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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.
Sounds like the perfect time to finally ditch WordPerfect and use a modern, cloud-based word processor.
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.
"...a glitch in the system Google uses to monitor Google Docs..."
wtf does this mean? the cynic in me can fill in the blanks but I'll wait for a more informed bit of info
How's that 'Cloud' working out for ya?
"Cloud is a nicer way of saying 'someone else's computer that you have no control over'."
I've been seeing a lot of messages on twitter about people who can't access their documents and don't have local copies. I guess they won't make that mistake again.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It continues to astound me how many people I know, who'd I'd expect to know better, have all their emails only accessed by webmail. No POP client to save a local copy.
Ditto those who entire contact database is only on their cellphone.
Maybe it's only the Wall Street crowd?
It's certainly not the advertisers because they're getting screwed every which way possible as well. It wasn't that long ago that several companies showed that the effectiveness of online advertising just isn't there. So what did Alphabet do? It must be those pesky content generating people who make their platform worthwhile in going to in the first place. We must crack down on them!
Let's not talk about how ineffective certain targeted ads are. Let's not talk about how the system was abused for propaganda purposes.
No. Instead let's work on cutting into people's livelihoods and make everyone nervous that instead. That's the distracting ticket!
as with all Google properties.
AC comments get piped to
Apple haters gonna hate to admit this, but Apple's iCloud Drive does not read your docs.
Now cloud, which is actually water vapor, is all the rage and everyone and his brother wants to put their stuff in the cloud.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The real glitch is that Google can monitor it and flag it. Period. Maybe a lesser contributing factor of TANSTAAFL. Change to a word processor that can't be monitored and you don't have a problem.
Also use a picture of Alfred E. Neuman. How are they going to prove it isn't me?
...Still, seems a bad way to treat your product.
ssshhhh... be quite or they'll print a EULA under your clothes and shrink wrap you!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
with real harm done to people earning their living as vloggers.
Then maybe they should go get themselves a real job, or set up their own video service if they're not happy with YouTube. YouTube doesn't owe them anything.
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.
Sure, and if you don't like it, don't use it. No one's forcing these people to use YouTube.
So Google is reading private documents on it's servers. That's why I don't use google docs.
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.
All your inventions are now Google's.
Commonly-used software has bug(s), users impacted, company investigating fix. That story, and your local weather, right after this word from our sponsors.
Except it is randomly flagging files! Random! A bug would be arbitrarily flagging them. Why is Google using an RNG to flag files? That's crazy!
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.
... this word from our sponsors.
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Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I love the way he stands there disinterested, hands in pockets, reading the script off the floor and glancing casually at the camera. Classic Shatner Method.
Just how would you propose supporting it as a true commons? The only two sources of support I can think of are ads and subscriptions, and subscriptions don't meet much approval. (Possibly when I get a refillable credit card I'll consider supporting a lot of places I approve of, but I don't really trust committing funds over the open web. I need a way to limit my exposure that isn't too inconvenient.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Pretty much answers the question: should you move your personal computing into the cloud? Just how brain damaged would you need to be, to buy Google's (or any other megacorp's) koolaid pitch about the cloud, as opposed to just downloading Libreoffice for free, and using it securely in the safety of your own device? Which of course is running Linux to actually be safe... oh, I forgot, there is a lot of brain damage going down out there.
Word to the wise: use the cloud only for throwaway stuff you don't mind sharing with the world. Your private affairs? Don't be an idiot.
This advice applies to Gmail and its ilk too, though admittedly, few have the wherewithall to operate their own secure email server in their own domain. I do, sorry if you can't. But your ISP's email service (remember when everybody used that?) is a way better idea than the spy cloud.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Anyone who follows any sort of weapons or gaming or political channel on YouTube knows
... or should know, that they're really out in the fringe, outside of commentary careful enough to commit to words, but well within the range suitable for blathering on anyways.
The situation in the story is a lot more sympathetic; media outlet has their words flagged, while on a service that offers private sharing, even though those words are suitable for public display and even though those words were not yet shared with the public.
Much more sympathetic than, "Illiterate nutters have their videos flagged on a public distribution platform and can't understand the terms of service well enough to figure out why."
