13 ms·

I made a Google sheet of local elections and it's been removed from Google Drive

464 points by danso 4y ago

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
Just call their support to sort out what happened and get it fixed. Oh wait. Welcome to our glorious future of “internet scale” companies which make money by taking advantage of the information YOU GIVE THEM don’t have care, and can’t be made to.
ZoF 4y ago
gtk40 4y ago
What alternatives to Google Docs/Drive are folks using? I'm open to trying something else.
danso 4y ago
Key points mentioned in the thread: - The specific policy violated is "Phishing" - Sheet was titled "Boston Election candidate websites" - OP says it's a list of candidate names and their campaign websites - Created in Oct 2021, removed in July 2022 - OP says a similar worksheet with many more records has not been removed
- andybak 4y ago
  Curious what rule this has tripped. Surely there's tons of sheets consisting of name and url?
  - willis936 4y ago
    A question with no answer. It's an unnamed node tuned with automated routines. Classifier curators will scratch their heads too meanwhile victims have to wonder why this is acceptable.
- ABeeSea 4y ago
  One explanation could be that a candidate’s campaign domain expired and is now being used for phishing.
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  The key point, to me, is that Google monitors all content. I don't think it's much of a surprise, but in context of Google Drive, it's pretty terrible. Drive is a anti-product like this. It's like if Western Digital decided to update the disk firmware to just ship your data to them for scrutiny.
  - nathancahill 4y ago
    User stores data in the cloud. User: surprised pikachu face.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      There is no reason a priori that companies should be looking at private data, even automated agents thereof. The fact that they do monitor that content represents some kind of deviation from the null hypothesis that is important to identify and explicate.
      - nathancahill 4y ago
        In fact the opposite is true, companies care about what their servers are being used for, both to prevent abuse and legal liability. Any impression users may have to the contrary is a result of marketing and the widespread concept of "the cloud" as a nebulous entity. E2E encrypted services are the exception, not the rule. This mischaracterization extends so far that when Apple announced plans to turn on E2EE for photos (necessitating an on-device scanning tool for banned photos before upload), the uproar against it was vast and unanimous. So now we still have the same photo scanning on Apple's servers, and no E2EE.
    - domador 4y ago
      This is a pretty pessimistic comment. Cloud storage companies should, can, and have been held accountable for violating their users' privacy, including when they themselves are the violators.
      - judge2020 4y ago
- mmanfrin 4y ago
  Stab in the dark but I imagine some of those campaign website domains lapsed, were picked up by domain expiry people because they probably have very good visibility (i.e. a lot of links to those pages from official/.gov sites), and had phishing or sketchy landing pages put on them. Google then prunes these malicious pages from their search and then also flags any docs that have those links in them.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    Yeah this seems like the most likely scenario to me, as well... Lots of losing candidates who don't want to keep paying for their domains.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  Although it wasn't specifically mentioned, the file was likely shared with the OP's professor. That might be what triggered the scan.
cube00 4y ago
> I'm curious what triggered this. 80/20 incomplete machine learning model. One day people and institutions will get the message and stop using Google for important things. Sadly it won't even be the next generation as they're all rusted into the ecosystem with Chromebooks provided by their school districts.
- FredPret 4y ago
  Are we watching Google turn into IBM
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Pretty much by design, I imagine.
- danso 4y ago
  I taught data journalism at the graduate school level (not to the OP) and I regularly used Google Sheets as a channel for hosting data, which were typically U.S. public datasets, like city crime reports, Census demographics, election results, etc. This is in addition to hosting CSV and .sqlite files on the class homepage and Github repo. The reason why Google Sheets was so handy was because it's a great interface for data exploration. I could show students features about the data, and sort/filter/highlight, without having to distribute/create spreadsheet files. I guess if Google Sheets ends up being draconian with its content filters, I could link to Github-hosted CSVs, but it's not quite the same. Haven't checked my classroom Google sheets recently, but if they're untouched, it might have helped that they were all set to public view. Maybe the flagging algorithm looks at private sheets with much more suspicion.
  - jfoster 4y ago
    > Maybe the flagging algorithm looks at private sheets with much more suspicion. You could be right, but jeez... shouldn't it be the opposite?
    - the_lonely_road 4y ago
      For sure no. If you are storing a trove of copyrighted movies, revenge porn, or child porn then you would for sure not have it marked for public access. Google clearly doesn’t want their storage to be used for these nefarious purposes but anyone who has tried to train a ML algorithm knows, false positives is the name of the game so they should really only be used in places where false positives do little to no harm.
peanut_worm 4y ago
Does stuff on Google Drive get hand moderated or just scanned?
- cube00 4y ago
  Google can't even spare humans to rescue their paying Google One customers from automated account bans. [1] There's no way a human is involved in this ban. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31073302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31073302
  - newbieuser 4y ago
    engrossing...
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Both. I have reported fraud forms to them before.
tholman 4y ago
Am thinking that a few of the domains on the list expired and were snapped up by malware/scammer sites causing the spreadsheet to seem super sus to a machine scanning/checking urls.
- mh- 4y ago
  this is usually the case when these posts pop up, yep.
- metadat 4y ago
