Pages in topic:   < [1 2 3] >
Files lost forever - Anyone to blame?
Thread poster: José Henrique Lamensdorf
Jennifer Forbes
Jennifer Forbes  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:05
French to English
+ ...
In memoriam
Some agencies ... Mar 26, 2015

A few of the agencies I work with (but certainly not all) have a clause in their confidentiality agreements saying that the translator must delete all material received from and sent to the agency as soon as requested. I don't like this clause because I normally keep much of the stuff I translate either out of interest or to refer to when doing similar jobs. I particularly don't want to delete anything I've done until I've been paid for it.
I don't know how an agency would know whether or
... See more
A few of the agencies I work with (but certainly not all) have a clause in their confidentiality agreements saying that the translator must delete all material received from and sent to the agency as soon as requested. I don't like this clause because I normally keep much of the stuff I translate either out of interest or to refer to when doing similar jobs. I particularly don't want to delete anything I've done until I've been paid for it.
I don't know how an agency would know whether or not I'd deleted everything, but there it is ...
Collapse


 
Phil Hand
Phil Hand  Identity Verified
China
Local time: 20:05
Chinese to English
Some clients take deletion seriously Mar 26, 2015

One of my agency clients regularly sends file deletion reminders, to which you actually have to reply to say that you've deleted the files from completed jobs. With other clients, I'm more of a hoarder, but I certainly don't find Jose's deletion policy to be particularly odd.

 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:05
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
+ ...
you are misreading the terms (see the red) Mar 26, 2015

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

Michael Beijer wrote:

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

On the other hand, any translator using Gmail, Yahoo, or some other free e-mail service should be prepared, in case the content they sent or received via e-mail finds its way to the public via Google, Yahoo, etc. Their service agreement states that any content going through there may be indexed and published.


José, that's nonsense. You don't actually believe that Google has the right to publish my private emails publicly. Where on earth did you hear that? They reserve the right to use your data to improve their service, not to publish it online!


Found this on the web:
7. Privacy. As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.




This applies to 99% of the companies in the world (and you probably wouldn't want to deal with a company this didn't apply to). It doesn't mean they are allowed to publish your emails.

Michael


 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:05
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
+ ...
just chance Mar 26, 2015

Anton Konashenok wrote:

This obviously does not mean that they may publish such information. Obviously, they may not.

I don't have a link, but I remember someone writing about a translation job that passed through Google. It was not published anywhere in the open, but sentence pairs from it resurfaced in Google Translation.


That's just chance. There are many reasons identical or almost identical strings might show up in Google Translate output. Also, GT doesn't store your target text. Unless your computer is infected with a virus

Michael


 
José Henrique Lamensdorf
José Henrique Lamensdorf  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 09:05
English to Portuguese
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
In memoriam
Court order Mar 26, 2015

Thomas T. Frost wrote:

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

Their service agreement states that any content going through there may be indexed and published.

if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order),



Every single company or person has to hand over such information if requested to do so under such circumstances, whether or not they write it in their T&C.

This obviously does not mean that they may publish such information. Obviously, they may not.


A court order will be issued upon granting some contending party's request. The request must be specific on where to find anything.

I mean, no judge would allow any law enforcement agency to scan ALL of Gmail to find evidence incriminating someone under investigation. Note that the snippet I included says that...
Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities.


Some countries may require additional legal procedures to allow a foreign law enforcement authority to do anything there.

If Gmail has scanned and indexed all messages and attachments some user has sent/received, they must comply and use that index to provide the required information.


For instance, as I am a sworn translator in Brazil, I must keep on 400-page bound books (the law is ancient, 1943) all sworn translations I've issued since my day one. My surviving family members are expected to surrender these books to the supervising agency upon my demise. (I keep them in electronic files on disks by my own free will.)

However I'll require a specific court order to provide a copy of a certain sworn translation, if requested by anyone other than the original client.

