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Google Drive could soon start locking your files
- KevinThax 5y agoMaybe give 'yandex disk' a try?
- deadalus 5y agoI will never forget that the Christchurch shooting video was automatically deleted from users' PRIVATE Google Drive and Dropbox - no warnings were given and no explanation was presented.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoThey do the same thing for copyrighted material, they can match a hash and nuke a file off the service at the drop of a hat.
- pedro2 5y agodelete the file? not unshare it and keep it on the personal storage?
- fknorangesite 5y agofwiw the article says > These files will be flagged to their owner and restricted automatically, which means they can no longer be shared with other people, and access will be withdrawn from everyone but the owner.
- pedro2 5y agoall articles always say that but non-verifiable comments around the internet say the file is removed from everywhere. I'm trying to confirm this comment: > They removed it after they began using GIFCT to ‘prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.’ All hashed versions of that video was removed from user accounts. > Page 16 : https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...
- pedro2 5y agoWhaaat? Link please
- deadalus 5y agoThey removed it after they began using GIFCT to ‘prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.’ All hashed versions of that video was removed from user accounts. Page 16 : https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?cote=DSTI/CDEP(2019)15/FINAL&docLanguage=En https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...
- yuliyp 5y agoI haven't had my coffee yet, but I'm having trouble understanding your claims (about Google Drive deleting TVEC content) and how they relate to the OECD document you linked. That document does not state that Google (except YouTube) is a member of GIFCT. Further, on page 124 (in "Policies") of the document it states that Google Drive will prevent sharing of files it finds violating, or maybe ban an entire account in some situations. Am I missing something here?
- jart 5y agoThe policy going back to at least 2014 does mention not being allowed to "store" violence and gore. They even say that if it's shocking enough, then no artistic, scientific, educational, or documentary exceptions will allow it to remain on their platforms. I assume that means deletion. It's a different Internet than what many of us grew up with. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505
- srj 5y agoWas it deleted or unshared?
- snarf21 5y agoI wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.
- Zamicol 5y agoAs long as Google is willing to serve binaries, encryption solves this.
- rainbowzootsuit 5y agoBase64 would like to put in a word too. https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271
- SavantIdiot 5y agoThere are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is what Apple does (or rather did) for their cloud scanner. Then there are other non-hash methods, similar to how Shazam determines a song in a noisy room. Poles, zeros, FFTs, there are many other strategies that are fault-tolerant.
- snarf21 5y agoSure but it becomes an arms race. There is also a lot of people that have shown that you can make images of dogs and cats that hash to Apple's hash detector. At some point a white hat is going to start making memes that cause hash collisions. When 300M all violate some hash trigger, it will cause a stir and restart the game.
- kurthr 5y agoSure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).
- beachy 5y agoPerhaps I'm sensitive as a NZer, but would you feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon etc? Though while giving a warning is clearly inappropriate, they should certainly have explained what they did.
- vorpalhex 5y agoThe video of the christchurch shooter is a primary source for a historical event, in the same way that combat footage is. When primary sources are not available to the public then lies have the same footing as truth.
- morpheos137 5y agoRecently I have discovered that google has nuked hundreds of North Korean videos. This upsets me as needless destruction of the historical record. I wonder how people would feel if something like google was around after world war II and censored hundreds of videos of nazi atrocities. It is wrong for a public forum like Youtube or public resource like google drive to restrict content based on subject matter with very few limited exceptions. All political and war footage should be free from restriction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/14/youtube-has-shut-down-more-north-korean-channels-and-researchers-are-livid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/14... Stimme Koreas is now gone too.
- vorpalhex 5y agoIt's never too late to join the digital hoarding initiative.
- morpheos137 5y agoWell it kind of is too late when the historical videos are pulled down and you do not have another source besides Youtube. I am sure that academic and even possibly open source intelligence researchers are similarly frustrated assuming they did not all download the videos many of which had been on the platform for many years.
- mrweasel 5y agoThat eliminate both options for journalists and lawyers. There are professions which could have legitimate reasons for having the material and as terrible as it is, is it actually illegal?
- Meph504 5y agoFrom the legal standpoint, using those sort of services for storing sensitive case data like that is a bad call. too much media in those situations violate the terms and services of most platforms paid or not, and too many of those platforms have too many liberties with the usage policies on the media. If you are dealing with case data, you should be have those policies reviewed carefully, and should likely be encrypting before storing anywhere anyway. I say should because I almost never see case data stored to standard.