  If this were the case, then the reason for flagging should be fully disclosed in a transparent fashion to the end-user, with specific details. Otherwise it's super confusing to have the entire document be marked "suspicious", and end-user may reasonably (naively) still paste and visit the link. When this happens, the entire effort to keep them safe is subverted by Google's own poor design.
  - deltree7 4y ago
    Only a dumb detective will reveal how they caught the thief
    - metadat 4y ago
      Sometimes the ones who need protection are even dumber than the thieves. Where does this leave us?
legalcorrection 4y ago
How can any serious business use GSuite with problems like this.
- EricE 4y ago
  1. People are cheap 2. People tend to dramatically underestimate that yes, stuff like this could happen to them too
- josefresco 4y ago
  I don't see any indication that he was using paid Google Workspace (new name for G Suite)
vorpalhex 4y ago
The cloud is someone elses computer. Act accordingly. It's a shame this person lost their work. More and more stories like this need to come to light and we need to convince others the cloud is a risk, not a solution.
- EricE 4y ago
  One of the killer features of a QNAP NAS is the built in cloud backup utilities for Google and Microsoft - it always amazes me how often I have to fight with people to turn them on. You'd think after the original Photobucket meltdown people would be more cognizant of stuff like this, but here we (still) are :(
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    You can roll this yourself with rclone, for the DIY folks.
- jfoster 4y ago
  It was a solution. Google Drive was great until they turned user/customer hostile. Arguably, no one could really have seen this coming, because this doesn't even seem to make business sense. Google are seemingly acting against the reputation of their own services.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Google (and their ilk) are risk adverse. Is it legal to keep a list of electoral candidates and their public info? Yes. Could it be disinformation? It could. Would that be harmful to Google to have Google Sheets be used to distribute? Yes. Does the risk of it being bad outweigh the benefit of keeping legal content? Yes, strongly, and it *always* will. It is always in Google's interest to be as risk adverse as possible. They always will be. (This applies to all clouds too)
    - jfoster 4y ago
      > Would that be harmful to Google to have Google Sheets be used to distribute? Yes. If it's a private file (not shared), the question doesn't even make sense. Some degree of control might make sense for 100% publicly shared content on Google Drive, but how does it make any sense that they are cutting off access for the owner of the content?
EricE 4y ago
There is no cloud, just someone else's computer...
computer23 4y ago
I have had a Google sheet I created years ago and edit periodically that has also been flagged but not removed. It has a number of URLs. I suppose it's possible at least one of the URLs is no longer legitimate. There is a yellow banner "This file looks suspicious. It might be used to steal your personal information" and an option to "Request a review". It also says "This file can still be viewed, edited, and shared, but users will see a warning that alerts them that the content may be harmful. These restrictions were put in place because this content violates Google Drive's Phishing policy." There is no indication of why the file was flagged. Despite my concerns about a human looking at my personal file, I bit the bullet and clicked review several times but the banner remains after several months. Google support hasn't been helpful even though I'm a paid user. I have now received 5 emails from "Google Drive Safety" notifying me of this alleged violation.
- bsedlm 4y ago
  why assume that the review would be done by a human? I'd wager the "reviewer" it's merely a more computationally expensive process
  - powerhour 4y ago
    Humans are involved at some point, if only while developing the software or writing up the spec. They ought to figure out how to do better.
    - bsedlm 4y ago
      but ultimately, the "executives" making the decisions of what software to develop, which bugs to hunt, and so on, are all basing their decisions on data, reports, and many sorts of 'metrics'. Additionally, I suppose in a company as big as Google, all this decision making is backed by written communications. All this written stuff is subject to legal scrutiny. All must abide by 'approved' rules, guidelines, etc.. Squinting a little bit (maybe some may need to squint harder) it's clear that in the end everything is being done according to a computational (written) process. this is essentially what 'skynet' (from the terminator) or the matrix actually means. if every human involved is following data and written guidelines, the decisions are being made by a computer program running across many hundreds of humans pushing "paper" around.
bborud 4y ago
I wish there was an open source spreadsheet solution I could host myself. Update: thanks for tips. Will have a look when I get home.
- jfoster 4y ago
  Someone must be working on one, in light of stuff like this, surely?
- sofixa 4y ago
  Like LibreOfficen Online?
  - radec 4y ago
    I think collabora might me the most active version of it: https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code I haven't tried it myself.
- haunter 4y ago
  OnlyOffice can be self hosted https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-workspace.aspx?from=default https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-workspace.aspx?from=defa...
- layer8 4y ago
  There’s Collabora Online: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online It integrates with NextCloud: https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/ https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/
jjtheblunt 4y ago
remake it on Word 365?
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Microsoft also scans and takes down anything that looks like public-facing PII in 365.
  - vba616 4y ago
    Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative, but the warnings imply that anything in Office saved to a network location is "public facing", and if that implies Microsoft has inside information that it is...
    - jabroni_salad 4y ago
      You have to make stuff public on purpose in 365, of course they know what is visible. Awhile ago there were a lot of fake login forms being made and getting hosted on official microsoft domains, via forms and Flow. Dont see that one as often anymore.
      - vba616 4y ago
        >You have to make stuff public on purpose in 365, of course they know what is visible. You are saying that it truly groks the permissions and other security applied to every accessible shared drive, every SharePoint location, anything not a local file, before it warns you about PII? As well as all the relevant regulations from HIPAA, to European privacy laws, to company & corporate classifications...?
