bwillard

Officially, up to you if you believe they are following their policies, all of the companies have published statements on how long they keep their data after deletion (which customers broadly want to support recovery if something goes wrong).

- Google: active storage for "around 2 months from the time of deletion" and in backups "for up to 6 months": https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US

- Meta: 90 days: https://www.meta.com/help/quest/609965707113909/

- Apple/iCloud: 30 days: https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/delete-files-mm3b7fcd...

- Microsoft: 30-180 days: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...

So if it ends up that they are storing data longer there can be consequences (GDPR, CCPA, FTC).

>This is an aspirational statement and not a requirement of DTP, so it's problematic from a public perception standpoint to make the claim that DTP provides the user with more control of their data when the control very much remains at the mercy of the data controller. Indeed, this project directly facilitates the opportunity for more data controllers to obtain copies of the subject's data.

I don't really disagree with what you, but I interpret things differently:

Without DTP, if you ask a data controller to delete your data you have to trust that they do. There is very little way to verify that the deletion actually happened, you more or less need to rely on the reputation of the company. Nowadays they all should have published retention statements which state their deletion practices in more details, so that helps some, and allow for some recourse if in fact they aren't following it. But in general for the average user, it comes down mostly to trust.

With DTP, nothing is worse. But users now can get their data into a new service easier.

If DTP had move semantics you still have the same problem as above, it mostly comes down to trust.

It is true that after a copy there are now two copies of the data, which isn't ideal in terms of data minimization. But because of the reasons I outline previously, I think it is important to keep deletion as a separate action from copy. I do think that after a copy the option to delete the data should be presented to the user prominently to make that as easy as possible if that is what they want to do.

So DTP isn't trying to solve every problem, but my take is that it makes some things better without making anything else significantly worse, so it's a net win.

> Can you clarify whether you are saying that the DTP Project will honor takedown requests from parties targeted by DTP tooling?

DTP doesn't really store data, so I don't think it is scope for a traditional takedown request. But I think more to the spirit of the question, yes if a service doesn't want to grant a DTP host a API key, or revoked an API, we wouldn't condone trying to work around that.

(One super detailed note, DTP is just an open source project, and doesn't operate any production code. A Hosting Entity can download/run the code. A Hosting Entity could be a company letting users transfer data in or out, or a user running DTP locally. Each Hosting Entity is responsible for acquiring API keys for all the services they want to interact with; including agreeing to and complying with any restrictions that that service might impose for access to their API.)

> Can you explain the business drivers that incentivize these companies to provide parity between their import and export capabilities? Does the DTP Project require parity between these capabilities?

This is a little bit of a bet on our part. I think Google has demonstrated, through its almost decade long investment in Takeout, that giving users more control over their data leads to greater user trust and that is good for business.

As for requiring parity, we cover this a bit in the white paper, but as you say, we recognize the reciprocity is key, and we need to incentive services to invest equally in import and export otherwise the whole thing falls apart.

Right now the stance we are taking is the reciprocity is strongly encouraged and we will be collection stats/metrics to try to measure it so we can name and shame folks that aren't following that. We hope that by providing transparency around different service's practices in this area will allow users to make informed decisions about where to store their data.

An interesting thought experiment in this area is that if a user wants to transfer data from service A to service B, but service B doesn't allow export back out, what should service A do? Ideally you force service B to support export, but on the other hand the user should be in control, and who is service A to say no. Its almost putting the good of an individual user against the good of the ecosystem.

We are hoping that as the project, and the large portability ecosystem, evolves there emerges some kind of neutral governance model that can help mediate some of these issues. It is problematic for service A to decide that question, but a neutral group representing the interests of users will have more legitimacy in making these tough questions.

Super welcoming :).

Re: Java, ya its in the roadmap that the adapters should be language agnostic. Forcing them all into one language, regardless of what it is, is kind of lame.

Check out https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/blob/master/... for ways to stay in contact with us and start contributing.