- chris1993 5y agoPossession of the Christchurch video is illegal in NZ. Not sure about elsewhere.
- paganel 5y agoIt would have been interesting if any of those users who got their video file deleted would have been directly attached to the shooter (like an accomplice, let's say), afaik that would have meant that Google Driver and Dropbox had tampered evidence.
- wodenokoto 5y agoGoogle don’t delete. They make unavailable. If a judge said that owning that video was probable cause or whatever, they could produce every user who used to have that file.
- smueller1234 5y agoApologies for directly contradicting you, but it's false that Google don't delete. Google do delete in a timely fashion (which is required by law in many places!), it's just that for technical reasons, it becomes unavailable or possibly also crypto erased* first. On an aside, such a setup is also a layer of defense-in-depth protection against a certain, uncommon class of bugs. I do work for Google, but don't, in any way, speak for the company. All of the above information can be found on the internet, eg. https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-really-delete-the-account-history-of-users-when-they-choose-to https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-really-delete-the-account-... about Google accounts themselves. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding
- paulpauper 5y agoas other mentioned, encryption solves this. Or scrambling, compression, etc.
- api 5y agoNot on your drives => not your data. Not encrypted (at rest and in transit) => not private. There are no exceptions.
- dhimes 5y agoSadly true.
- dokem 5y agoI was actually trying to watch that video the other day. Google would not find it, Bing listed the actual video as the top result. Never thought I'd start to respect bing over google.
- lern_too_spel 5y agoEverything I've seen indicates it was a shared file. I haven't seen any reports that files that are actually private (not shared) get deleted.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoUsers? You mean Google's storage space that they allow people to use.
- indigodaddy 5y agoYes users of a service, whether one is paying with one’s personal data, or whether one pays with their personal data AND a yearly fee for a bit more storage, as I do— they are users.
- lamontcg 5y agoThis is probably the worst example to use. It is like arguing against capital punishment using Ted Bundy's case as example. Generally that works the other way with most people and that's the kind of person they enthusiastically support the state murdering. Similarly the reaction of most people to Google removing that video is going to be "good" and you're going to have a very uphill battle convincing them otherwise, and you're probably going to lose. If you talk about university researchers that study pornography and Google nuking their research or their ability to share their research with other institutions, you'd probably make more headway. It is only on a site like HN where the most upvoted commment is "OMG they deleted practically the worst video imaginable from a mass shooting incident can you believe those fascists?" and everyone votes it up to the top. The HN echo chamber bubble is real.
- mleonhard 5y agoI think the main point of your comment is insightful. The final two sentences are distracting and unnecessary. How about deleting them?
- lamontcg 5y agoNo, they're really accurate and to the point, its quite relevant that HN is an echo chamber.
- chii 5y agoit's not a bad example at all - the point is that even if the video is vile, it is not and should not be google's mandate to delete private files by applying some extra-judicial moral judgement. Let the law work - possession of illegal material should be enforced by the police, not by a corporation that the user cannot hold accountable.
- lamontcg 5y agoYou will not convince anyone to agree with you who does not already agree with those principles already, and you will lose 90% of the rest of the people who find that video horrific and never get past it.
- jeffbee 5y agoTotally misleading headline and all these comments are commenting on the headline without reading the article. Google has _always_ had anti-abuse systems that will restrict sharing for content that violates ToS. The new feature is that the content owner will now be notified when their content has been restricted, if that owner has a Workspace account.
- szszrk 5y agoSo.. Drive will automatically un-share our files based on their own algorithms. I've got a feeling this will be mostly an automatic DMCA takedown tool.
- ipsin 5y agoIs there a legal requirement to do a DMCA take down of something the copyright holder doesn't know about? If you put something on Twitter mentioning certain cryptocurrency keywords (e.g. MetaMask), you'll get reply tweets from bots in a few seconds with fake support documents hosted on Google drive. My sense is that this is what they are trying to stop.
- kingcharles 5y agoA lot of their takedowns come from user-flagging. If a user flags something, so that the item is now on the hosting site's radar, are they now responsible for it? They're only not responsible for things they are not aware of.