        jabroni_salad 4y ago
        Sure. It's called DLP and if you pay them, you can have it warn you about your own specific regulations before you commit a share based on the content of the file. There are premade options for a lot of different country's regulations or you can roll your own.
anoncow 4y ago
Are you a Google One subscriber?
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  G1/Gsuite are not omitted from this type of scanner. O365 does it too.
lizardactivist 4y ago
Use Google for fun, casual, fleeting things. Never trust them with anything important.
- luxuryballs 4y ago
  Bingo, right up there with “if you want something to be confidential don’t make it digital.”
TIPSIO 4y ago
Just sharing my story. If I recall… I made a voting tool (legitimate and funded by a campaign) with a throw away email as the contact: <state><voting>@gmail.com It was removed. For the OP, this could be an auto flag error or this could be something else. (Edit: I bet) Google takes the election stuff seriously.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  what did your voting tool do? I suspect google like many other tech companies are trying to avoid having their platforms used to manipulate election activities and the definition of manipulate might be very broad. It being funded by a campaign might not matter to google at all.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    Being funded by a campaign might even be a negative, as it would likely increase the odds that the address is being used for election manipulation. It would be easy to register <state>voting@gmail.com, start using it as a contact for public-facing election-oriented documents, and get at least some people confused about whether I was officially associated with <state>'s election apparatus. Given the current environment, I'm positive Google very much doesn't want their systems being used to (even accidentally) impersonate election officials.
- pomatic 4y ago
  How do you know 'google takes election stuff seriously'? Causation!=effect. TBH I'm surprised the OP even asked the question 'why did an algorithm remove my stuff?'. No google employee is going to tell you (even if they knew, which is quite doubtful given the complexities of machine learning). If you sign up for a service which is machine-managed, you are subject to the whims of the machine. Occams razor suggests it is unlikely there is a conspiracy, or malice at play. The machine is just doing its job for its masters, possibly badly, possibly not, but the general populace will never know one way or the other.
  - TIPSIO 4y ago
jeffwask 4y ago
It's getting more and more apparent moving Office/Productivity apps from your local system to web based is a huge mistake. In 20 years, I'm going to be a like the guy who writes manuscripts in Word Perfect 4.
- S201 4y ago
  It's always been apparent to some of us. Unless I have an explicit need to actively collaborate with another person on some document I've continued to use locally saved LibreOffice documents for everything, and even then I still download a copy from Google Drive when finished/periodically.
  - jeffwask 4y ago
    I was never a fan but I was never actively opposed. Now, I'll advise against at every opportunity.
theandrewbailey 4y ago
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547256544332488708.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547256544332488708.html
ibejoeb 4y ago
Does google read every single document in drive, or is it just a sample?
- compiler-guy 4y ago
  every single one that isn't encrypted
  - ibejoeb 4y ago
    Is that true, or is it a hypothesis? I'd really like to know if Google does process every single file. I'll operate as if it does, but I wish someone from inside would confirm and elaborate.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
iso1631 4y ago
Looking forward to the day when the pendulum swings back to personal computing rather than a terminal session on someone else's computer
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  I'm not convinced that's a pendulum that will swing. There's a lot of big money trying to keep it up
- bell-cot 4y ago
  You mean like back in 1987 - when Joe D. User could install MS-DOS from a couple floppy disks, then WordPerfect and Lotus 123 similarly, then just use his PC for years - withOUT knowing what Windows Registry entries, security patches, spam, phishing e-mails, virii, typosquatted domain names, SaaS, etc., etc., etc. were? Let alone having to regularly pour time & grief into dealing with those? That I am aware of, every one of my family members who has retired in the past 15 years was stuck using MS Windows at work. Every one of them has been happy to delete MS and Windows from their life - getting rid of their home computer, buying an Apple iPad, and running their modest on-line lives from that iPad.
njharman 4y ago
I don't understand. Was this document shared? Or private? Who is google trying to protect from phishing?
- thenoblesunfish 4y ago
  This would be very helpful to know in this case. Is it even possible that the document was public?
- kyrra 4y ago
  It looks like it was shared. A further down tweet said: > I keep material in Google drive because my graduate school uses Google - so I use it to be able to share material with my professor. Google doesn't seems to do fewer TOS checks unless they are shared with other people.
bedast 4y ago
> Is this something researchers using Google Drive should be aware of? This is something EVERYONE using Google Drive should be aware of. Your data on Google Drive is scanned by Google (and not only for policy violations), meaning it is not secured FROM Google, and false positives can and will cause your data to be lost and cause your account to be flagged. Using Google Sheets means that is your only copy of the data, so you also have no backup. Google does not provide support for this service.
- silicon2401 4y ago
  This is why I use local storage as my backup methods. Just upgraded my total storage capacity to 28TB with 3 copies. I may add cloud backups once I figure out how to make sure my uploads are encrypted, but owning your own storage is the only surefire way to make sure nobody else can play games with your data
  - Entinel 4y ago
    This isn't necessarily aimed at you but a bit of a rant because honestly I feel like encrypted backups for personal use are evangelized to the point that it's ridiculous. If my entire hard drive was dumped on the internet, there is nothing that would happen. That isn't to say people should use them but people should consider their threat model.