Envision this...
Mr. Silva is closing some international deal, and was requested to provide evidence of his financial status overseas. So he asks me to do a sworn translation into English of his Brazilian income tax return.
His ex-wife's lawyer gets wary of that, files a lawsuit for significantly raising her alimony, and gets a court order to secure a copy of that translation from me.
Fortunately, I am not required to, and don't keep source documents with me. No problem, another sworn translator could back-translate that into Portuguese, so it would be acceptable in court.
I'll first advise Mr. Silva, so he can appeal, based on the non-disclosure law on income tax returns, before providing that copy to the ex-Mrs. Silva's attorney.


 
Tina Vonhof (X)
Tina Vonhof (X)
Canada
Local time: 06:05
Dutch to English
+ ...
Never delete Mar 26, 2015

I never delete any files, however I do delete old emails once the job has been accepted and paid. I keep files for the current year on my computer but regularly save them on a USB drive; any files from past years are also on a USB drive. I don't put my trust in any web-based storage facility.

I also keep scanned copies of my personal files, such as insurance, passports, credit cards, and pictures on USB drives, so that in case of an emergency (fire, flood, etc.) all I need to do is
... See more
I never delete any files, however I do delete old emails once the job has been accepted and paid. I keep files for the current year on my computer but regularly save them on a USB drive; any files from past years are also on a USB drive. I don't put my trust in any web-based storage facility.

I also keep scanned copies of my personal files, such as insurance, passports, credit cards, and pictures on USB drives, so that in case of an emergency (fire, flood, etc.) all I need to do is grab my USBs and my toothbrush and I'm ready to go.
Collapse


 
brg (X)
brg (X)
Netherlands
I am also a bit paranoid Mar 26, 2015

And that is why I don't use Dropbox as a matter of principle, but I save my files regularly and save them once a year, and keep them during several years (5 - 10) on an external hard drive which is stored in a very safe place. It happens too often that a client wants to recover an old file, and besides tax inspectors could require them.

And further because one of my family members got his laptop stolen, with all personal details of the employees of his firm, mostly employment contra
... See more
And that is why I don't use Dropbox as a matter of principle, but I save my files regularly and save them once a year, and keep them during several years (5 - 10) on an external hard drive which is stored in a very safe place. It happens too often that a client wants to recover an old file, and besides tax inspectors could require them.

And further because one of my family members got his laptop stolen, with all personal details of the employees of his firm, mostly employment contracts and Financial data. He did have a copy of these files on a hard drive, but it was in the same suitcase.
He did not get sued however, because his boss had forbidden him to store the data in one of the company's computer for confidentiality reasons, so the error was on both sides. I took months and months to recover the data.


[Edited at 2015-03-26 15:42 GMT]
Collapse


 
Charlotte Farrell
Charlotte Farrell  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:05
Member (2013)
German to English
+ ...
Don't worry Google - this isn't really your fault Mar 26, 2015

Found this on the web:
7. Privacy. As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.


Did you read the entire sentence in the section you quoted? Google may disclose the content of your emails subject to a court order or similar legal request, but not just willy nilly. This doesn't mean that it's made properly public - just that it can be disclosed in exceptional, legal circumstances.

But back on the main topic, I agree with a lot of the other posters that it's probably a bit overkill and paranoid to delete all of your jobs once they're done. The odds of a hacker finding a file and doing something dodgy with it are significantly lower than something like this happening where a job is lost forever - a point practically proven by the fact that this has happened.

Having said that, it's not really your fault in this case as you did inform your client that you were deleting the files. The end client should have downloaded the files while they were still there. But in future I'd say that deleting them is overkill - just make sure everything is stored securely and somewhere password-protected and only delete things where explicitly instructed and this shouldn't happen again.


 
José Henrique Lamensdorf
José Henrique Lamensdorf  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 09:05
English to Portuguese
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
In memoriam
Yes, I read it Mar 26, 2015

Charlotte Farrell wrote:


Found this on the web:
7. Privacy. As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.