This probably doesn't apply to google docs or any other online office systems. But it certainly applies to online storage like dropbox or whatever the fuck microsoft is calling theirs this week. If you are going to use such services encrypt your damn documents. They can't remove if they can't read it, unless they just decide to remove all encrypted documents.
And for god sakes keep recent, local backups. Since dropbox stores shit in a folder on your computer just have that folder get backuped up in your normal back up routine.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Thanks for the tech support update. It doesn't sounds like Google has changed any kind of policy - rather is having an issue enforcing current policy.
In other news - my Intel video driver update is causing Outlook to draw a black page when I plug in an external monitor. Choosing "disable hardware acceleration" appears to be the work around.
Public service --- Just incase anyone else needs to know about that bug too. I'll post it to twitter hoping to make it a Slashdot article. The twitter universe - where all the news that isn't is published.
Sorry, but that doesn't suffice. You also need backups stored at remote locations.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
But the that's none of my business. I hope someone loses a shitload of money when Google does this. That would be pretty entertaining.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
No it is not. And neither is google or any of the other services that it has.
I've never had a word processing application on my laptop start denying access to my own files. Use a hosted service, get hosted service problems.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Unplug from wall, remove cover, tap out chuck,pull bearing,press new bearing in, insert chuck, screw cover back on.
It could be certain word(s) that are above a threshold in the smaller segments but those things are talked about in the other segments so the appearance rate is lower, and below the threshold, in the combined video.
I have stuff on Google Docs, but if they locked it, I have local copies on my desktop, laptop, and thumb drive, not to mention other online places.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Then maybe they should go get themselves a real job
If you work a full week in order to produce content, how is that not a real job? If you employ a staff, and are actually running a small business, how are these not real jobs?
They are new kinds of jobs, but real jobs nonetheless.
or set up their own video service if they're not happy with YouTube
Oh, everyone is very aware that YouTube is not their friend at this point. The problem is, most of the alternatives have either been scammers, or poor re-implementations of YouTube with all the same issues. None of them, for example, allow role-based administration of a channel (needed as soon as you grow beyond a 1-man shop).
Everyone I follow with a larger following is Patreon-funded now, but you have to build your channel to that point, and you need an established service to build that following.
No one's forcing these people to use YouTube.
It's the only realistic option today. Sure, Google may "owe them" nothing .. nothing that is beyond not being a dick to your fellow man (aka: don't be evil).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> Very bland content now routinely gets flagged for no apparent reason and must be manually appealed.
It is worse then that. When even a black screen gets flagged for "copyright violation" you know YouTube is seriously broken.
Google doesn't give a shit about quality assurance. Witness their mentality -- everything is in "Beta" aka "Broken".
"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.
Don't be silly. That would have shown up in testing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most likely they are using machine learning to develop a classifier to flag content. The problem is they removed the human element of checking the results too early. In addition, they probably didn't direct the classifier enough to enable to to avoid false positives.
I suggest that 'probably' and 'backup' are a scary combination.
I can tell you exactly why it's "not appropriate": because it's hosted on someone else's system and utterly depends on them for access and security (including security vs DoS)! That's a completely absurd way to treat most data. The chances that Google Docs is the right fit for you are greater than zero, but not much.
You can correct the problem of inappropriateness by storing your data yourself, under your control. That will fix the underlying problem, thereby causing your document to be stored appropriately and with maximum value (including tool interoperability) to you.
Then if Google Docs still isn't able to work with the data on your local computer or your server, then Google Docs is silly and relatively underpowered joke compared to your typical 1970s microcomputer. You should upgrade to 1970s-or-later tech.
MAYBE IT HAS A YELLING FILTER?
Ahem. Take two. What I mean to say is, maybe it's got some metrics about the density of certain words or topics. Spread over a bigger piece, it doesn't trigger the alarms but in the shorter clip it does. Just a wild guess, though. It could also be a bug in the algorithm that just doesn't work on longer pieces or something. Or randomization. Or wild inconsistency.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
APK
Have you heard they are planning to remove host files from Windows 10?
I think the real story here is the new (pseudo-?) random number generator apparently employed in this flagging service.
