Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content”

I see a lot of comments misinterpreting this.

First, it's not about private files, it's about distributing content.

Google isn't spying on your private files, but does scan them when you share them publicly. E.g. keep all the pirated movies you want on your Drive, and even give private access to friends, but the moment you make them publicly viewable Google scans them and limits access accordingly. So no, this isn't applying to your private diary or privately shared documents.

And second, to those who claim absolute free speech with no limits -- notice that the two main categories here are related to democracy and health. All our legal protections ultimately depend on a democratic foundation -- undo that with misinformation and you don't have anything anymore. Similarly, your rights don't matter much if you're dead. Companies aren't allowed to advertise rat poison as medicine and neither are you.

I just cancelled my drive subscription.

I don't know how anyone could continue using it after this.

I probably have dozens of docs and hundreds of research papers contradicting government health advice on diabetes and heart disease. These would fall under "Misleading content related to harmful health practices" since they promote a health theory which the government considers harmful.

However I would have cancelled regardless since the idea of automatic bans and/or content deletion based on ML models is crazy. They are obviously going to find a lot a false positives and I can't deal with the idea of trying to speak to google to explain that their algorithm mistakenly flagged my innocent content. In other words even if you are the perfect citizen, there is a chance you will get flagged anyway.

"Misinformation" is just another word for "falsehood" or "untruth."

Those of you claiming that "democracy" depends on authorities preventing the spread of misinformation are ipso facto saying that democracy requires the government, or megacorporate cartels with a monopoly on public speech most likely acting as proxies for the government (as Psaki made clear is happening), to define what counts as "truth" (a Ministry Of Truth if you will) and to stamp out what they've defined as "false."

It's insane, and it's amazing to me how many of you have your heads so far up your assessment with partisanship that you can't see that the recent media hysteria over "misinformation" is a blatant example of the contrived "emergencies" that all totalitarian regimes in history have used to seize control over free societies.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -George Orwell, 1984

The road to hell is paved with "good intentions". We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides. Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc. are fantastic services in that they work really well on a massive scale. However, Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information puts too much power into the hands of one corporation, whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population.

I've been working as a SWE at google (in ads...) for over two years and I've really started to loathe it over the past year. The pay is fantastic and it's really hard to walk away from that, but the idea that they are not (or at least no longer) contributing to the better world that I think we need, has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me...

We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.

edit: added quotes around "good intentions"

Interesting... so I wrote a wrote an article on gun violence

https://austingwalters.com/firearms-by-the-numbers/

Guess it contradicts the official position of the current administration (not reality). So will my drive content be removed?

Similarly, I have been monitoring the CDC change the covid19 deaths rate over time.

https://austingwalters.com/changes-in-the-cdc-counts-of-deat...

It appears the CDC had been inaccurately portraying the deaths rate(s) (I assume unintentionally). Particularly, it appears there's a significant number of unexplained deaths. That could be "misleading?" because I regularly collaborate with and we update the data.

"misleading" does not mean not inaccurate. Often the context matters and how is Google going to take this into account? We have multiple theories and discuss them, find more information and put it together.

Ahh Hell No!

I mean - Who gets to define 'misleading and/or confusing'? Google? A court case?

If they (Google) want to impose restrictions such as "Do not distribute content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users" - Might I suggest that they apply those very same standards to their own behavior.

* But who can watch the watchmen? *

I am grateful that I have a symmetric ftth connection. Information (correct or incorrect) needs to be free - as in Free to be expressed; Free to be ridiculed; Free to be disseminated; Free to be discussed; Free to be exposed to the light of day.

It is for the people themselves to decide what they do or do not believe.

Do I want Google to decide what is or is not misleading or confusing? Eh??? Say Whhaaatttt!!! Ever read a contracts terms and conditions? They can be as confusing AF… so uhhmm Yep – Let’s Ban ‘em! Woot!

Google, Eat Your Own Dogfood.

Google can do a much better job of making clear what is out of scope. When I first saw this headline I was also surprised and outraged.

Looking more closely, this is just about distribution, probably in terms of "content hosting". It doesn't target individuals or families storing whatever they want for themselves. This made more sense in that context.

For example, if I create a fake video urging people to vote illegally, or at the wrong time, and I am sharing it through Google Drive with many many people seeing it, Google wants a policy prevent that sharing.

Otherwise either it's hands are tied or it's just doing arbitrary things. Which is far more authoritarian.

If a document is shared and accessed by thousands of people, it makes plausible sense that Google might not want to essentially be a hosting service if that content is leading to real-world harm.

