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Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

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Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#2
I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum.

Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someone who can fit it. That isn't a support model.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#5
> The added grievance to this is that my drive also included my own personal family photos and my current book on the subject

I mean, how many times does this need to come up for people to learn the lesson? If you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data, including locking you out of it. We certainly don't like this state of affairs, but that is the world many of us have created.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#6
Aside from all the moral and ethical questions this raises from the usage of faceless AI, really this happens time and again, I suspect so Google can employ less human reviewers and so they can claim "not our fault". I think I've commented on a couple of these posts by now every time with the same advice.

But anyhow, people should be well aware cloud providers do use AI systems and they will make mistakes, so you should:

1: have multiple redundant backups, seriously this is a no-brainer, AI or no even Google can lose data if a storage device dies. Depending on how important the data is you might consider as many backups as you can manage.

2: encrypt, encrypt, encrypt. If you store even so much as a text file unencrypted you're making a mistake. Use archives, double compressed, use the myraid of tools out there to ensure your files can't be read by anyone but you and who you decide to give the key to.

Is this more work? Absolutely, but at the end of the day regulations mean Google need to scan content, and they will have a false positive match, and then it goes on HN and magically Google restore the data.

I hope they get the data back but sometimes being burnt is actually a lesson in remembering best practice, why oh why your only copy of family photos are on one user hostile data-mining platform is beyond me, but it's a terrible idea.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#7
post #2

I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum. Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someo…

And to teach other users to stop critically relying on such a capricious service. I have less sympathy when it happens to someone techy, who should know better, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#8

Stop using Google Drive. Unless you're storing cat photos, or you use an rclone-encrypted mount that is stored in your Google Drive, you can't trust any public file store.

Well you especially cannot trust google for anything. The only reason they let you host stuff is so they can datamine it.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#9
I know this is avoidable, and I know it’s a semi-regular occurrence, and I can recognize Google’s moderation problem is non-trivial, but I really can’t shake the feeling that Orwell was off by a letter and the future will truly just be a bot stamping on a human face forever.
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