Be aware: You will not be able to delete from Google Docs any image embedded in your Presentations
Google launched this week the capability to store in addition to Docs and Spreadsheets also Presentations on Google Docs. This new capability is easy to use and very valuable. But a simple test has shown that there is right now (September 2007) an issue with Presentations on Google Docs that you maybe should know of:
You will currently not be able to delete from Google Docs any image that is embedded in your Presentations.
Evidence:
If you click on this link https://docs.google.com/File?id=dchrr3kn_185hzvxfd4
an image that was embedded in my presentation “Presentation 3″ will be downloaded (as long as Google has not fixed this issue).
I deleted “Presentation 3″ at the 19th of September 2007 from Google Docs and I also emptied the trash. According to the Google Docs User Interface “Presentation 3″ is not existing anymore.
There is nothing that I as a user and owner of “Presentation 3″ can do (based on the Google Docs User Interface) to delete the image that was embedded in “Presentation 3″. But, and this is the issue, the image that was part of “Presentation 3″ still can be accessed through the URL above.
Discussion:
This issue is not new: In July I shown this problem to Google ( you will find in this article a video that is describing the details of how you can get to the specific URL so that you can test this all yourself ) and I understood that they are taking this issue seriously. Still Google seems to feel comfortable in launching Presentations with the same issue.
To be very clear: this is not at all a catastrophe. But it is creating for me a limitation on what I feel is acceptable to put on Google Docs. My presentations usually contain a lot of screen-shots and images. If there is an error in these images in a Presentation then I want to be sure that if I delete the Presentation with the wrong information that this wrong information is gone and that this wrong information will never be able to show up again. Because Google is currently not allowing to delete a Presentation completely the value of Google Docs is for me limited.
The “A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web” authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington is asking to give users the ownership of their data on Social Networking sites. I would like to ask for the same Rights for Users for all Internet based Services (not only Social Networking sites). Ownership includes obviously also the ability to completely remove my data from a Service.
I know from the feedback for the article about the same issue with Google Docs that a lot of people are concerned about this. Therefore it would be good to find answers to the following questions:
- How can users motivate a Service Provider like Google to comply with a “Bill of Rights for Users”?
- Is the only alternative to search (or even worse: wait) for another Service Provider that will put the basic Rights of Users as first priority?
There is a more fundamental and basic question behind this:
- How can a Service Provider guarantee or make me just believe that a file or any of my data is really deleted (and not just better hidden) after I requested its deletion ?
Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, proposed recently to follow the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Privacy Framework as a global privacy standard.This privacy framework covers also deletion as a topic:
VIII. Access and Correction
23. Individuals should be able to:
…
c) challenge the accuracy of information relating to them and, if
possible and as appropriate, have the information rectified, completed,
amended or deleted.
…
I am therefore assuming that Google will take this issue as a whole seriously and not just fix it with a workaround but instead solve it as soon as possible from the ground up.
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September 21st, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Issues explained. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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