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Title is hugely misleading; she wasn't locked out, she was prevented from sharing the document. What's going on is basic spam filtering. That's it. Anyone who t

by arp242 2y ago

Title is hugely misleading; she wasn't locked out, she was prevented from sharing the document. What's going on is basic spam filtering. That's it. Anyone who thinks this ISN'T necessary has never operated a service that allows emailing or otherwise contacting random people. > a friend texted to say the shared Google folders where Renee kept her works in progress were no longer accessible. Her friend had planned to read and make notes on one of Renee’s stories and was surprised to be locked out. “You no longer have permission to view this document,” said the pop-up message. “If you believe this is an error, contact the document owner.” [..] > Renee logged into Docs and tried sharing the documents again. Then she received her own message from Google. “Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text. [..] > That author later posted a video to Instagram explaining that it wasn’t the adult content in the files but rather “Google thought I was spamming people.” Apparently, sending the same doc to scores of people—for example, alpha and beta readers—can make it appear as though the doc was unsolicited.

raxxorraxor 2y ago
You don't know and you cannot verify if it indeed was spam filtering. I think that is part of the problem here.
- arp242 2y ago
  What else could it be? Can I prove this with absolute certainty? No. Is it the straight-forward common-sense explanation when you just shared a document with scores of people? Yes. But whatever the case may be, title is still hugely misleading. Lots of the comments here are railing against a situation that doesn't exist.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    You think google's lying about the reason? And them lying is the obvious common-sense answer? A friend of mine had a saucy document get locked from sharing recently, and it definitely wasn't spammed. Also "that author" is a completely different person from the subject author.
    - fangzzz 2y ago
      Google uses one wording for all of these. "Flagged as inappropriate". If you look you'll find examples of people being unable to share their business spreadsheets, and "inappropriate" turned out to mean "I don't like that you have read receipts turned on and nothing written in the message field". https://support.google.com/drive/thread/172795978/project-management-google-sheet-flagged-as-inappropriate-for-no-reason?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/thread/172795978/project-ma... Legally speaking it's incredibly unlikely that Google is actually parsing the textual content of stuff on Google docs. The reason being that if they demonstrate that they can, then suddenly legally they must, and also they open themselves to being sued for doing it incorrectly and failing to remove content that is illegal in certain jurisdictions. There's really nothing in it for them. Edit: seems like Google has also a different mechanism for telling you if the file itself is the problem - you get an email saying [filename] is a terms of service violation. See e.g. https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Your-file-may-violate-Google-Drives-terms-of-service-violate/m-p/675453 https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Your-f... So I think we can be fairly confident that it's not a problem with saucy material here.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        Google openly says they look at shared file contents for the purpose of restricting some of them, in particular for copyright purposes. And no, I don't think we can be fairly confident that the error messages work exactly as you say.
from-nibly 2y ago
And thank heavens for it. I used to get porn spam from bots sharing Google docs directly to me. I would get a notification on my phone while I was at work and a nude woman would pop up my phone. After a few of those I was ready to uninstall Google drive. Glad they fixed it. Still, like others have mentioned, it's a pain that there's never any recourse if you get caught by the filter unintentionally.

by arp242 2y ago

raxxorraxor 2y ago

You don't know and you cannot verify if it indeed was spam filtering. I think that is part of the problem here.

arp242 2y ago
What else could it be? Can I prove this with absolute certainty? No. Is it the straight-forward common-sense explanation when you just shared a document with scores of people? Yes. But whatever the case may be, title is still hugely misleading. Lots of the comments here are railing against a situation that doesn't exist.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  You think google's lying about the reason? And them lying is the obvious common-sense answer? A friend of mine had a saucy document get locked from sharing recently, and it definitely wasn't spammed. Also "that author" is a completely different person from the subject author.
  - fangzzz 2y ago
    Google uses one wording for all of these. "Flagged as inappropriate". If you look you'll find examples of people being unable to share their business spreadsheets, and "inappropriate" turned out to mean "I don't like that you have read receipts turned on and nothing written in the message field". https://support.google.com/drive/thread/172795978/project-management-google-sheet-flagged-as-inappropriate-for-no-reason?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/thread/172795978/project-ma... Legally speaking it's incredibly unlikely that Google is actually parsing the textual content of stuff on Google docs. The reason being that if they demonstrate that they can, then suddenly legally they must, and also they open themselves to being sued for doing it incorrectly and failing to remove content that is illegal in certain jurisdictions. There's really nothing in it for them. Edit: seems like Google has also a different mechanism for telling you if the file itself is the problem - you get an email saying [filename] is a terms of service violation. See e.g. https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Your-file-may-violate-Google-Drives-terms-of-service-violate/m-p/675453 https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Your-f... So I think we can be fairly confident that it's not a problem with saucy material here.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      Google openly says they look at shared file contents for the purpose of restricting some of them, in particular for copyright purposes. And no, I don't think we can be fairly confident that the error messages work exactly as you say.

from-nibly 2y ago

And thank heavens for it. I used to get porn spam from bots sharing Google docs directly to me. I would get a notification on my phone while I was at work and a nude woman would pop up my phone. After a few of those I was ready to uninstall Google drive. Glad they fixed it. Still, like others have mentioned, it's a pain that there's never any recourse if you get caught by the filter unintentionally.