Did Google really just say they'll delete accounts "together with all data"? 😅

pollodiabolo@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 120 points –
32

@pollodiabolo, it's interesting that whenever you post, you get boosts from the same set of accounts that downvote every other thread that trends towards the top. And all this happens roughly within a 10 minute stretch! Incidentally, this happens when those other accounts post too! How strange amirite? Wonder if there's an explanation?

@journalism_died @ishitwhite @muftiboy @kilkennygriffin and way more than I can tag here

EDIT: A few more - @jeremyfurzen @riseupagainstthem @ruse-of-metacarpi @johnson_waters @cazzodicristo @at-fieldu

I suspect a bunch more just to be clear, this is not a comprehensive list. But mentioned accounts are beyond a reasonable doubt either the same person or different people collectively vote manipulating.

Thanks, gonna block all these!

That wouldn't help you much sadly. This person has at least 10-15 accounts (that I can reasonably suspect based on their boosting history) and they will definitely make even more as people get to know about them. You can expect an increase in shills as kbin becomes more popular too lol.

It's nice to know some of the posts I've seen those accounts downvoted aren't by people who're really downvoting what the content is about.

Shill op?

OP tryna karma farm by boosting the fuck out of their posts when they're new posts (from any account), so that they make it near the top of the hot section and then they downvote the top few posts so that theirs gets pushed even further, seen them doing it a bunch of times. What a loser lmao.

"Karma farming" isn't even possible on Lemmy. There's literally no total of up- and downvotes displayed anywhere. And having a meme artificially pushed to the top without reason seems to be nonsensical to me.

It's a kbin account, we have reputation points here, similar to Reddit karma. Even if they post to a lemmy community from kbin, upvotes and boosts will give them karma

There was no point to it on Reddit either but that obviously did not stop people.

Yeah, it always baffled me. At least with memes, etc. It makes sense with political content, for example. But memes? Those internet points must really trigger the dopamine.

Someone coming from reddit that doesn't understand how lemmy works? Will it be a self correcting problem once they realize there's absolutely nothing to be gained by shilling posts? Will be interesting to see how this plays out. On a related note, does anyone know if you block a user are their votes still included in the totals you see for posts and comments?

I saw similar patterns in politics for news articles about politicians. I assumed it was also a shill op

If you read it closely, they say they "reserve the right to" delete the accounts/data after 2 years of inactivity. They don't actually say they will.

ohhh now this makes more sense than the misleading headline. they're just saying "we wanna keep your data, but we also don't wanna be liable in case us having your data ever becomes a problem to us, so we reserve the right to get rid of it whenever we want for no reason and claim we never had it in the first place

Do you really think they deleted or they just cut your access?

Oh, they said that they will:

We are going to roll this out slowly and carefully, with plenty of notice:

  • While the policy takes effect today, it will not immediately impact users with an inactive account — the earliest we will begin deleting accounts is December 2023.
  • We will take a phased approach, starting with accounts that were created and never used again.
  • Before deleting an account, we will send multiple notifications over the months leading up to deletion, to both the account email address and the recovery email (if one has been provided).

Source: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/

Once the raw emails have been fed into their ad targeting system, the content of those emails loses the vast majority of its value. Storage is cheap, but not free and inactive accounts have particularly low value. So of course they'll delete the data.

Ahh this makes more sense... I would think they would still keep the raw data... Never know about future use cases.

ohhh now this makes more sense than the misleading headline. they're just saying "we wanna keep your data, but we also don't wanna be liable in case us having your data ever becomes a problem to us, so we reserve the right to get rid of it whenever we want for no reason and claim we never had it in the first place