    - silicon2401 4y ago
      I don't have a problem with you saying they're ridiculous; I'm sure a lot of things are over-evangelized. I have no emotional attachment to anything except my data. However I am very private so I simply feel more comfortable having my data encrypted in the cloud and ideally encrypted on my HDDs. The former for backup privacy, the latter for privacy if I need to RMA an HDD one day.
    - jobs_throwaway 4y ago
      > If my entire hard drive was dumped on the internet, there is nothing that would happen. What do you mean by this? There's nothing personally compromising on your hard drive?
colordrops 4y ago
This is some heavy slippery slope shit. If you told people that this would be happening in 15 years back in 2007 you'd be called a paranoid conspiracy nut.
- rob_c 4y ago
  Yeah it was something people laughed at you for predicting would happen in the age of "everything online". Which is a synonym for "everything on the cloud". Which really means "all your stuff on someone else's computer"...
layer8 4y ago
Two basic rules: - Always have backups. - Cloud providers are not your friend, especially in their unpaid tiers.
rob_c 4y ago
Lol, if only there were an open office like suite available with a libre license which could generate files in some sort of open documented format which could be shared by all through a clickable interface within a browser... Nah that's stupid...
tantaman 4y ago
the ai bureaucracy is here.
mcv 4y ago
This is our regular reminder from Google that "the Cloud" means "someone else's computer". Whatever you store in the cloud is not under your control. The cloud can be convenient, but it's not under your control, so always also keep a copy that's under your control. Of course your local copy isn't secure either, so having a copy in the cloud is still a good idea, but it shouldn't be your only copy.
nonameking2026 4y ago
Ah big brother, he loves me soooo much. https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ looks to be something that could work as a backup for your storage needs. Anyone with experience using Filecoin ?
nvr219 4y ago
I highly recommend everyone stop using Google, including Google drive. But self-hosting "cloud" file storage is complicated for the average user, and easy to break, so I recommend using Dropbox (which for the past few years has used MS Office Online as editor for MS Office docs) and back that up on your own. Why Dropbox? It's super reliable, doesn't force its own filetypes on you (mostly), and has native clients for everything including linux cli. So this is something you can set up for your entire family, have backups go reliably and in the background, so that if something like this happens you can restore. And of course, for any sensitive files you don't want Dropbox to read, you gotta encrypt it yourself - but I'd say for the average user that encryption is only needed in rare occasions.
- judge2020 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31680894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31680894
  - nvr219 4y ago
    That tweet doesn't exist anymore :(
milesskorpen 4y ago
I'll bet that some of the candidate websites this file linked to had been taking over by malicious actors and WERE being used for phishing. By linking to them and sending them traffic, you were perceived as a bit complicit.
admax88qqq 4y ago
Is it actually removed or just restrictiones from sharing Google drive in the last has restricted sharing of files that violate terms but I don't think I've heard if instances of then deleting private data.
brightball 4y ago
That is infuriating.
xyclos 4y ago
> It has a number of URLs. I suppose it's possible at least one of the URLs is no longer legitimate Just a guess, but since it is a file which lists website urls one of those domains was probably flagged as a phishing site, and since your doc had a url with the same domain it got flagged as well. It wouldn't surprise me to find that one of those candidates' sites had actually been hijacked by some phisher. Unfortunately just visiting each site wouldn't necessarily reveal which one it was since they'd likely have tucked the php shell or other phishing stuff at some path away from the root of the site to avoid detection from the site's maintainer.
g42gregory 4y ago
I’ve always assumed that Google Drive can not be used for anything important/critical. I store files on local disk and back up to Dropbox. Other backup services should be Ok too, I presume?
nmstoker 4y ago
Is this happening to public or private files? Could understand certain kinds of causes being applied to public / shared files but private files ought to be pretty much untouched. Of course, that's probably not how it really works when you're relying on cloud providers.
YarickR2 4y ago
Well, as it has been pointed many times in the past, private companies have no obligations to provide any kind of a service, for free or for profit. See Youtube removing videos, Twitter banning users, etc.
redleggedfrog 4y ago
Google - 1st mistake. Drive - 2nd more egregious mistake. If you actually care about the files you're using, neither of those are good choices.
pilgrimfff 4y ago
I've found mega.nz to be a great alternative to Google Drive. I've never had issues with feature parity and it even has a proper Linux client. The combination of flag-happy AI and the way Google will nuke your entire account without recourse* or a human ever being in the loop makes them a non-starter for me. *Google might give you recourse if you can get a public uproar going on Twitter or HN
bks 4y ago
A way to export from google - Export a copy of content in your Google Account to back it up - https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
znpy 4y ago
Is that even legal? Google going through your private documents and arbitrarily deciding what’s legitimate and what is not?
Blackstrat 4y ago
Sooner or later, and I suspect later, companies and individuals will realize that they can’t trust cloud providers-period. And all the connected gadgetry like Siri, Alexa, et al are not in anyone’s best interest.
perryizgr8 4y ago
It's google's platform, they can choose not to host your spredsheet. Just use another service, or make your own web-scale spreadsheet software.
jfoster 4y ago
How come there's no "hi googler here" comments on these types of posts anymore? Did Google become a lot more strict about that type of thing?
ptman 4y ago
We really need to switch to self hosting. Or at least services that are end-to-end encrypted, like https://cryptpad.org/ https://cryptpad.org/ It's possible to self-host for free if you use google services because of the price: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

