

Ask HN: What if your service ends up hosting explicit content? - spongeblob

I&#x27;m running a service which parses the content of text files from GitHub. To do this, we have to clone the content to our servers.<p>What are our duties (European, specifically UK) regarding data that may contain explicit information?<p>We happened to come across this content from our logs that contain the repository name and since the account broke our terms of service, we&#x27;ve terminated the account and removed the directory from our servers.<p>The concerns we now have is that:<p>1. The content was, at some point, stored on our hosting provider. We&#x27;ve removed it once we came across the content, but would we be at fault for not recognising sooner?
2. The text files were accessed via CloudFlare, we don&#x27;t &quot;host&quot; the content per-se, but provide access to the analysed files.
3. Even though the content has gone, we still have a history in the logs that we had this content.<p>What do we do? We&#x27;re not technically hosting the data, it&#x27;s stored for analyses and speed - you cannot access the raw files directly. We&#x27;ve removed the account because it does violate both ours and our service provider terms.
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muhpirat
So like nostradamons say it, go to a lawyer.

My team handle it so: We are not responsible for things user do on our
plattform. If we or another user find such things, we remove the content from
our website and block the user and/or the origin. If we think the content is
not only against our ToS because the law, we fill a abuse notice and also
contact our lawyer and do some further steps.

So at first: Go to a lawyer 2nd: For your company you should have a plan for
such things.

-MuhPirat

 _yeah_ Bad english, sry.

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nostrademons
Consult a lawyer - HN is not good for legal advice.