Howdy, (I work on DTP)

I wanted to provide my thinking on some of these very valid wories,

Re: Copy vs. Move: This was a conscious choice that I think has a solid backing in two things: 1) In our user research for Takeout, the majority of users who user Takeout don't do it to leave Google. We suspect that the same will be true for DTP, users will want to try out a new service, or user a complementary service, instead of a replacement. 2) Users should absolutely be able to delete their data once they copy it. However we think that separating the two is better for the user. For instance you want to make sure the user has a chance to verify the fidelity of the data at the destination. It would be terrible if a user ported their photos to a new provider and the new provider down-sampled them and originals were automatically deleted.

Re: Scraping Its true that DTP can use API of companies that are 'participating' in DTP. But we don't do it by scraping their UIs. We do it like any other app developer, asking for an API key, which that service is free to decline to give. One of the foundational principals we cover in the white paper is that the source service maintain control over who, how, and and when to give the data out via their API. So if they aren't interesteed in their data being used via DTP, that is absolutely their choice.

Re: Economics As with all future looking statements we'll have to wait and see how it works out. But I'll give one antidote on why I don't think this will happen. Google Takeout (which I also work on) allows users to export their data to OneDrive, DropBox, and Box (as well as Google Drive). One of the reasons we wanted to make DTP is we were tired of dealing with other peoples APIs, as it doesn't scale well. Google should build adapters for Google, and Microsoft should build adapters for Microsoft. So with Takeout we tried the specialized transport method, but it was a lot of work, so we went with the DTP approach specifically to try to avoid having specialized transports.

DTP is still in the early phases, and I would encourage you, and everyone else, to get involved in the project (https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project) and help shape the direction of the project.

Howdy (I work on DTP),

I'd say suspicion is always wanted with things like this. If you know of other services you would like to see data transfer to/from, please let us know, we want this be open to everyone, big and small, and are looking for suggestions.

FWIW, the team that is building this at Google is the same team that builds Takeout, so we've have been trying to give users useful tools for leaving Google a while now. We think giving users the ability to directly move data to a new service provider is the next evolution of the Takeout ethos about not locking users in.

It turns out reports of the Data Liberation Front demise have been greatly exaggerated. We are still very actively improving Google Takeout[0] as well as developing other products[1]. The thing that didn't last was running a quasi-official Twitter account, perhaps without official blessing.

Its true that the Data Liberation Front did start as a group of 20%ers, but like the much less successful GMail, we got turned in a real team and now we have reorgs and TPS and everything.

[0] Check out the new My Activity service as an example of some of the new data we have added: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/my_activi...

[1] https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/12/09/google-unveils-gr...

I am having trouble figuring out how in the world they can make the numbers work.

- The lowest possible rates I've seen for personal loans are ~9%.

- From the article: over 50 years the "cumulative divorce rate of ever-married women approached 40 percent". - 22% of divorces are caused by financial dificulty (https://www.institutedfa.com/Leading-Causes-Divorce/), so assume there is no money to get back there.

So for an investor to think giving out this type of loan is better than a standard personal loan the minimum rates they could offer would be 9 / .6 (stay married) / .8 (already bankrupt) = ~18.75%.

And there are all kind of unfavorable terms in this loan:

- it's a bullet loan so there is no incremental income stream (at least until the divorce)

- you have to track people's marital status to see when loans are due

So for the best qualified people you have to charge ~18.75% to come close to breaking even on the returns from a normal personal loan at which point you start having to worry about usury laws that cap the interest that can be charged.

Maybe their algorithm is just going to select for couples with high credit rating that they think will get divorced soon. But once it becomes known that getting approved for one of these loans is a strong signal of getting divorced it seems like people would shy away from them.

This is a very nice collection of Buffett QnAs.

It would be interesting to see these in a timeline to see how his various answers have changed (or not) over time.