464 points by danso 4y ago

Just call their support to sort out what happened and get it fixed. Oh wait. Welcome to our glorious future of “internet scale” companies which make money by taking advantage of the information YOU GIVE THEM don’t have care, and can’t be made to.

ZoF 4y ago

gtk40 4y ago

What alternatives to Google Docs/Drive are folks using? I'm open to trying something else.

danso 4y ago

Key points mentioned in the thread: - The specific policy violated is "Phishing" - Sheet was titled "Boston Election candidate websites" - OP says it's a list of candidate names and their campaign websites - Created in Oct 2021, removed in July 2022 - OP says a similar worksheet with many more records has not been removed

andybak 4y ago
Curious what rule this has tripped. Surely there's tons of sheets consisting of name and url?
- willis936 4y ago
  A question with no answer. It's an unnamed node tuned with automated routines. Classifier curators will scratch their heads too meanwhile victims have to wonder why this is acceptable.
ABeeSea 4y ago
One explanation could be that a candidate’s campaign domain expired and is now being used for phishing.
ibejoeb 4y ago
The key point, to me, is that Google monitors all content. I don't think it's much of a surprise, but in context of Google Drive, it's pretty terrible. Drive is a anti-product like this. It's like if Western Digital decided to update the disk firmware to just ship your data to them for scrutiny.
- nathancahill 4y ago
  User stores data in the cloud. User: surprised pikachu face.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    There is no reason a priori that companies should be looking at private data, even automated agents thereof. The fact that they do monitor that content represents some kind of deviation from the null hypothesis that is important to identify and explicate.
    - nathancahill 4y ago
      In fact the opposite is true, companies care about what their servers are being used for, both to prevent abuse and legal liability. Any impression users may have to the contrary is a result of marketing and the widespread concept of "the cloud" as a nebulous entity. E2E encrypted services are the exception, not the rule. This mischaracterization extends so far that when Apple announced plans to turn on E2EE for photos (necessitating an on-device scanning tool for banned photos before upload), the uproar against it was vast and unanimous. So now we still have the same photo scanning on Apple's servers, and no E2EE.
  - domador 4y ago
    This is a pretty pessimistic comment. Cloud storage companies should, can, and have been held accountable for violating their users' privacy, including when they themselves are the violators.
    - judge2020 4y ago
mmanfrin 4y ago
Stab in the dark but I imagine some of those campaign website domains lapsed, were picked up by domain expiry people because they probably have very good visibility (i.e. a lot of links to those pages from official/.gov sites), and had phishing or sketchy landing pages put on them. Google then prunes these malicious pages from their search and then also flags any docs that have those links in them.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  Yeah this seems like the most likely scenario to me, as well... Lots of losing candidates who don't want to keep paying for their domains.
wolpoli 4y ago
Although it wasn't specifically mentioned, the file was likely shared with the OP's professor. That might be what triggered the scan.

cube00 4y ago

> I'm curious what triggered this. 80/20 incomplete machine learning model. One day people and institutions will get the message and stop using Google for important things. Sadly it won't even be the next generation as they're all rusted into the ecosystem with Chromebooks provided by their school districts.

FredPret 4y ago
Are we watching Google turn into IBM
mysterydip 4y ago
Pretty much by design, I imagine.
danso 4y ago
I taught data journalism at the graduate school level (not to the OP) and I regularly used Google Sheets as a channel for hosting data, which were typically U.S. public datasets, like city crime reports, Census demographics, election results, etc. This is in addition to hosting CSV and .sqlite files on the class homepage and Github repo. The reason why Google Sheets was so handy was because it's a great interface for data exploration. I could show students features about the data, and sort/filter/highlight, without having to distribute/create spreadsheet files. I guess if Google Sheets ends up being draconian with its content filters, I could link to Github-hosted CSVs, but it's not quite the same. Haven't checked my classroom Google sheets recently, but if they're untouched, it might have helped that they were all set to public view. Maybe the flagging algorithm looks at private sheets with much more suspicion.
- jfoster 4y ago
  > Maybe the flagging algorithm looks at private sheets with much more suspicion. You could be right, but jeez... shouldn't it be the opposite?
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago
    For sure no. If you are storing a trove of copyrighted movies, revenge porn, or child porn then you would for sure not have it marked for public access. Google clearly doesn’t want their storage to be used for these nefarious purposes but anyone who has tried to train a ML algorithm knows, false positives is the name of the game so they should really only be used in places where false positives do little to no harm.

peanut_worm 4y ago

Does stuff on Google Drive get hand moderated or just scanned?

cube00 4y ago
Google can't even spare humans to rescue their paying Google One customers from automated account bans. [1] There's no way a human is involved in this ban. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31073302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31073302
- newbieuser 4y ago
  engrossing...
jabroni_salad 4y ago
Both. I have reported fraud forms to them before.

tholman 4y ago

Am thinking that a few of the domains on the list expired and were snapped up by malware/scammer sites causing the spreadsheet to seem super sus to a machine scanning/checking urls.

mh- 4y ago
this is usually the case when these posts pop up, yep.
metadat 4y ago
If this were the case, then the reason for flagging should be fully disclosed in a transparent fashion to the end-user, with specific details. Otherwise it's super confusing to have the entire document be marked "suspicious", and end-user may reasonably (naively) still paste and visit the link. When this happens, the entire effort to keep them safe is subverted by Google's own poor design.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Only a dumb detective will reveal how they caught the thief
  - metadat 4y ago
    Sometimes the ones who need protection are even dumber than the thieves. Where does this leave us?

legalcorrection 4y ago

How can any serious business use GSuite with problems like this.