...but this has not been made explicit enough for such a sensitive issue, with real speech and free expression concerns. (and there are real concerns as always about who decides what is misinformation)

Also today,

Psaki on de-platforming American citizens: "You shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others if you providing 'misinformation' out there."

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1416095652162031624

They will define misinformation of course.

Simple solution: Google can delete whatever it wants for being "misleading content" but if they ever get it wrong, even in the slightest, 10% of Google's wealth is transferred to the aggrieved. If Google is so confident in its ability to be the sole arbitrator of truth for humanity, they should have zero issue with agreeing to this because it will be zero risk.

Of course they will never agree to such a condition because they know they aren't capable of even figuring out how to make products that the market wants much of the time. The Google Graveyard is proof of this. They sure as hell aren't capable of knowing more about virology than the virologists of the world who still are trying to figure things out.

Tech companies wanting to be in control of human ability to communicate with each other is simply a power play. Combat it with risk and they'll have to back down or suffer the consequences when they make a mistake (which they will, often).

What. The. Hell.

I suppose limiting sharing might be justified. But limiting access and/or deleting own files is outrageous.

For that matter, collections of misleading content can have legitimate purposes. Such as research.

Now I'm seriously considering dropping my Drive subscription.

Update: I got a lot of upvotes, but tbh I may have misunderstood the new policy, which does seem to (maybe?) only be limited to distribution of misleading content. I do think Google has a legitimate interest in regulating use of it's services as means of distributing information. I'm not sure where the line is, though. For example, if I sent an email to a friend in which I said something that isn't true, I think I would rightly be upset if Google refused to deliver the email. OTOH, if I was sending this to large numbers of people regularly, as part of some kind of misinformation operation, then maybe blocking me would be a legitimate. Complicated.

Throwing in my comment like a penny down a wishing well:

Google recently turned off my gmail because my google drive quota was exceeded. They were "protecting" me from myself, by denying me the ability to buy more storage. They refuse to accept any payment method until I deliver a passport photo to them.

The problems here go a bit beyond them being the steward of information or arbiter of right vs wrong. They'll deny you service for any or no reason, and leave no recourse when their algorithm malfunctions.

That said, they can ban distribution of misleading content. It's their right, and no one can dispute that. I'm not sure what people hope to accomplish by expressing outrage over this. We wouldn't want providers not to be able to decide what content to distribute.

The problem we actually need to solve is how to divorce the concept of free speech from private companies. For some reason, it's almost ubiquitously believed that the "Internet" is actually just Twitter, Google, Facebook.

How can we, the tech literate, start to explain to our friends/family and eventually the world, that the Internet is actually an interconnected network of computers that no one person or entity controls?

Honestly, I fear that even among us, we have large groups of uninformed people who believe companies like Google and Facebook are more than just leaf nodes on the graph, and that worries me. If knowledgable people can be this wrong, how can we expect the uninformed to get this right?

I worry about the future of tech, if the discourse on HN is any indication of how the greater tech community feels. The idea that Google is an integral part of using the Internet to express oneself is not only completely wrong, but actively harmful, and I have no clue what to do about it.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". John Gilmore's statement has seemingly gone out of vogue, but it remains true. Google cannot stop information (good and bad) from spreading, so why do people think they can, and how do we disabuse Americans (and the world) from the notion that Google has that power?

The problem isn't that one company has made its own decision on what to ban. The problem is that the White House is literally compiling a list and telling all the social media companies who to ban. This is censorship by proxy.

This is not just Google Drive, this is a policy across many of their services (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and new Sites). Holy smokes... I think it's time to finally dump Google services for me.

Its a slippery slope but not for the reasons you might first think.

It's because this is turning a platform into an publisher. Soon more and more governments will be demanding publishers to enforce editorial standards. There seems to be no platforms these days that say they are just that. Even cloudfare, a peice of background infrastructure is happily editorialising certain things.

With this idea, try not to get sucked in to the other argument. The issue is not that the list of certain things is going to increase, the issue is that the impartial nature of the internet is disappearing.

There's a fair bit of evidence on some public hearings that the major players were given an ultimatum from both Republicans and Democrats to start being publishers, to relinquish control to the state, or be split up under anti monopoly and anti competition laws.

Gross.

All must recognize the indubitable authority of the ministry of truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...

Good on Google!

The old assumptions of the internet and how it works were wrong. The declaration of freedom was naive.

The simple model of how “free speech” leads to wiser outcomes turned out to be wrong.

What the heck - this combination may even be a Great Filter.

1) The rapid deployment of near-species scale information networks.

2) Information losing neutrality because any species (aside from maybe a hive mind) adds spin and polarity to data

3) Unprepared economic markets that end up rewarding polarizing (“engaging”) content, attriting societal level attention/mental resource in a way never experienced before.