- ricktdotorg 5y agoI feel a big push behind this new policy is to remove the large amounts of commercially-broadcast TV content that is shoved into Google Drive and openly shared to 0.0.0.0/0 (e.g. via TV subreddits). Google has had fairly aggressive rate-limiting on viewing/downloading fully-open shared-to-all videos hosted within Drive for a long time, but there have generally always been ways around these limits. In the last few months, I have noticed several fairly large TV subreddits that used Drive for video distribution being closed due to too many DMCA takedowns, as such I feel that this policy change is G formalising their intentions to stanch this avenue of piracy, more than it may be a move to chase off malware/phishing ne'er-do-wells.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoAFAIK they've already been matching hashes to remove pirated content, so this is an extension into certain types of "objectionable" content
- throwawayffffas 5y ago> withdrawn from everyone but the owner And in the next iteration it will also block it for the owner.
- k8sToGo 5y agoNo need. It will just lock your entire account.
- pedro2 5y agoI thought it already did that. Also, on some FB group someone said Google had deleted the copyright infringing files. Can anyone confirm it happens?
- cabalos 5y agoSomeone has been running a massive fake DMCA notice bot targeting website contact forms with links to Google Cloud Storage files for the last year. I wonder if this is in response to this ongoing campaign?
- Workaccount2 5y agoI have, uh, mp3 backups of all the music I have owned from my, um, ludicrously massive CD collection. Is it worth the risk that google might one day decide I am a pirate and block my account?
- nix23 5y agoDo you really need a answer?
- kingcharles 5y agoHas to be a rhetorical question. I was once responsible for ripping 250,000 CDs, legally, on behalf of various record labels, from tiny to the big 5. I would love to store a backup of all that data in the big cloud services and see which ones deleted my legally-owned data.
- vetrom 5y agoNow imagine having to deal with disposition of the data and the ownership of the NAS throughout a bankruptcy.
- kingcharles 5y agoWhat I'm trying to find out is what happened to the 250,000 CDs. They were put in storage unit. What happened to the storage unit when the company was liquidated? Did anyone even remember the CDs were there? Did someone bid on the unpaid storage unit and come across the biggest cache of music ever seen?
- jeidz 5y agoIf you ripped those CDs while contracted by these record labels, I don’t see how it is legal for you to keep the files after the job and call them yours.
- reaperducer 5y ago
- thisiscorrect 5y agohttps://www.techtimes.com/articles/269456/20211216/google-work-space-request-review-update-allows-download-wrongly-restricted.htm https://www.techtimes.com/articles/269456/20211216/google-wo... makes it sound like they're adding a feature to review when files are restricted. That's very different.
- dilap 5y agoI know it takes a lot of shit, but something like Urbit is seeming more and more appealing (necessary?) every day.
- dirtyid 5y agoDo locked files and DMCA removals affect both online and offline synced files?
- buro9 5y agoReminder to periodically do a Google Takeout to protect your data from Google.
- encryptluks2 5y agoWhy not just have everything synced. If you are using Google Takeout, you'll likely never be that type to figure out how to get your data back in somewhere else.
- aledalgrande 5y agoAside from legitimate DMCAs what I'm worried about is losing backupped files of any sort because some rogue individual files a complaint on stuff they don't own or because of an ML error and an inexistent customer service by Google. Also I don't really like the service to sneak onto any files I upload. What alternatives do we have for cloud file backup? I already do full backups, need something to sync files between devices.
- enz 5y agoI use an S3-comptaible hoster with the rclone client which supports encryption/decryption on the fly. That is, I don't even need to trust my S3 provider. For syncing between devices, I guess `rclone sync` should do the trick.
- drevil-v2 5y agoIs there a guide to set this up? Thanks in advance
- enz 5y agoYup: basically you need to set up a regular S3 backend (guide here: https://rclone.org/s3/ https://rclone.org/s3/), and then you can set up a "crypt" over it (guide here: https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/).
- fulafel 5y agoYou're leaking quite a lot of information to the provider if the encryption is per-object. Not saying this necessarily matters in your use case, but good to be aware of the limitat a lot can be deduced from file sizes, timeline of accesses, and access pattens of files. And most importantly of course you're still trusting the provider for availability. For example if you saved a folder of mp3 files using the rclone crypt functionality that you downloaded from a known BitTorrent, it would be easy for an adversary to match that set of known sized objects with high confidence at the storage provider end, or from observing encrypted network traffic (which in the S3 case leaks object size through traffic patterns) and deducing object sizes from there.
- ThinkBeat 5y agoHow is this done? Google claims files are encrypted at rest and encrypted during transfer. Metadata inspection? Checksum during upload?
- dontcare007 5y agoGoogle dropped "don't be evil", so....