Did you read the entire sentence in the section you quoted? Google may disclose the content of your emails subject to a court order or similar legal request, but not just willy nilly. This doesn't mean that it's made properly public - just that it can be disclosed in exceptional, legal circumstances.


the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time


It's the "then nobody could see it, now they do".

In the ancient BBS days, I adopted a nom de plume, Stanley Atwood. Evidence of Google snooping everywhere is that, since early year (but not earlier) anyone writing me FROM a Gmail account (including my wife!) will have my real name automatically switched to Stan's, even though they are sending a message to an e-mail address that was always registered to my actual name.

For the record, neither I (Jose) nor Stan (the same guy) ever had a Gmail account.


 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:05
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
+ ...
Lost in translation? Mar 26, 2015

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

Thomas T. Frost wrote:

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

Their service agreement states that any content going through there may be indexed and published.

if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order),



Every single company or person has to hand over such information if requested to do so under such circumstances, whether or not they write it in their T&C.

This obviously does not mean that they may publish such information. Obviously, they may not.


A court order will be issued upon granting some contending party's request. The request must be specific on where to find anything.

I mean, no judge would allow any law enforcement agency to scan ALL of Gmail to find evidence incriminating someone under investigation. Note that the snippet I included says that...
Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities.


Some countries may require additional legal procedures to allow a foreign law enforcement authority to do anything there.

If Gmail has scanned and indexed all messages and attachments some user has sent/received, they must comply and use that index to provide the required information.


For instance, as I am a sworn translator in Brazil, I must keep on 400-page bound books (the law is ancient, 1943) all sworn translations I've issued since my day one. My surviving family members are expected to surrender these books to the supervising agency upon my demise. (I keep them in electronic files on disks by my own free will.)

However I'll require a specific court order to provide a copy of a certain sworn translation, if requested by anyone other than the original client.

Envision this...
Mr. Silva is closing some international deal, and was requested to provide evidence of his financial status overseas. So he asks me to do a sworn translation into English of his Brazilian income tax return.
His ex-wife's lawyer gets wary of that, files a lawsuit for significantly raising her alimony, and gets a court order to secure a copy of that translation from me.
Fortunately, I am not required to, and don't keep source documents with me. No problem, another sworn translator could back-translate that into Portuguese, so it would be acceptable in court.
I'll first advise Mr. Silva, so he can appeal, based on the non-disclosure law on income tax returns, before providing that copy to the ex-Mrs. Silva's attorney.


I'm not entirely sure I understand what you are trying to say here. I think something might also have gone wrong with the nested quotes.


 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:05
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
+ ...
Never the twain shall meet Mar 26, 2015

We can argue until the cows come home, and we'd probably never agree or get anywhere.

In my humble opinion, people can generally be divided into two camps: those who trust Google/Microsoft/Dropbox, etc, and those who don't. José belongs to the latter camp, as does "Tom from London" (or was that "Tom in London"? sorry Tom!), who also won't use anything with the word "cloud" in it and who deletes all his email from the server so the CIA or aliens don't intercept them.

I
... See more
We can argue until the cows come home, and we'd probably never agree or get anywhere.

In my humble opinion, people can generally be divided into two camps: those who trust Google/Microsoft/Dropbox, etc, and those who don't. José belongs to the latter camp, as does "Tom from London" (or was that "Tom in London"? sorry Tom!), who also won't use anything with the word "cloud" in it and who deletes all his email from the server so the CIA or aliens don't intercept them.

I belong to the former. I am a very happy user of Dropbox, Gmail (Google Apps for Work), etc. Happy as a clam. They have saved me a lot of trouble on many occasions and make my life easier on a daily basis, as they should. That's the whole point of technological progress! I have never lost a file or an email, or had a problem with my email provider. I have never been sued because I compromised the security/confidentiality/privacy of a client's data in any way. None of my Highly Confidential Translations have ever been sold to the Ruskies (or is that Russkies, Tom?).

Michael
Collapse


 
José Henrique Lamensdorf
José Henrique Lamensdorf  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 09:05
English to Portuguese
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
In memoriam
In a nutshell... Mar 26, 2015

Michael Beijer wrote:

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you are trying to say here. I think something might also have gone wrong with the nested quotes.


