Slashdot Mirror
Google Docs Is Randomly Flagging Files for Violating Its Terms of Service (vice.com)
Louise Matsakis, writing for Motherboard: Google Docs, the collaborative, cloud-based word processing software, appears to be randomly flagging files for supposedly "violating" Google's Terms of Service. A member of Motherboard's team, as well as numerous users on Twitter, report that their documents are being locked for no apparent reason. Once a document is flagged, the owner of that document can no longer share it with other users. Users who have already been shared on a document that's been flagged are kicked out and can no longer access it. When a draft Motherboard article was locked on Monday morning, a message took over the screen that read "This item has been flagged as inappropriate and can no longer be shared." It's not clear why this is happening, but it may be the result of a glitch in the system Google uses to monitor Google Docs. DownDetector is currently reporting Google Drive problems in the US and Europe, which may be part of the problem.
Anyone who follows any sort of weapons or gaming or political channel on YouTube knows just how over-aggressive the Google's flagging bots can be. Very bland content now routinely gets flagged for no apparent reason and must be manually appealed. Sure, the bots are intended to do something Google actually wants: demonitize genuinely offensive content so that advertizers aren't embarassed, but that's not what the bots actually do. The collateral damage seems to be 10x the intended effect, with real harm done to people earning their living as vloggers.
I'm betting this is just more of the same. Google has some stuff they legitimately want to ban (e.g., sharing pirated content form you Google drive), but then the bots are badly written and poorly tested, and wreak havoc.
I'd call it poor customer service, but of course we know we're not Google's customers - only their ad buyers are their customers. Still, seems a bad way to treat your product.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Google Drive Terms of Service
We may review your conduct and content in Google Drive for compliance with the Terms and our Program Policies.
When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through Google Drive, you give Google a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our services unless you delete your content. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to Google Drive.
Our automated systems analyze your content to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is received, shared, uploaded and when it is stored. You can find more information about how Google uses and stores content in our Privacy Policy. If you submit feedback or suggestions about Google Drive, we may use your feedback or suggestions without obligation to you.
Google’s Privacy Policy explains how we treat your personal data and protect your privacy when you use Google Drive. By using Google Drive, you agree that Google can use such data in accordance with our privacy policies.
Google Privacy And Terms: Privacy Policy
We collect information in the following ways:
Information you give us. For example, many of our services require you to sign up for a Google Account. When you do, we’ll ask for personal information, like your name, email address, telephone number or credit card to store with your account. If you want to take full advantage of the sharing features we offer, we might also ask you to create a publicly visible Google Profile, which may include your name and photo.
Information we get from your use of our services. We collect information about the services that you use and how you use them, like when you watch a video on YouTube, visit a website that uses our advertising services, or view and interact with our ads and content. This information includes:
Device information
We collect device-specific information (such as your hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information including phone number). Google may associate your device identifiers or phone number with your Google Account.
Log information
When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This includes:
details of how you used our service, such as your search queries.
telephony log information like your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls.
Internet protocol address.
device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and re
It's not a monopoly. There are other video services out there, such as Vimeo. Or you can just set up your own website and serve your own videos. You don't need YouTube to make video available to people.
As for not having a corporate overlord, how exactly do you think such a thing would keep running? It costs a lot of money to keep a system like that in operation.
Anyone who follows any sort of weapons or gaming or political channel on YouTube knows just how over-aggressive the Google's flagging bots can be.
I don't think "aggressive" is even the correct category of term to use here.
The most amazing and baffling example I've seen was after a live stream.
The stream lasted almost 3 hours, and all was well. At the end of the stream the VOD was marked to post to the channel in its entirety.
Either the stream or the archived full copy was flagged at all.
The next morning editing began, which was to cut the original video into segments aligned to the few topics discussed on stream. 5 segments in all.
2 of those 5 were flagged as not suitable for advertisers. Keep in mind, those 2 segments were exact copies from the original stream, which is still suitable for advertisers.
So the bot had decided that one copy of the video was not suitable for ads, which is an exact copy of time marks 36m-72m within another video which was sutable for ads
What this shows is that you can upload the exact same video multiple times, with the exact same description text, and the same title but with " - 1" or " - 2" etc. appended, and have a non-zero chance that some but not all of those copies will get flagged while the other copies will remain fine, despite being identical copies.
This is not simply being aggressive, this is being broken and incapable of basic pattern matching.
YouTube is a defacto monopoly at this point. It was set up to be a Commons where everybody could participate. It has no competitor of a similar scale.
So perhaps it should be broken away from Google and made a separate entity again. Google can still contract with them to sell ads on it.
Or maybe it should be made into a true Commons without a corporate overlord running it.
A "true commons" is not something that can exist under US law, thankfully. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here all land is owned. Even land you have a right to access is owned, probably by a government entity, and that entity is charged with regulating access. For example, in the traditional example of common land used for grazing, in the United States grazing on government-owned land is regulated and requires permits. There is no Commons.
Youtube may or may not be a "defacto" monopoly as that is a loose and subjective phrase that can mean anything. Here in the US we only care if a monopoly results in the two banned things; harming consumers, and harming competition.
To claim harm to competition you'd have to be able to show losses or lack of access because of youtube's monopoly; but nobody else (other than pornographers) have even been able to make a profit on user-contributed internet video. They would have to be able to show that youtube is somehow preventing competition. But the nature of the internet makes that unlikely unless they were using some sort of active strategy that keeps people out; yet, their market dominance is based solely on customer preference! Customers aren't even locked in in any way. (As for the pornographers, youtube doesn't allow porn and so don't compete directly, and therefore doesn't harm them at all)
To claim harm to consumers you'd have to be able to show that prices were higher because of youtube. That's not going to happen, it is a free service!
If something is bad for the "vloggers" it doesn't matter; they're only protected as a consumer, and they're being paid so they're not even a consumer they're a business partner. It is only customers and competitors, rather than business partners, that are protected.
Unplug from wall, remove cover, tap out chuck,pull bearing,press new bearing in, insert chuck, screw cover back on.
"Gaming" is hardly fringe these days. It's a bigger business than the movies. Is your mind still in the 90s?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.