I believe the recent British Govt paper argues that social media firms need to bear a duty of care to users. This is a better place to start.

Removing misinformation which has an obvious known fingerprint is a good start.

I read regular stories on HN about employee activism on certain types of popular issues around gender and race, involving petitions and publicity. Spotify, Apple, Google. Yet nothing about the march towards totalitarianism and information control - always with good intentions and to our benefit - promulgated with stories such as this.

Not a peep from our young Silicon Valley activists. Do we still teach history at school? I'm talking about history of many countries. No fear whatsoever of information control and government censorship. I'm baffled and saddened.

If there's one thing the history of authoritarianism has taught us, it's that the invasion of privacy will not be contained. Invasion of Privacy breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is. ...

Authoritarianism will find away.

- Ian Malcolm after they raided his house for publishing the memoires of his stay at Jurassic Park to Google Docs

I highly reccomend people look at Cryptomator[1]. It encrypts all your data on your google drive or dropbox etc, but works like normally on your local machine. Allows you to use these services while blocking the provider from being able to view your unencrypted data. Also its free and open source!

[1]https://cryptomator.org/

For better or for worse: the cloud was always somebody else's computer.

Honestly I think it's pretty silly that we've all become so complacent with the cloud that we pretend that we're not guests, and that we own the place.

In 2003 the US Government and media collaborated to start the Iraq War based on false reporting. Tens of thousands of people died. Today, the notion that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction would be suppressed as "misinformation" because it contradicts the official narrative.

Amazing they have the gall to think they still can arbiter truth, considering how YouTube up until recently was banning the "conspiracy theory" that the recent pandemic may have originated from a Wuhan Lab... Something that now all the experts are saying may actually be true.

> "...that contradicts official government records"

Whose government?

Surprised nobody has mentioned ProtonDrive[0] as a near future candidate for eliminating these types of incidents. Since the data is encrypted, ProtonDrive can't make arbitrary value judgements on your data. For me personally I can't wait for it to arrive so I can wean myself off Google properly. It's the one final thing that I need to replace Google with: Proper Encrypted Cloud Storage.

[0] https://protonmail.com/blog/protondrive-security/

My guess is that a lot of this is driven by the climate in the USA, so with that in mind I have some examples that I am curious about, as an outside observer.

> It also includes incorrect claims that a political figure or government official has died, been involved in an accident, or is suffering from a sudden serious illness.

1) What is the ruling if I store and share a CNN video of a Don Lemon show in which he and a mental health professional discusses her diagnosis that a political figure, whom she has never met, is mentally ill.

2) Same thing but on Fox News and different political figure

3) Same thing but on Infowars but about Hillary Clinton

> Content that is demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in civic or democratic processes.

and

> This includes information about public voting procedures, political candidate eligibility based on age / birthplace, election results,

1) Claims in the media and by political figures that the gubernatorial election in the state of Georgia was fraudulent

2) Claims that a Presidential election was "hacked" by a foreign state

3) Claims that a Presidential election was fraudulent

> Manipulated media: Media that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm.

Again here, dealing in pure objective truth versus media spin and misleading framing:

1) Out-of-context edits suggesting that political figure called neo-nazis "very fine people"

2) A video, absent context, of a fictional reading of a phone call transcript, during an impeachment

3) A statement by a political figure that the COVID-19 virus may have leaked from a laboratory

I will be very surprised if the enforcement does not fall on partisan political lines.

No one is talking about this but no matter what side you’re on, it’s terrifying that a group of individuals congregated in Menlo Park, CA and to a lesser extent few other offices around the world has become the arbitrator of the world’s information. Even if that group is benevolent and have good intentions. It’s principally wrong. These groups of people have no dissent because it gets silenced internally in Google. It’s like an unstoppable unchecked steamroller of ideas that make the world dance at their tune.

I also do not want FAANGs to spread their work culture, their shitty UI frameworks, their interview process, their politics, their methodology and engineering libraries, their philosophical stance, their morality and ultimately their influence over the rest of the world.

I love most of their products but I will not use them because of their overpowering influence. People in Australia have to deal with shitty SV culture because of these companies. It’s cancerous. It’s dangerous and it’s going to stifle freedom of information, ultimately freedom of political expression and opposition. They’re acting as government proxy but inability to vote them off. Makes me angry just thinking about it. Fuck this.