... I mean that many court orders are not so dead open-and-shut as often seen on TV series, where it usually involves a murder investigation.

If whoever has the evidence took the trouble to index it for any other purposes (I mean Google indexing e-mail and attachment contents for advertising purposes), denying to use that index to disclose the desired info that caused someone to petition a court order would be tantamount to concealing evidence or obstruction of justice.

On the other hand, if an e-mail service simply passed on the e-mails, attachments, whatever, it could take them months to e-rummage all their servers, searching for that required piece of evidence.


Back to the case at hand, I read on the press that one company in that very trade did sabotage a competitor, so there is actually covert warfare going on. In such cases, paranoia becomes "advisable".


 
Phil Hand
Phil Hand  Identity Verified
China
Local time: 20:05
Chinese to English
Third way Mar 26, 2015

Michael Beijer wrote:

In my humble opinion, people can generally be divided into two camps: those who trust Google/Microsoft/Dropbox, etc, and those who don't.

I've said this before, and I'll mention it again. There is a third way which I find reasonable: like Michael, I don't think cloud services are any more of a practical security risk thank my email, home computer, etc. But I do think they might be more of a legal risk, and in some cases are worth avoiding for that reason. Some of the agency NDAs I've signed have specified no cloud storage for their documents. But I think in five years everyone will have got used to the idea and we will all be clouding quite happily.


 
Radian Yazynin
Radian Yazynin  Identity Verified
Local time: 15:05
Member (2004)
English to Russian
+ ...
Until we have Mar 26, 2015

Phil Hand wrote:
... and we will all be clouding quite happily.

new challenges


 
Thomas T. Frost
Thomas T. Frost  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 12:05
Danish to English
+ ...
What exactly is a "cloud" service? Mar 26, 2015

Phil Hand wrote:

Some of the agency NDAs I've signed have specified no cloud storage for their documents.


Interesting. So do they define what exactly a "cloud" service is? As I see it, it is essentially a computer that is connected to the Internet, just like your work/home computer is connected to the Internet and just like the clients' computers are connected to the Internet. So for some reason, they seem to believe that the security protecting computers with "cloud" written on them is automatically inferior to the security of any other computer.

Reality is probably the opposite, since a professional computing service provider is more likely to have advanced knowledge about how to implement a high level of security than the agency and a translator. Sony seems to be an exception with their systems being hacked regularly. Of course, if Madonna opens a ‘cloud’ account and uses “Madonna” as password and her account is hacked, then it’s hardly the cloud provider’s fault.

I recently read claims that apparent spyware claimed to origin from a western intelligence service had been located on ‘secret’ areas of hard disks. Others have claimed that the NSA had secured a ‘backdoor’ into Windows 8. People could also just break into your home and steal your computer. 100 % security doesn’t exist.

As for agencies that demand that the files be deleted after the work, it would be wise to find out if the translator doesn’t violate the laws if his or her own country by doing so. It would also be wise to insert a clause that makes it impossible for them to make any liability claims after the moment you delete the files. Otherwise, they may make it impossible to defend yourself if that should ever be needed. And it would need to be studied if such a clause would be accepted by a court. Agencies look after their interests, but we also need to look after our own interests.


 
Pages in topic:   < [1 2 3] >


To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:


You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »

Files lost forever - Anyone to blame?







TM-Town
Manage your TMs and Terms ... and boost your translation business

Are you ready for something fresh in the industry? TM-Town is a unique new site for you -- the freelance translator -- to store, manage and share translation memories (TMs) and glossaries...and potentially meet new clients on the basis of your prior work.

More info »
Wordfast Pro
Translation Memory Software for Any Platform

Exclusive discount for ProZ.com users! Save over 13% when purchasing Wordfast Pro through ProZ.com. Wordfast is the world's #1 provider of platform-independent Translation Memory software. Consistently ranked the most user-friendly and highest value

Buy now! »