EricE 4y ago
1. People are cheap 2. People tend to dramatically underestimate that yes, stuff like this could happen to them too
josefresco 4y ago
I don't see any indication that he was using paid Google Workspace (new name for G Suite)

vorpalhex 4y ago

The cloud is someone elses computer. Act accordingly. It's a shame this person lost their work. More and more stories like this need to come to light and we need to convince others the cloud is a risk, not a solution.

EricE 4y ago
One of the killer features of a QNAP NAS is the built in cloud backup utilities for Google and Microsoft - it always amazes me how often I have to fight with people to turn them on. You'd think after the original Photobucket meltdown people would be more cognizant of stuff like this, but here we (still) are :(
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  You can roll this yourself with rclone, for the DIY folks.
jfoster 4y ago
It was a solution. Google Drive was great until they turned user/customer hostile. Arguably, no one could really have seen this coming, because this doesn't even seem to make business sense. Google are seemingly acting against the reputation of their own services.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Google (and their ilk) are risk adverse. Is it legal to keep a list of electoral candidates and their public info? Yes. Could it be disinformation? It could. Would that be harmful to Google to have Google Sheets be used to distribute? Yes. Does the risk of it being bad outweigh the benefit of keeping legal content? Yes, strongly, and it *always* will. It is always in Google's interest to be as risk adverse as possible. They always will be. (This applies to all clouds too)
  - jfoster 4y ago
    > Would that be harmful to Google to have Google Sheets be used to distribute? Yes. If it's a private file (not shared), the question doesn't even make sense. Some degree of control might make sense for 100% publicly shared content on Google Drive, but how does it make any sense that they are cutting off access for the owner of the content?

EricE 4y ago

There is no cloud, just someone else's computer...

computer23 4y ago

I have had a Google sheet I created years ago and edit periodically that has also been flagged but not removed. It has a number of URLs. I suppose it's possible at least one of the URLs is no longer legitimate. There is a yellow banner "This file looks suspicious. It might be used to steal your personal information" and an option to "Request a review". It also says "This file can still be viewed, edited, and shared, but users will see a warning that alerts them that the content may be harmful. These restrictions were put in place because this content violates Google Drive's Phishing policy." There is no indication of why the file was flagged. Despite my concerns about a human looking at my personal file, I bit the bullet and clicked review several times but the banner remains after several months. Google support hasn't been helpful even though I'm a paid user. I have now received 5 emails from "Google Drive Safety" notifying me of this alleged violation.

bsedlm 4y ago
why assume that the review would be done by a human? I'd wager the "reviewer" it's merely a more computationally expensive process
- powerhour 4y ago
  Humans are involved at some point, if only while developing the software or writing up the spec. They ought to figure out how to do better.
  - bsedlm 4y ago
    but ultimately, the "executives" making the decisions of what software to develop, which bugs to hunt, and so on, are all basing their decisions on data, reports, and many sorts of 'metrics'. Additionally, I suppose in a company as big as Google, all this decision making is backed by written communications. All this written stuff is subject to legal scrutiny. All must abide by 'approved' rules, guidelines, etc.. Squinting a little bit (maybe some may need to squint harder) it's clear that in the end everything is being done according to a computational (written) process. this is essentially what 'skynet' (from the terminator) or the matrix actually means. if every human involved is following data and written guidelines, the decisions are being made by a computer program running across many hundreds of humans pushing "paper" around.

bborud 4y ago

I wish there was an open source spreadsheet solution I could host myself. Update: thanks for tips. Will have a look when I get home.

jfoster 4y ago
Someone must be working on one, in light of stuff like this, surely?
sofixa 4y ago
Like LibreOfficen Online?
- radec 4y ago
  I think collabora might me the most active version of it: https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code I haven't tried it myself.
haunter 4y ago
OnlyOffice can be self hosted https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-workspace.aspx?from=default https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-workspace.aspx?from=defa...
layer8 4y ago
There’s Collabora Online: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online It integrates with NextCloud: https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/ https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/

jjtheblunt 4y ago

remake it on Word 365?

jabroni_salad 4y ago
Microsoft also scans and takes down anything that looks like public-facing PII in 365.
- vba616 4y ago
  Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative, but the warnings imply that anything in Office saved to a network location is "public facing", and if that implies Microsoft has inside information that it is...
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    You have to make stuff public on purpose in 365, of course they know what is visible. Awhile ago there were a lot of fake login forms being made and getting hosted on official microsoft domains, via forms and Flow. Dont see that one as often anymore.
    - vba616 4y ago
      >You have to make stuff public on purpose in 365, of course they know what is visible. You are saying that it truly groks the permissions and other security applied to every accessible shared drive, every SharePoint location, anything not a local file, before it warns you about PII? As well as all the relevant regulations from HIPAA, to European privacy laws, to company & corporate classifications...?
      - jabroni_salad 4y ago
        Sure. It's called DLP and if you pay them, you can have it warn you about your own specific regulations before you commit a share based on the content of the file. There are premade options for a lot of different country's regulations or you can roll your own.

anoncow 4y ago

Are you a Google One subscriber?

jabroni_salad 4y ago
G1/Gsuite are not omitted from this type of scanner. O365 does it too.

lizardactivist 4y ago

Use Google for fun, casual, fleeting things. Never trust them with anything important.

luxuryballs 4y ago
Bingo, right up there with “if you want something to be confidential don’t make it digital.”