As a government censor it is very pleasing to see commercial companies go above and beyond like this. In the old days I would have to threaten legal action before they instituted preemptive policies. Now all I have to do is wait for an internal group to raise an inclusion/exclusion/psychic violence issue and they'll grant themselves all sorts of broad policing authority. Saves me a whole lot of trouble I can tell you that much!

</sarcasm>

This is like watching someone (tech companies) wrap a rope around his neck while standing on a ladder. HEY HOLD MY BEER! Its all fun and games when an administration "in charge" has your back.

It's going to be 100% different the day that changes. It's almost like people forget the pendulum of leadership in the US has a well known tendency to swing.

Don't get me wrong, in principal I can get behind the idea of this but at the same time I don't think I'd feel comfortable with any actual implementation of the idea let alone the people in charge of the implementation. In my own personal view I feel like the harm done by people publishing stupid bullshit online is vastly outweighed by what amounts to government backed methods to cull publishing stupid bullshit online.

This cure is worse than the disease in my opinion.

You are not immune to censorship.

The things that you say and write now are very likely going to be put under a microscope in the future and be found wanting.

And you will have to choose between lying, keeping your mouth shut, and having your entire life (digital and personal) torn apart for not agreeing with whomever is deciding what's true that day.

If you want to have freedom of speech you have to have the freedom to say things that some people think are lies. And let other people do the same.

There are laws to deal with edge cases that are seriously damaging, like libel. Which, unsurprisingly, is quite hard to prosecute in the US due to first amendment protections.

Google banning illegal content is entirely reasonable. Kicking out users who are disruptive to the platform itself is also justifiable. This is not that.

Don't like Google Drive's policy? Use a different hosting service, or run your own. Seriously. It's a free country and a free market, and if they don't want to do business with you, they don't have to (and it's a two-way street). Deal with it.

Relevant: How The CIA made Google (2015) https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

Is Google honestly acting following economic interests? Is it to avoid liability from hosting damaging content? Is it acting to protect us?

Google, which isn't event the most valuable company in the world, is worth above all but - give or take - the top 36 countries in the world.

A company of this size wields immense power while simultaneously remaining unhampered by all the dead weight governments have to haul around to get anything done.

[edit: switched link to original]

It's an interesting form of curation, as if something has been censored, now that's something I'm interested in knowing about. Dangerous means powerful, and powerful is valuable. Most of everything is crap, but what's not crap is stuff that genuinely puts dominant narratives at risk.

I can't remember the name of it, but there is a feature of change in systems that has to do with complexity, where the change happens rapidly as the result of explosive exponential growth, and not relatively linear increments (period doubling?). In that view, something being censored is a good leading indicator that it's a candidate for sudden growth.

Their definition of misleading says it "includes information [...] that contradicts official government records". Because no government record has ever been wrong before, right?

Just a friendly reminder that if you use "google" for all of your logins...then if "Google" bans you, you will lose access to all of your logins.

So now, a minimum wage drone at Google, or even worse an AI, will be able to shut down my entire account because they perceived my document that I'm sharing as "misinformation"? That's pretty fucking scary.

People call for tech regulation.

Government has mandate to regulate tech.

Tech realizes that shift in power and self regulates in a way favourable to the government.

This reminds me of when Reddit tossed out Ellen Pao. Reddit demanded wholesale change, so what they got /u/spez, who happily banned all manner of subreddits when the fight was originally about one.

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...

How is this _not_ on the front page?

Google is analyzing your files for content, and flagging if it doesn't align with narratives that a government body sets - and _removing all trace of that content._

If this doesn't conflict with the "hacker pathos," what the fuck is Hacker News then?

Archive.org shows this was added in April 2020. This isn't news.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200328123253/https://support.g...

Oh man this is extremely bad news. The highway should not get to decide which color cars are allowed through. Google et al, are only going to make the internet's underground railroad larger. Users aren't supposed to be slaves to the preferences of the companies that provide the products.

Putting the megacorps that have manipulating people on behalf of others as their primary business model in charge of determining truth. Cyberpunk dystopia, here we come (except for the cool gadgets).

Isn't the underlying main problem (censorship), as (nearly) always, growing up along with the size of the society, that is to say mistrust?

I have yet to encounter a small group of people, let's say less than ~15 people (all adult and responsible, children and fools are another matter and must be protected by adults), where someone thinks that others shouldn't access to some content (because they are irrevocably dumb or evil-minded), that he detains the Truth and has to forbid everything he dislikes.

In all huge groups (modern nations) it is the norm. As each one doesn't know most of the citizens, he/she is at best mislead into thinking of them as a bunch of children, and at worse is afraid of them.

Even if many people cannot, for the time being, tackle something useful/necessary (for example to distinguish raw bullshit from consistent information) they may "train" by being exposed to it, thus building some experience (living and dialoging with others will enlighten them).

