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Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

theregister.com

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Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#31

Post by ajross »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #21
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I pay for the storage, then it is my drive and my data. The article didn't say anything about the free or paid GDrive accounts. If it is a free account, then that is up for debate. If it impacts the paid consumers, they paid for the service and it is their data.

do you have a link to the legal decisions that confirm this is the case and establish what rights the customer actually has in this relationship? What rights do the contracts that a paid customer signs with Google say they have over the data? From what I see in the free terms of service: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.…

> You have the rights to your data, but there doesn't seem to be any stated obligation for Google to keep that data or make it accessible to you.

On a paid account, clearly that's part of the contracted service being provided. There is absolutely an obligation to provide the service you took payment for.

But no, in general in our society, gratis products aren't required to carry warranties, for obvious reasons (no one would provide them if so).

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#32

Post by Obscurity4340 »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #14
__jonas wrote: post #10

I recently set up rclone to do nightly backups of my entire OneDrive to Dropbox, I feel pretty safe with this in terms of reliability, I find it unlikely that both services will catastrophically fail like this at the same time. Would recommend rclone to anyone, it has worked pretty consistently so far.

Dropbox constantly scans your data and can easily block your whole account permanently. It's hard to recommend it unless you encrypt your data.

Thats why you setup Cryptomator

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#33

Post by nickthegreek »

causality0 wrote: post #30
londons_explore wrote: post #26

Guess at root cause: Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data). Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the d…

and some users are going to permanently lose data Why couldn't you write code to let users compare and choose which version of the data they want to keep?

Ideally Google will resolve it without the customer needing to do the work.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#34

Post by Obscurity4340 »

This is why its good to have Cryptomator setup and figure out how to use that rsync or rclone whatever. Still gotta figure out how to implement it but anything with the G is already on shaky grounds. You're better off with Dropbox or literally anyone else.

Does this affect iCloud?

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#35

Post by jeffbee »

londons_explore wrote: post #26

Guess at root cause: Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data). Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the d…

That seems like one of the more unlikely causes, among the almost infinite variety of causes that are consistent with "several people said they can't find some files".

To me the most likely one by far is the deletion was actually commanded, for example by a flaw in the program they use to sync, or by malware.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#36

Post by jqpabc123 »

withinboredom wrote: post #20
Wolfbeta wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rights do you have in this case?

> Google Drive allows you to upload, submit, store, send and receive content. As described in the Google Terms of Service, your content remains yours. We do not claim ownership in any of your content, including any text, data, information, and files that you upload, share, or store in your Drive account. The Google Terms of Service give Google a limited purpose license to operate and improve the Google Drive services…

If Google can delete it, it's not really *your* data is it?

https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#37

Post by londons_explore »

jeffbee wrote: post #35
londons_explore wrote: post #26

Guess at root cause: Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data). Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the d…

That seems like one of the more unlikely causes, among the almost infinite variety of causes that are consistent with "several people said they can't find some files". To me the most likely one by far is the deletion was actually commanded, for example by a flaw in the program they use to sync, or by malware.

A few users have reported that documents they deleted months ago have reappeared too. And files they moved long ago have unmoved.

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#38

Post by londons_explore »

causality0 wrote: post #30
londons_explore wrote: post #26

Guess at root cause: Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data). Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the d…

and some users are going to permanently lose data Why couldn't you write code to let users compare and choose which version of the data they want to keep?

You could... But writing and deploying a diffing tool for every different gsuite application is probably 6 months of work for a whole team... There are so many corner cases.

What will the users do for 6 months waiting for their data to return?

Re: Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data

#39

Post by fh9302 »

roody15 wrote: post #23
potency wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember OneDrive doing this too, where photos of parents' children taking a bath etc. were flagged as child porn. Unfortunately unless you encrypt your data locally, privacy is one of the tradeoffs in using these services.

This happens with Apple iCloud as well. Staff member had their iCloud photo collection locked because of this. Was able to regain access but I would definitely caution anyone storing all family photos online without another backup option.

According to NCMEC Apple does not do any proactive scanning of photos.

> Last year, while Meta’s Facebook and Instagram submitted a combined 26 million reports, Google 2 million, and TikTok nearly 300,000, Apple submitted 234. The year before that: 160.

> Apple isn’t a social media company, so this is hardly a direct comparison. That said, WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted, scans unencrypted content such as profile and group photos for CSAM. It provided over 1 million cybertips to NCMEC in 2022; Microsoft sent in 110,000; Dropbox, nearly 46,000; and Synchronoss, the cloud storage provider for Verizon, over 30,000.

https://archive.is/AyuCq

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