TIPSIO 4y ago

Just sharing my story. If I recall… I made a voting tool (legitimate and funded by a campaign) with a throw away email as the contact: <state><voting>@gmail.com It was removed. For the OP, this could be an auto flag error or this could be something else. (Edit: I bet) Google takes the election stuff seriously.

LegitShady 4y ago
what did your voting tool do? I suspect google like many other tech companies are trying to avoid having their platforms used to manipulate election activities and the definition of manipulate might be very broad. It being funded by a campaign might not matter to google at all.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  Being funded by a campaign might even be a negative, as it would likely increase the odds that the address is being used for election manipulation. It would be easy to register <state>voting@gmail.com, start using it as a contact for public-facing election-oriented documents, and get at least some people confused about whether I was officially associated with <state>'s election apparatus. Given the current environment, I'm positive Google very much doesn't want their systems being used to (even accidentally) impersonate election officials.
pomatic 4y ago
How do you know 'google takes election stuff seriously'? Causation!=effect. TBH I'm surprised the OP even asked the question 'why did an algorithm remove my stuff?'. No google employee is going to tell you (even if they knew, which is quite doubtful given the complexities of machine learning). If you sign up for a service which is machine-managed, you are subject to the whims of the machine. Occams razor suggests it is unlikely there is a conspiracy, or malice at play. The machine is just doing its job for its masters, possibly badly, possibly not, but the general populace will never know one way or the other.
- TIPSIO 4y ago

jeffwask 4y ago

It's getting more and more apparent moving Office/Productivity apps from your local system to web based is a huge mistake. In 20 years, I'm going to be a like the guy who writes manuscripts in Word Perfect 4.

S201 4y ago
It's always been apparent to some of us. Unless I have an explicit need to actively collaborate with another person on some document I've continued to use locally saved LibreOffice documents for everything, and even then I still download a copy from Google Drive when finished/periodically.
- jeffwask 4y ago
  I was never a fan but I was never actively opposed. Now, I'll advise against at every opportunity.

theandrewbailey 4y ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547256544332488708.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547256544332488708.html

ibejoeb 4y ago

Does google read every single document in drive, or is it just a sample?

compiler-guy 4y ago
every single one that isn't encrypted
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  Is that true, or is it a hypothesis? I'd really like to know if Google does process every single file. I'll operate as if it does, but I wish someone from inside would confirm and elaborate.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

iso1631 4y ago

Looking forward to the day when the pendulum swings back to personal computing rather than a terminal session on someone else's computer

thatguy0900 4y ago
I'm not convinced that's a pendulum that will swing. There's a lot of big money trying to keep it up
bell-cot 4y ago
You mean like back in 1987 - when Joe D. User could install MS-DOS from a couple floppy disks, then WordPerfect and Lotus 123 similarly, then just use his PC for years - withOUT knowing what Windows Registry entries, security patches, spam, phishing e-mails, virii, typosquatted domain names, SaaS, etc., etc., etc. were? Let alone having to regularly pour time & grief into dealing with those? That I am aware of, every one of my family members who has retired in the past 15 years was stuck using MS Windows at work. Every one of them has been happy to delete MS and Windows from their life - getting rid of their home computer, buying an Apple iPad, and running their modest on-line lives from that iPad.

njharman 4y ago

I don't understand. Was this document shared? Or private? Who is google trying to protect from phishing?

thenoblesunfish 4y ago
This would be very helpful to know in this case. Is it even possible that the document was public?
kyrra 4y ago
It looks like it was shared. A further down tweet said: > I keep material in Google drive because my graduate school uses Google - so I use it to be able to share material with my professor. Google doesn't seems to do fewer TOS checks unless they are shared with other people.

bedast 4y ago

> Is this something researchers using Google Drive should be aware of? This is something EVERYONE using Google Drive should be aware of. Your data on Google Drive is scanned by Google (and not only for policy violations), meaning it is not secured FROM Google, and false positives can and will cause your data to be lost and cause your account to be flagged. Using Google Sheets means that is your only copy of the data, so you also have no backup. Google does not provide support for this service.

silicon2401 4y ago
This is why I use local storage as my backup methods. Just upgraded my total storage capacity to 28TB with 3 copies. I may add cloud backups once I figure out how to make sure my uploads are encrypted, but owning your own storage is the only surefire way to make sure nobody else can play games with your data
- Entinel 4y ago
  This isn't necessarily aimed at you but a bit of a rant because honestly I feel like encrypted backups for personal use are evangelized to the point that it's ridiculous. If my entire hard drive was dumped on the internet, there is nothing that would happen. That isn't to say people should use them but people should consider their threat model.
  - silicon2401 4y ago
    I don't have a problem with you saying they're ridiculous; I'm sure a lot of things are over-evangelized. I have no emotional attachment to anything except my data. However I am very private so I simply feel more comfortable having my data encrypted in the cloud and ideally encrypted on my HDDs. The former for backup privacy, the latter for privacy if I need to RMA an HDD one day.
  - jobs_throwaway 4y ago
    > If my entire hard drive was dumped on the internet, there is nothing that would happen. What do you mean by this? There's nothing personally compromising on your hard drive?

