl+s to save the page, print to pdf, or use one of many addons for saving pages locally. As for searching your local hoard, you'll find no shortage of tools for that for most platforms.
The whole addon with google integration thing you imagine seems poorly thought out. What do you do with similar but not exact queries? Do you expect your addon to do its own local search? If so, what's the point of prepending them to the Google search results? If you're looking for
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My bookmarks list is a local plain HTML page, set as my browser homepage. When I want to add or remove links, I just edit the HTML. I put dates on all the links, so technically it's kind of version controlled, too.
I never have to mess with importing bookmarks or worry about browser updates screwing anything up. All my browsers share the same HTML page, so they all work the same way. I don't travel much, but one of these days perhaps I'll write a script to automatically sync my local HTML page with my we
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That's my approach too :-)
I did once toy with the idea of having a simple top level page with categories and separate link listing pages below, but decided it was simple enough but too much effort.
Your daily reminder ... (Score:1)
... that the advertising company formerly known as "Google" has not had "Don't be evil" in their values for many years now.
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No: it's your daily reminder than when you entrust your data to someone else on the cloud, you lose control of it.
If you don't want Google to mess with your data, don't share your data with Google in the first place.
links.txt (Score:2)
Has never removed a link from my collection.
GMail Story (Score:5, Informative)
I had something similar happen a few weeks ago with Gmail. I had just purchased a new Android phone but I wanted to install a very old app I enjoyed, one that had been removed years ago from the Google Play store. No problem I thought, I have a copy of the apk stored as an attachment in Gmail. I could not download it. I dug up the email on Gmail's website and saw the following:
Anti-virus warning – 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled.
The app did not have a virus, I've been using it on my phone for years. It was, however, pulled from the Google store due to copyright violations. So I guess this is the state of play at Google these days, we can expect take-down requests and legal orders to be far reaching, even into our private files
As a side note, I was able to get my file by downloading the entire email as a .eml file, loading it into Outlook, and extracting the attachment that way.
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Googlectomy (Score:2)
Yet another reason for a Googlectomy. We've had our email with a local ISP for years. It costs money, of course, whereas Gmail is free. But we all know what "free" really means, nowadays.
It is nearly impossible to live in the modern, Internet-driven world without a Google account. However, with a bit of effort, you can go weeks, or even months between times that you actually need and use it...
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Anti-virus warning – 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled.
I workaround that by making sure everything I save on my Gmail or GDrive that might cause problems down the line due to their policies, is saved within an encrypted 7-Zip or, depending, as an encrypted PDF. Google cannot scan within those, so it merely warns the file cannot be scanned for viruses.
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No, bookmarks are saved in your browser. The links in question were on a webpage on Google's servers.
You lost me (Score:4, Insightful)
With the combination of Google and Private. There is zero privacy in Google, and after over 20 years, that should have been clear to anyone feeding personal data to them.
My reminder the "cloud" is the wrong language (Score:4, Interesting)
"cloud", English, little fluffy looking puff of vapor in the sky.
"klaut", German, homonym to "cloud", English, imperative plural of "klauen", to steal. I.e. a command to a group to steal your stuff.
And that's pretty much what you do when you put stuff in the cloud.
Piracy is still flourishing (Score:1)
But so flourish profits of the media companies. There is no need to go stricter with this crap, it's all pure greed.
Glad they "Don't Be Evil" (Score:2)
Gosh, it's sure good that Google has "Don't be Evil" in their code of condu... wait? what they removed that in ... checks Interwebs... 2018
Seriously talk about a fall. I think it comes down to
Money corrupts, Billion@ corrupts absolutely
We control the horizontal. We control the vertical (Score:2)
And Pirate Urls means what? (Score:1)