Google Drive could soon start locking your files

On a technical level: I assume they'd be finding files they want to block by looking for a hash, right? Are these guaranteed to be unique or are collisions possible? And any organized and genuine bad actors can work around some kind of hash filter by altering files slightly, right? I'd hate to think that Google's abject arrogance is going to result in false positives that are going to nuke normal peoples' livelihood with no recourse while again barely having an impact on real bad guys.

On an ethical and moral level: my opinion is subjective, but this puts an undesirable amount of control over people in the hands of a company that has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted. If Google cannot provide actual human customer support to avoid wrecking lives with bad algorithms that make wrong decisions, then their policy should be to merely allow everything that's not blocked by law/court-order.

I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.

Totally misleading headline and all these comments are commenting on the headline without reading the article. Google has _always_ had anti-abuse systems that will restrict sharing for content that violates ToS. The new feature is that the content owner will now be notified when their content has been restricted, if that owner has a Workspace account.

And the cycle repeats. It starts with the obvious malware or hollywood movie takedown, but the actual policy is anything which goes against an opaque and subjective acceptable use policy, which means the entire world's files now need to conform to discourse within the narrowly defined Overton window controlled by a tiny group of likeminded people.

Fast forward a few years, and we can all predict which content will be "hate speech" and which almost identical content will be allowed. Detection of copyright protected content will be automated, but appeals for fair use will be manual, slow and difficult. Double standards will abound where the liberal ideals of the company run up against corporate interests, favored politicians or powerful governments.

And of course- someone will make a competing service which doesn't police content, and that service will in turn become a cesspool as all the worst offenders will be massively over represented there compared to merely the good netizens concerned about protecting a free internet.

Maybe a massive move to decentralization is the only thing that can save us. 100 different services with 100 different policies on which content is allowed seems far better than the direction we're headed. I'd rather at least have the easy choice and understanding of which ideology and set of interests I'm being filtered through.

Well, 15 years ago I told some people from Czech Pirate party that they are basically marxists. (At the time, they still wanted a fair copyright reform.) I didn't mean it pejoratively in the least, but seriously, as a historical warning.

I pointed out that fight for fair copyright and culture in public domain has a historical analogy in fight for public lands, that were enclosed by capitalists by the end of the 18th century, to get people to the manufacturing plants. People didn't take me very seriously, because, we are white collar professionals, not some stupid peasants or communists, right? And of course, information wants to be free and are simple to copy, so they can obviously always be free.

I think digital enclosures are coming, and the digital "public sphere" is shrinking. Some (Varoufakis) even say they are already there. Unless people fight the trend, most of the digital stuff you "own" today will be someone else's property, and not public (similar to land today). Access to it will be limited by laws and controlled by mandatory digital devices.