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.

Faceless corporations should be forced to do so via the law!

I'm reasonably confident you literally mean the corporations have to do the archiving since the article is about a corporation not doing it. Philosophically you just picked a random subgroup in society to do the archiving. If we're going to pick people who have to do this by law, why not force the archivists to do it? They've already got the skills and experience. Probably willing to do it voluntarily if there is some money in it from the government, but I suppose if we're committed to forcing people to do it there can be some sort of taskmaster drag them back to the archives if they try to sneak out early.

It's kinda interesting, since many countries already have taxpayer paid archivers.

Not sure if the laws have changed, but every book published over here in my country needed to send a few copies to our "national library" for archival.

edit: https://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/informacije/obvezni-izvod-fizicni-... (yeah.. google translte it)

Ironic considering it seems to be a change in law that spurred this action in the first place.

If it's worth saving from a societal standpoint, maybe a third option of funding and maintaining a public archive could be taken. Wild idea, we can tax the faceless corporation to pay for it.

You really want mandatory data retention laws? Think about the side effects of this.

First of all, any such regulation is a regressive tax on small businesses. Small companies will find it harder to comply than large ones. The cost to Google would be trivial but for a small startup it might kill them, especially if retaining data isn't important to their business.

Secondly, there are privacy implications. It's sometimes good when data is purged.

In general, this point is absolutely correct, and regulatory capture as a mechanism to stifle smaller competitors is shockingly common.

But in the case of requiring brokers of political advertising to maintain transparency about the reach of that advertising - that seems far more palatable and far more in the public interest. If you want to play in that specific sandbox, you owe accountability to the public at a level where dynamics across election cycles can be analyzed.

Of course, all this is just a thought exercise, since the background of the original post is that Google is removing its archive because its response to the EU regulatory environment has been to pull out of the political ads market entirely on a go-forward basis. Regulations did not require it to maintain any historical archives, apparently, and so the natural consequence would be that Google had no reason to air its historical dirty laundry with no benefit to them at all.

"Brokers of political advertising" is just speech.

"just speech" is just speech too, right?

I seem to be missing the point here. Are you claiming that this term can not be applied categorically in a realistic fashion? I think that's wrong.

All communications are speech in one way, but whether this should be considered equivalent (from a regulatory perspective) to an individual's speech was not apparent to 4 out of 9 Supreme Court justices in the US in 2010 during Citizen's United - and, certainly, this opinion does not bind (or speak for) the entire world's description of speech.

I agree with what you said here.

I do think that with a slight modification, OP's statement can be improved in a practical way.

"Regulations that allow consumers to export their data should be more comprehensive and standardized."

I'll also note that many of these big services do allow you to export user data fairly easily.

What are the privacy implications in a database of advertising, an activity specifically intended to make information as public as possible?

Pretty sure GP was being sarcastic. But in any case, there's no reason we can't recognize that Google and other such massively-influential companies are hugely different from a small business and act accordingly.

>First of all, any such regulation is a regressive tax on small businesses.

your first argument is that it harms small businesses

it's really not an issue to set up laws such that small businesses do not have to follow them. the DMA is a perfect example

your second argument is that there are privacy implications

okay then require the data to be anonymised

I think your comment exemplifies why people have an issue with "just regulate it" because there are endless nitpicks and carve-outs that seem arbitrary and will likely have unintended consequences. It's easy to go "then just do this" but in reality the government and private sector can only deal with so much from an enforcement and compliance perspective.

saying "businesses over a certain size must comply" and "data must be anonymised" are not endless nitpicks, they're simple rules that can be and are regularly enforced the world over. I think your comment exemplifies why people have so much distaste for the corporate sphere and its disingenuous ideology in general

We need to start working on the premise that large corporations are different beasts than small businesses. I mean as a people of the world as a whole.

There is a tipping point somewhere and that is definitely up for conversation but we need to pick a point and start making sure regulation hits where it does good.

Frankly, the outcomes of both "regulate it" and "don't regulate it" have already both been captured by the biggest offenders to use as they wish.

For political advertisement via the internet? I absolute want mandatory data retention and transparency. It must be clear what was published using which targeting criteria by whom and when. 100%. Our societies are in grave danger.

Say you build a hobby website for your photos and allow people to comment on them. Boom, now you are responsible for keeping archives for other people posting there and cannot take your site down. Why do you think this is correct?

This is about political advertisements, not about a hobby website for photos. As a society, we need to hold those that influence and track us, to be responsible and transparent.