- deathanatos 5y agoThey just read the file. You seem to be under the impression that either of those imply end-to-end encryption, which they don't. (And in Drive's case, AFAIK, E2EE is not an offered nor advertised feature.) The data was encrypted during transmission to Google's servers, sure, but it was encrypted to them; similarly, yeah, they store it encrypted … and they have the key. (This isn't atypical either, sadly. E2EE is the exception…)
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoEncrypted at rest and transfer just means that if an unauthorized someone gets ahold of their backend systems, they can't read the file. It doesn't mean that Google can't maintain the key and use it to process and inspect the files. If they didn't have and use the key, they would never be able to create previews for files they keep, nor would they be able to offer a search function.
- serverholic 5y agoThis is what happens when we give too much power to centralized authorities.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alexfromapex 5y agoGet a Synology NAS, you will not regret having data sovereignty
- the_doctah 5y agoOr even better just build your own NAS. Synology are overpriced for what you get.
- egberts1 5y agoBetter yet, run your ownCloud/nextCloud.
- layer8 5y agoIt’s not uncommon to install Nextcloud on Synology, so that’s not an either/or.
- katbyte 5y agothey are also locking their newer 12bay and rack units to only work with their own overpriced (re)branded Toshiba drives. before this they were great units that were very easy to setup and manage provided you were not concerned about cost.
- teh_klev 5y agoCan you provide a source for this claim?
- katbyte 5y agothey have made no official announcement but all new rack stations as of feb lock in. the new 12bay disk station units also now do confirmed by support & user reports (thou it is possible to hack around it it seems) - lots of chatter on r/synology https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/r53ow5/synology_confirms_vendor_lock_coming_to_plus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/r53ow5/synology_c...
- coolgoose 5y ago'our' files comrade. At this point it makes 0 sense to keep files in drive, since if the magical algorithm has any issues you have 0 ways of combating it.
- hoppla 5y agoIronically, craping the web can result in termination of your account: “we reasonably believe that your conduct causes harm or liability to a user, third party, or Google — for example, by hacking, phishing, harassing, spamming, misleading others, or scraping content that doesn’t belong to you”
- cookiengineer 5y ago> scraping content that doesn’t belong to you Oh the irony, Google. It doesn't belong to you either.
- jolmg 5y agoGiven that a search engine needs to scrape the whole web to exist, I can't understand how they can stand against a user scraping unrelated third-parties, like it's some sort of grand evil they need to stand up against. Talk about a pot calling the kettle black. I can't believe they put that in their terms. For future reference: https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en#suspending-access https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en#suspending-access
- jevoten 5y ago> pot calling the kettle black Think of it more as Google defending its turf. They want to be the only ones with access to data in bulk, so that if you want to find something, you have to go through them.
- visarga 5y agoScraping is one, publishing scraped content for SEO is another.
- skinnymuch 5y agoGoogle is publishing the content on the SE. That is one level up!
- rkalla 5y agoI've been a Google Fi customer for 6 or 7 years now and what constantly scares the hell out of me is the subreddit where about every 3-6 months you see someone saying: "Google Fi did me wrong, so I reversed the charges on CC - now my entire Google account is locked / all photos / all files in drive" This seems... like it's going to get regulated soon. Just going to take blocking the wrong account some day and boom, here we go, legislation.
- COGlory 5y agoI left Fi because I was very concerned about something like this
- skinnymuch 5y agoExcept wouldn’t that wrong account would get unblocked quickly enough? So not change. Amazon does the same thing with [too many] chargebacks.
- dawnerd 5y agoTime to just start encrypting everything.
- logicalmonster 5y agoOn a technical level: I assume they'd be finding files they want to block by looking for a hash, right? Are these guaranteed to be unique or are collisions possible? And any organized and genuine bad actors can work around some kind of hash filter by altering files slightly, right? I'd hate to think that Google's abject arrogance is going to result in false positives that are going to nuke normal peoples' livelihood with no recourse while again barely having an impact on real bad guys. On an ethical and moral level: my opinion is subjective, but this puts an undesirable amount of control over people in the hands of a company that has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted. If Google cannot provide actual human customer support to avoid wrecking lives with bad algorithms that make wrong decisions, then their policy should be to merely allow everything that's not blocked by law/court-order.