It's true the sales people do out number us here in Chicago, but we do have O(100) engineers in the office. We are working on lots of cool stuff: Ads, Search, and Privacy to name a couple.

It does, there was a lot of debate on whether it should or not. If you have strong opinions one way or the other I would love to hear them as we are open to changing that behavior.

If you don't want that behavior, or just want to export part of your drive (or photos) collection you can expand that product in the Takeout UI and just select certain folders.

Sorry about that. Did you try the move to drive option? One of the reasons we added the ability to move the finished archive to Drive was to allow users with unreliable internet connections to use the Drive Sync tool to sync the finished download down to their computer. I know it is a little inconvenient but it should make it possible to download a large archive over an unreliable connection.

(I work on the Takeout team)

When you create the Takeout or when you try to download the archive?

Just as an FYI Takeout's zip files are limited to 2GB (for compatibility reasons) so you'll actually get a couple zip files, if you want just one file you need to pick one of the other archive formats.

No Takeout was affected by the outage as well unfortunately.

We are rolling this feature out slowly, right now only about 1% of people have access to Takeout's of GMail. But we hope to increase it to 100%, including Google Apps accounts (if your administrator hasn't blocked it) over the next couple weeks.

This may be a myth. Nanex (http://www.nanex.net/) does a lot of detailed analysis of the HFT. Their view, and it is supported by a lot of data and many very detailed, if not intuitive graphs, is that HTF does not help liquidity.

I agree it is complicated and busy, on the other hand I hate having to refresh a CAPTCHA 20 time to find one I can do.

My two concerns would be it seem to load pretty slow for me (5-10 seconds). And what do people without a mouse do? I know there aren't a lot of people with this problem but any organization that has to comply with ADA or section 508 are going to care about it.

Just signed up, couple thoughts:

- I think it is pretty clear what you do, so that is good

- The left right buttons on the homepage weren't working for me

- after signing up its weird to see some red text "You're 33% of the way there...", it makes me think something went wrong.

- its also a little weird that I have to add my e-mail address again to create my first notification, maybe that should be pre-populated with the address I signed up with to save a step when signing up.

- I got 2 e-mails every time (signup, e-mail verification, notification)

But it looks cool, I will give it a try on some of our pages, nice work.

Hey guys, this is a little extension of the game posted on Friday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138712 hopefully people find it fun.

Hi guys, X-stream.ly is a push messaging PaaS that requires no servers to use.

We'd love for people to check it out and give us your feedback.

Thanks

I disagree that it is the opposite. In fact I think it is more like LucasFilm is saying Just Sue Me. From the article Seth (I am assuming he is a reliable source as I know nothing about the film industry) seems to think that if LucasFilms was sued that they would lose (or settle), but luckily people, specifically Darth, are either to lazy or the amount they would win wouldn't cover the legal expenses of suing. So in effect LucasFilms is pretending like the risk of litigation isn't there and it is working out OK for them so far. Just like the experiences of PUD.

My understanding is that the target bonus is more in the 15% range but that there are multipliers (company and personal) that most of the time turn that ~15% into the 30-40%.

Awesome tool, great idea, great implementation,

Couple ideas: 1) On the CPU and HDD graphs if I just keep my mouse over the dot the tool tip blinks in and out, if I mouse over the tool tip it stops blinking (this is with chrome)

2) I like the review info on CPUs it would be handy to have it for other components (from new egg or amazon ratings perhaps)

3) It would be useful to have more categories for mother boards (e.g. RAID support, USB 3 support, ect...)

4) Adding a social component would be handy. Let people build, share and vote on builds. Basically I would like see the top three builds for a development machine that the rest of community has selected.

5) I would prefer if the filters on the right were defaulted to collapsed if everything is checked in them.

6) It would be nice if the graph resized, If i just select SSD's on the HDD $/Capacity graph all the data points are on the left 1/8th of the screen, it would be nice for the graph to resize based on what data points are being shown.

Great job I will definitely use this to spec out my next build.