Is your mind still in the 90s?
Doesn't asking this question worry you? Don't you wonder why you changed your way of thinking? Whose idea was it?
Me, I'm darn proud of the fact that I'm trying to keep my mind as close to what it was in the 90s as is practicable given the onslaught of garbage data.
Here's another report of the same Google problem, including Google's response: "A mysterious message is locking Google Docs users out of their files"
'And they do go over and snoop your stuff, and they will even lock you out.
That's it in a nutshell.
YouTube has an effective monopoly over the community produced video streaming sector, just as Microsoft had an effective monopoly over the desktop operating system back in the late 90's, when they got in trouble for bundling Internet Explorer in an deliberate move to undermine Mozilla.
YouTube is using its control of its monetization tools to undermine whatever content they think should not be produced. Do you really want to pretend that Google's massive advertising operation is just some glorified web host running on AWS and claim that anyone could "do that in 30 minutes"?
"... cloud, which is actually water vapor..."
Funny.
Like the two items of medical research I read about today, they probably trained it on only 17 samples.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
What an utterly stupid fault to build in as a feature. Obviously Google Doc is viewed as a toy at best by Google.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Nationalize that shit homey
This is really no different than the phone company restricting you from the phone lines because they don't like what you have to say. This is what google, youtube, twitter, facebook, etc are doing. These sites are effectively "the internet" now and for western democracies to allow them to throw out whatever speech they don't like is harmful to our way of life.
Me, I'm darn proud of the fact that I'm trying to keep my mind as close to what it was in the 90s as is practicable given the onslaught of garbage data.
If you want to keep your mind sharp, you might want to consider gaming. So far the aggregate of the scientific studies done on the subject suggest that gaming is very good for your brain.
;-)
If your business relies solely on one other company, then you don't have a business: you're a serf.
I don't respond to AC's.
I never said the other options were as convenient. Freedom usually isn't convenient; just ask any Linux desktop user about their selection of common proprietary applications (Photoshop, etc.). But YouTube is not a monopoly as claimed before: there other other options out there, even if you don't like them as much.
If you work a full week in order to produce content, how is that not a real job?
A real job has a real paycheck. If you can actually make a real living at it, OK, but most YouTube bloggers are just yahoos doing this in their spare time, or worse, have delusions of making it big like a small handful have and forsake actually working at a real career for this pipe dream.
Anyway, I could quit my job now and write some open-source software on github, and I could easily work a full week doing that. If I can't pay the bills doing that, however, it's not a real job, it's a hobby. Just like most YouTube bloggers. There's a remote chance I could turn my github project into a full-time job somehow, but it's a very remote chance.
The problem is, most of the alternatives have either been scammers, or poor re-implementations of YouTube with all the same issues.
Then set up your own service. There are alternatives, even if you think they're not as good. They're not a monopoly.
Sure, Google may "owe them" nothing .. nothing that is beyond not being a dick to your fellow man (aka: don't be evil).
Why shouldn't Google be a dick to their fellow man? They have every right to be evil if they want. There's no law saying you can't be evil. If you think they're being evil, it's your responsibility to stop supporting them.
Nationalize it? Then it won't work at all; there's no way they'd be able to continue operating with different people in Congress fighting over how it should be administered, and worse they won't be able to hire competent help to run it, so it'll have to be outsourced to some corporation to run (the US government can't even run its own intranet or email systems, it's outsourced to HPE).
I'm sorry, your assertion is just plain stupid. MS had an effective monopoly on PC OSes because of compatibility problems: you can't (easily) run Microsoft Office on Linux, for instance, nor many many other very popular programs, many of which are critical for business use (like Photoshop, various engineering packages like CATIA or AutoCad, etc.). This phenomenon is called "lock-in".
There's no lock-in with YouTube. There's no requirement that you host videos on YouTube; just ask the people at XVideos, YouPorn, etc. They had no problem setting up their own sites, There's other non-porn services like Vimeo. And you can always just set up your own server with a Linux box and nginx or apache, or set up an AWS instance, etc. Embedded videos on webpages are not proprietary; the technology is open and not that difficult.