- floor2 5y agoAnd the cycle repeats. It starts with the obvious malware or hollywood movie takedown, but the actual policy is anything which goes against an opaque and subjective acceptable use policy, which means the entire world's files now need to conform to discourse within the narrowly defined Overton window controlled by a tiny group of likeminded people. Fast forward a few years, and we can all predict which content will be "hate speech" and which almost identical content will be allowed. Detection of copyright protected content will be automated, but appeals for fair use will be manual, slow and difficult. Double standards will abound where the liberal ideals of the company run up against corporate interests, favored politicians or powerful governments. And of course- someone will make a competing service which doesn't police content, and that service will in turn become a cesspool as all the worst offenders will be massively over represented there compared to merely the good netizens concerned about protecting a free internet. Maybe a massive move to decentralization is the only thing that can save us. 100 different services with 100 different policies on which content is allowed seems far better than the direction we're headed. I'd rather at least have the easy choice and understanding of which ideology and set of interests I'm being filtered through.
- ItsBob 5y agoHonestly? I'm fine with this: You're using space on their servers - This is the very definition of cloud imo. It's also a decent solution rather than just dropping the banhammer and locking your account so you can't then get your files out of their system. If you're concerned about it, encrypt your files before uploading them.
- reaperducer 5y agoIf you're concerned about it, encrypt your files before uploading them. Have fun explaining to your grandmother how she has to encrypt and decrypt her family photos so that yet another bad Google "algorithm" doesn't delete everything she holds dear because of a copyright troll.
- js8 5y agoWell, 15 years ago I told some people from Czech Pirate party that they are basically marxists. (At the time, they still wanted a fair copyright reform.) I didn't mean it pejoratively in the least, but seriously, as a historical warning. I pointed out that fight for fair copyright and culture in public domain has a historical analogy in fight for public lands, that were enclosed by capitalists by the end of the 18th century, to get people to the manufacturing plants. People didn't take me very seriously, because, we are white collar professionals, not some stupid peasants or communists, right? And of course, information wants to be free and are simple to copy, so they can obviously always be free. I think digital enclosures are coming, and the digital "public sphere" is shrinking. Some (Varoufakis) even say they are already there. Unless people fight the trend, most of the digital stuff you "own" today will be someone else's property, and not public (similar to land today). Access to it will be limited by laws and controlled by mandatory digital devices.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoThey cannot scan zipped files with a password. Problem solved. Unless they ban zipped files with a password.
- coolspot 5y agoEncFS is more elegant solution than zipping your files.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoDoes it work with Google drive?
- coolspot 5y agoIt works with anything that you can mount as a folder - Dropbox, Mega.nz, Box, GDrive, Backblaze, etc. It creates an encrypted file/folder for each decrypted file/folder you create. So when you change a file, only one encrypted file is uploaded into the cloud.
- the_doctah 5y agoI'm sorry, Google will scan my personal files for hate speech now? When exactly the the first amendment become toilet paper? Certainly feels like it happened in the last 2 years.
- freedomben 5y agotldr: s/first amendment/free speech principles obligatory mention that the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies, only governments. Then reply and say, "I mean the spirit of the first amendment" and then I'll agree with you. better to just say "free speech principles" rather than "first amendment"
- fallingknife 5y agoThe first amendment does apply to companies. As in they have the right to not associate with you for any reason. However, there are plenty of cases where that right has been taken from them when their services have been deemed so necessary that they must do business with the general public. e.g. the electric company can't cut you off if they don't like your politics. And until recently we had net neutrality. There is no reason that a platform neutrality policy couldn't be legislated in the same manner without violating the constitution.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoNet Neutrality was very shortlived in the USA though, like, a few years only ?
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Net Neutrality was very shortlived in the USA though, like, a few years only ? That is...not accurate. Net neutrality was FCC policy enforced by case-by-case action from 2005 until a couple such actions were struck down by courts in 2010 as requiring regulation. After that,the FCC adopted them as regulation in the 2010 Open Internet Order (which had been being drafted before the ruling); certain parts of the 2010 order were struck down by the D.C. Circuit in 2014, saying such regulations could not be applied without reclassifying ISPs as telecommunication providers under Title II rather than information service providers under Title I of the Telecommunications Act. Subsequently, the FCC adopted regulations reclassifying ISP and again imposing Net Neutrality regulations in 2015, which (with new leadership because of the Trump Administration), they withdrew in 2017. A number of states have since adopted various net neutrality laws, including California. While the FCC has not yet acted on it, the Biden Administration made bet neutrality executive policy in Executive Order 14036.
- notorandit 5y ago[Those] files will be flagged to their owner and restricted automatically, which means they can no longer be shared with other people, and access will be withdrawn from everyone but the owner.
