Maybe get your government to do this, instead of expecting some random company to do it for free indefinitely? This article could well be entitled "Google were the only people bothering to record our history."
Disappointing but i don't see any foul play from google like the headline kind of insinuates. Anyway their product support is notoriously fickle so why would you expect anything more of them. TLDR a policy change at google made the authors hobby more difficult or impossible because he didn't make any contingencies. Specifically they deleted political ad history for the EU.
To people interested in archiving this, it's still in the 7 days time history in BigQuery Public Dataset:
For instance:
SELECT
country
FROM
`bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads.geo_spend`
FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 6 DAY)
GROUP BY country;
Yeah hindsight is gonna be 20-20 as always, but in general if it's not on your hard drive, you have very little control over if and when it is deleted.
First thing you should do if you find useful data is to archive it somehow.
The EU has new regulations on political ad transparency and targeting coming in this year with likely fines for non compliance.
I imagine many of these old ads do not comply with the new rules so Google removed everything just to eliminate the risk of a fine or enforcement action.
If these are important, people shouldn't rely on the ad agency archiving them.
Archivist here. Google is not an archive. Neither is Tumblr or Flickr or any other platform that might delete your content at any time. They're companies and it's their job to make money. This is why my profession exists. We don't make money, which is why we're not well funded, but we have a whole lot of training, technical knowledge, and professional ethics around saving information and making it accessible. If you want to preserve your records, talk to an archivist because you can't assume some faceless corporation will do it for you.
The audacity of people to think others should store data for them indefinitely is unbelievable. You had years to back this up if you really cared about it, and most probably don’t. Cry more.
And history isn’t “erased”. It still happened. It’s up to you to remember it.
Is the historical aspect of the archive coincidental? It seems like Google archived ads; and those ads provided historical context. How does this information get supplemented by other historical data? I wonder if it will be relevant to know that an ad in the US talked about people eating their pets, not trying to be sarcastic it is a real part of history.
Guys, this isn't Twitter, we don't have to be obtuse just to ramp up engagement.
Right or wrong (evidently wrong), the common assumption has historically been that the Internet giants like Google assumed the mantle of facilitating, and to a lesser degree, preserving, the digital commons. Having your own backups and general data practices is still going to be the best strategy, but I don't think it's fair or good faith to act like everyone who got bit by this and similar instances is just an idiot.
Everyone here is commenting on the fact that you cannot depend on a big company to store backups for you. This is generally fair, but the company in question specifically has the following mission statement:
> Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
At the very least, google has some responsibility in helping out web archivists...
This article reports on the removal of access to the ad archive. No where does it claim the onus is on Google to maintain this data. Most of top level comments here are arguing against a straw man.
This erasure of our political past feels dangerous, for scrutiny, for accountability, for shared memory, for enforcement of our rules - for our democracy.
My goodness, I wonder how long it took them to think this statement up? I imagine they revised it again and again asking the editor "does this sound scary enough?" to the point it bears little resemblance to reality.
Google didn't delete your political history, it deleted it's own. You lost something that was given for free, thus could be taken away at any time.
Apparently it was so important that it would be "dangerous" if it went away but the author couldn't put in a minimal amount of effort to make a copy of it.
This thread is full of comments that miss the fact that political ads are not uploaded to Google for free. Advertising is 99% of the funding that sustains the platform and makes Google oodles of money, and when it no longer suits them (read: doesn't generate profit and might be risky), they're dropping the content.
It'd be one thing if it was 20 petabytes of cat videos, but this is content that Google was literally paid to serve to people.
There must be more to this story given that the political ad archive is still available for many other non-EU countries:
> Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below):
Is there some sort of EU data retention law at play here?
I maintain my own link meta archive. Just because I know that it will stay, but I am aware of link rot. I know also that internet archive exists, and also I know that it works painfully slow.
I want to be able to at least browse headlines and titles about Jeffrey Epstein after 20 years, when they start erasing all history about him.
27 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadFor instance:
SELECT country FROM `bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads.geo_spend` FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 6 DAY) GROUP BY country;
First thing you should do if you find useful data is to archive it somehow.
I imagine many of these old ads do not comply with the new rules so Google removed everything just to eliminate the risk of a fine or enforcement action.
If these are important, people shouldn't rely on the ad agency archiving them.
And history isn’t “erased”. It still happened. It’s up to you to remember it.
Right or wrong (evidently wrong), the common assumption has historically been that the Internet giants like Google assumed the mantle of facilitating, and to a lesser degree, preserving, the digital commons. Having your own backups and general data practices is still going to be the best strategy, but I don't think it's fair or good faith to act like everyone who got bit by this and similar instances is just an idiot.
> Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
At the very least, google has some responsibility in helping out web archivists...
My goodness, I wonder how long it took them to think this statement up? I imagine they revised it again and again asking the editor "does this sound scary enough?" to the point it bears little resemblance to reality.
Google didn't delete your political history, it deleted it's own. You lost something that was given for free, thus could be taken away at any time.
Apparently it was so important that it would be "dangerous" if it went away but the author couldn't put in a minimal amount of effort to make a copy of it.
I'm grateful for the piece regardless if only to inform me that the service exists (and, well — now doesn't for some countries).
If they find important to keep those ads get funding for their project and store it themselves. Ideally without further burdening taxpayers.
It'd be one thing if it was 20 petabytes of cat videos, but this is content that Google was literally paid to serve to people.
The whole discussion is cosmically ironic.
> Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below):
Is there some sort of EU data retention law at play here?
I want to be able to at least browse headlines and titles about Jeffrey Epstein after 20 years, when they start erasing all history about him.
Links:
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - Year 2025
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024 - Year 2024
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - Year 2023
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2022 - Year 2022
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2021 - Year 2021