TIL Chevy dealers are Serfs.
The operating noises of an antique drill sound like Lido Pimienta.
...it's only Skynet becoming sentient.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
I seriously doubt Google is just flagging files at random, which would make no sense. Clearly they are using some algorithm that is not working properly, which should lead one to believe that this problem can be fixed. The summary mentioning "It's not clear why this is happening," is evidence that the title not just incorrect but also alarmist and kind of whiny because this is personal.
Google is a convenient way to share and store documents, but if you use ANY one method of storage without any backup or contingency plan, that's on you when it fails.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Just as Microsoft had an effective monopoly over the desktop operating system back in the late 90's, when they got in trouble for bundling Internet Explorer in an deliberate move to undermine Mozilla.
Pretty sure it was Netscape that Microsoft put out of business in the late 90s.
Fedgov is totally capable of running its own email system, should it choose to do so. The point of outsourcing is for some well-connected capitalists to get a nice fat Federal contract.
The Google workers I've encountered all seemed to have an imaginatively high opinion of themselves. It must be difficult for many of them to accept that the general public has opened its eyes.
That they are now widely regarded as enemies of freedom. That people see their despicable surveillance-based business model and recoil in disgust.
That Google's obsession with constantly snooping and spying positively reeks of oppressive state surveillance, and people can no longer ignore the smell. That almost everyone sees Google's obvious love for censorship as inherently untrustworthy.
That with the now widespread recognition Google has become too powerful, more and more people there are calling for Google/Alphabet to be broken up.
Why are they scanning docs in the first place? Is that the price to pay for Google services?
Ahem, "ad-sense" is very much a monopoly by every definition of the term. Every other google service has not method of captivating the customer and fails on that part.
Great comment on the intranet! ..it's a reflection of them!
Remote location: Periodically mail a backup to your sister on the other coast.
It all depends on who you are, how rapidly your important data changes, and how much those changes are worth to you. I didn't address secrecy, which would, indeed, complicate matters.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Spammers figured out they can take all the @gmail.com email addresses they harvested and simply share a Google Doc with the recipients, to ensure 100% delivery.
And now to the ridiculous part: To report the document as abuse, you have to first open that document (which forces you to see it), then go to the menu option "Help --> Report Abuse/Copyright" (and then comically get to a screen that says "Internal Error, please try again later").
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Jobs don't necessarily come with paychecks. That's regular employment or contracting. There's a lot of people out there who are doing something else.
Jobs are not necessarily successful at first. If you're doing some sort of freelance work, there's a good chance you'll bleed money for a while, and then start being profitable.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Like... every franchise owner?
That they are now widely regarded as enemies of freedom. That people see their despicable surveillance-based business model and recoil in disgust.
Yeah, uhh.. nerds like myself on Slashdot may feel that way, but most people are totally fine with Google.
That Google's obsession with constantly snooping and spying positively reeks of oppressive state surveillance, and people can no longer ignore the smell
Most people don't care. They find things like their search history being discoverable and targeted ads and such as the new normal. As just the way the world works. Again: most people don't care about their privacy. Maybe they don't want the wife to find out about an affair, but it's not Google they blame when she does. They don't want their identity stolen, and while they might blame Equifax, they don't really blame a general system that makes it possible. Because convenience trumps security. Over the long run, it always has. People are HAPPY to give up their privacy if they think there are rewards to be reaped from it.
"You are incapable of making good chocolate chip cookies"
"Why?"
"Because if you make a delicious batch of chocolate chip cookies, these fat greedy men in suits will piss all over it"
May be the truth, but it's not an argument against my baking ability. Nationalize it and jail the fat greedy men for pissing all over the rest of our cookies.
Um, that really doesn't make any sense at all. Let me fix that analogy for you.
"You are incapable of making good chocolate chip cookies"
"Why?"
"Because you've been given many opportunities to do so, and instead of actually doing it, you just go to the store and buy the most shitty, nasty cookies they have and then pass those out as if they're good. You've proven you don't even know good cookies from bad ones when you can buy whatever cookies you want, and you've never even attempted to learn how to make cookies on your own, so you've also proven you don't have the desire or discipline to make your own cookies."