- attack-surface 5y agoYou can encrypt your files with Cryptomator[1] if you don't want Google looking at your files. I'm not sure about their policy on that though? I mean if it's encrypted, then they can't scan for piracy / Christchurch videos and other contraband, right? [1] https://cryptomator.org/ https://cryptomator.org/
- djoldman 5y agoJust a shout out for @cperciva's https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/ > Encryption: your data can only be accessed with your personal keys. We can't access your data even if we wanted to!
- falcolas 5y agoBackups and sharing are rather different use cases. There's no mention of deleting the file (though it is something Google has done before) in this announcement.
- rabuse 5y agoThis is why i encrypt everything before I store with a provider. Have fun scanning that.
- mcherm 5y agoSo... which cloud storage providers do NOT scan your files and propose to remove things which violate their own sense of what data is "appropriate"? Obviously, I could encrypt my data before putting on such a service, but that makes access less convenient.
- layer8 5y agoNextcloud hosting providers generally don’t.
- basicplus2 5y agoYour own cloud storage.. such as a Synology NAS
- cheald 5y agoI switched to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance some time back. Backups GPG encrypted and shunted to S3 for opaque offsite backup. It works quite well, and I don't have any concerns that a mistrained algorithm is going to lock me out of my files.
- morpheos137 5y agoGoogle is going to go down in history as an example of what can go wrong by using advertising (scams) to fund "free services." The censorship is getting unbelievable.
- unixhero 5y agoShit I got to decom that Gdrive.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoYet another reminder to have multiple offline backups for any files you care about losing
- allturtles 5y agoThis whole story and most of the ensuing discussion seems to be based on a misconstrual of the Google blog post in question (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/12/abuse-notification-emails-google-drive.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/12/abuse-notifi...). It is not announcing new content restriction policies. Those have already been in place. What's new are the user notifications: Not new: "When a Google Drive file is identified as violating Google's Terms of Service or program policies, it may be restricted." New: "Now, the owner of the item in Google Drive will receive an email notifying them of the action taken, and alerting them of how to request a review of the restriction if they think it is a mistake. For items in shared drives, the shared drive manager will receive the notification"
- xen2xen1 5y agoI have seen new notifications recently when moving dumb stuff (old downloads?) around, so the new error message stuff tracks.
- Wavelets 5y agoAlong these same lines - I'm looking to leave Dropbox. Has anyone used Tresorit or SpiderOak? I use it basically for cold storage - just a place to store images, files, etc. that I only access very, very rarely. I generally use iCloud for accessing images taken on my phone. The files I keep on Dropbox are just there as a redundant backup.
- skarz 5y agoEncrypt all of your files before upload: https://www.cryptomator.org/ https://www.cryptomator.org/
- throwawaysea 5y agoThis is an untrustworthy company whose activist policy making will lead to them banning any ideas they disagree with from their platform. Everyone should advocate for personal and business use of Google to move to other, better providers.
- aaron695 5y agoA pirate movie I had was 'locked' on Drive, this happened year ago. I opened a hex editor, changed a random byte, re-uploaded and it worked fine. This is a misunderstanding, as per other comments. This is old news not 'start soon'
- 2ion 5y agoYour data belongs on other people's storage in encrypted form only. I have long stopped trusting clouds with my private data in plaintext.
- zwaps 5y agoAdjacent to the article in the op: What __is__ your recommendation for setting up remote backup for private use? I am thinking of something that can be used to sync and / or backup different devices for people of differing tech affinity. I think this question deserves re-examination now, since recommendations likely change due to the facts in the op. As far as I know, it used to be that one should either "roll one's own cloud" (whatever that means for a non-technical user), or simply use the best-integrated tool like Google Drive, DropBox, Apple for the devices at hand and live with the fact that the company will train whatever AI model du jour on your private data. The reason for this binary recommendation was as follows: while services like SpikerOak exist, who say they encrypt your data, the believability of that was never exactly high. Most likely, your data might still get mined. Most likely, the NSA still scans all your docs. However, now you pay extra for "security theater". Instead of paying for such questionable offerings, the decision was rather binary: decide to either go full-hog (if able) and do your own, or just upload it to Google Drive and stop caring about who reads your private documents. But now, if Google starts actively reading, policing and deleting your data without even pretending to give you privacy, I think encrypted services start to have a use case again.
- sdoering 5y agoOne more nail in the coffin. My project as a freelancer for 2022 will be to de-monopolize my business.