colordrops 4y ago

This is some heavy slippery slope shit. If you told people that this would be happening in 15 years back in 2007 you'd be called a paranoid conspiracy nut.

rob_c 4y ago
Yeah it was something people laughed at you for predicting would happen in the age of "everything online". Which is a synonym for "everything on the cloud". Which really means "all your stuff on someone else's computer"...

layer8 4y ago

Two basic rules: - Always have backups. - Cloud providers are not your friend, especially in their unpaid tiers.

rob_c 4y ago

Lol, if only there were an open office like suite available with a libre license which could generate files in some sort of open documented format which could be shared by all through a clickable interface within a browser... Nah that's stupid...

tantaman 4y ago

the ai bureaucracy is here.

mcv 4y ago

This is our regular reminder from Google that "the Cloud" means "someone else's computer". Whatever you store in the cloud is not under your control. The cloud can be convenient, but it's not under your control, so always also keep a copy that's under your control. Of course your local copy isn't secure either, so having a copy in the cloud is still a good idea, but it shouldn't be your only copy.

nonameking2026 4y ago

Ah big brother, he loves me soooo much. https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ looks to be something that could work as a backup for your storage needs. Anyone with experience using Filecoin ?

nvr219 4y ago

I highly recommend everyone stop using Google, including Google drive. But self-hosting "cloud" file storage is complicated for the average user, and easy to break, so I recommend using Dropbox (which for the past few years has used MS Office Online as editor for MS Office docs) and back that up on your own. Why Dropbox? It's super reliable, doesn't force its own filetypes on you (mostly), and has native clients for everything including linux cli. So this is something you can set up for your entire family, have backups go reliably and in the background, so that if something like this happens you can restore. And of course, for any sensitive files you don't want Dropbox to read, you gotta encrypt it yourself - but I'd say for the average user that encryption is only needed in rare occasions.

judge2020 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31680894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31680894
- nvr219 4y ago
  That tweet doesn't exist anymore :(

milesskorpen 4y ago

I'll bet that some of the candidate websites this file linked to had been taking over by malicious actors and WERE being used for phishing. By linking to them and sending them traffic, you were perceived as a bit complicit.

admax88qqq 4y ago

Is it actually removed or just restrictiones from sharing Google drive in the last has restricted sharing of files that violate terms but I don't think I've heard if instances of then deleting private data.

brightball 4y ago

That is infuriating.

xyclos 4y ago

> It has a number of URLs. I suppose it's possible at least one of the URLs is no longer legitimate Just a guess, but since it is a file which lists website urls one of those domains was probably flagged as a phishing site, and since your doc had a url with the same domain it got flagged as well. It wouldn't surprise me to find that one of those candidates' sites had actually been hijacked by some phisher. Unfortunately just visiting each site wouldn't necessarily reveal which one it was since they'd likely have tucked the php shell or other phishing stuff at some path away from the root of the site to avoid detection from the site's maintainer.

g42gregory 4y ago

I’ve always assumed that Google Drive can not be used for anything important/critical. I store files on local disk and back up to Dropbox. Other backup services should be Ok too, I presume?

nmstoker 4y ago

Is this happening to public or private files? Could understand certain kinds of causes being applied to public / shared files but private files ought to be pretty much untouched. Of course, that's probably not how it really works when you're relying on cloud providers.

YarickR2 4y ago

Well, as it has been pointed many times in the past, private companies have no obligations to provide any kind of a service, for free or for profit. See Youtube removing videos, Twitter banning users, etc.

redleggedfrog 4y ago

Google - 1st mistake. Drive - 2nd more egregious mistake. If you actually care about the files you're using, neither of those are good choices.

pilgrimfff 4y ago

I've found mega.nz to be a great alternative to Google Drive. I've never had issues with feature parity and it even has a proper Linux client. The combination of flag-happy AI and the way Google will nuke your entire account without recourse* or a human ever being in the loop makes them a non-starter for me. *Google might give you recourse if you can get a public uproar going on Twitter or HN

bks 4y ago

A way to export from google - Export a copy of content in your Google Account to back it up - https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

znpy 4y ago

Is that even legal? Google going through your private documents and arbitrarily deciding what’s legitimate and what is not?

Blackstrat 4y ago

Sooner or later, and I suspect later, companies and individuals will realize that they can’t trust cloud providers-period. And all the connected gadgetry like Siri, Alexa, et al are not in anyone’s best interest.

perryizgr8 4y ago

It's google's platform, they can choose not to host your spredsheet. Just use another service, or make your own web-scale spreadsheet software.

jfoster 4y ago

How come there's no "hi googler here" comments on these types of posts anymore? Did Google become a lot more strict about that type of thing?

ptman 4y ago

We really need to switch to self hosting. Or at least services that are end-to-end encrypted, like https://cryptpad.org/ https://cryptpad.org/ It's possible to self-host for free if you use google services because of the price: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/