How may one accept to live among others while thinking that most of them are dumb and unable to learn, or evil-minded? How may one who doesn't think so want to bar them from any content?

The "census participation that contradicts official government records" clause is especially wild, given the US Census Bureau's open policy of injecting small errors for privacy purposes. (https://www.census.gov/about/policies/privacy/statistical_sa...)

>could significantly undermine participation or trust in civic or democratic processes

Participation in our democratic and civic processes include the freedom to speak about our government in a way that we desire, even if it's misleading or contradicts our government. It's part of the reason why America was founded in the first place. Google is being hypocritical here.

So is google cloud going to do that on people's servers and databases as well? Delete the (lawful) content Google deems "misleading content"?

Can someone from GCP comment here on record?

In case you were wondering why countries that don't feel like being pets to the US like China have their own Google's, Twitters, and everything.

It's not just for "government control". They'd do the same even if they were perfect democracies.

It's first and foremost for avoiding such blatant foreign control.

People must be able to exchange information in a secure and private way, free of government or corporate censorship. The fact that there is no common, simple, and ubiquitous way to exchange private messages blows my mind. I wish someone would do something about it.

Oh wait, I did! Here's my attempt to implement email based on Self-Sovereign Identity: https://github.com/regnull/ubikom and https://ubikom.cc

Still work in progress, but it's fully functional. There are no accounts or domains - private key ownership is all we need.

Google drive is not supposed to be a mass distribution platform and it actually violates the TOS to treat it like one. You can Argus all you like about privacy and free speech rights, but they do not apply to anyone trying to use Google drive as some sort of free content distribution network. It wasn't designed to let people do that, and Google has every right to ban people for violating the TOS. The fact that they typically haven't reacted to this kind of use on a large scale before now should drive home the point of just how much these idiots have started to abuse the TOS all for the purpose of distributing misleading content.

The fact google is scanning people's private drive's for this sort of stuff should be scary to absolutely everyone.

I would really love all of sorts of services (e.g. email, documents, photo storage, etc etc) prepackaged as docker images I can pop somewhere and open source, and I just pay for hosting and a licence fee.

>Manipulated media: Media that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm.

What about deepfakes and other machine-generated content?

"Misleading content" is already an issue for anyone who uses Google Merchant Center, and can cause your account to be suspended. Try getting a human being to give you a straight answer on what this means in specific cases - it's nearly impossible. Small accounts can't get through to anyone, and even if larger accounts or consultants can, the Googlers on the other end can't explain what triggered their "AI" to shut down the account.

Actual Content:

Do not distribute content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users. This includes:

Misleading content related to civic and democratic processes: Content that is demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in civic or democratic processes. This includes information about public voting procedures, political candidate eligibility based on age / birthplace, election results, or census participation that contradicts official government records. It also includes incorrect claims that a political figure or government official has died, been involved in an accident, or is suffering from a sudden serious illness.

Misleading content related to harmful health practices: Misleading health or medical content that promotes or encourages others to engage in practices that may lead to serious physical or emotional harm to individuals, or serious public health harm.

Manipulated media: Media that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm.

Misleading content may be allowed in an educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context, but please be mindful to provide enough information to help people understand this context. In some cases, no amount of context will allow this content to remain on our platforms.

Here's peak irony from Google's CEO just last week talking about "The free and open internet is under attack in countries around the world, Google boss Sundar Pichai has warned. He says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57763382

Does "Loose Change" count as "misleading content"?

The original has been replaced with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0skCyy7TObQ but it is still possible to find copies such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEZAXFbAnbA

It seems to me people that a lot of people around me who are all up and arms about "Covid-19 misinformation" actively promoted this "documentary".

Last year, I tried to put up something that had a rational discussion of the problems inherent in constant testing of asymptomatic people[1]. It took three months to get all sorts of automatic bans removed. By that time, I had lost all motivation.

[1]: https://www.covid2020.icu/false-positive-false-negative-simu...

The fundamental problem is that it used to invoke a cost to publish anything. Now any idiot can post things for free and the viral aspect of the systems ensures it will explode. Us humans are hardwired for new and outrageous gossip and hench the ads industry is related to this. Nothing can fix this as long as publishing is cost free. Human nature can not be fixed. Get over it and design systems which mitigate the worst part of it.

Misleading by what standard? “misleading content” may well be in the eyes of beholders.

The problem with this is that people use Google Drive for a lot of purposes. Including private ones.

I really don't want Google removing my stuff because of some T&C crap when I'm not even sharing it with anyone. An external HDD is much less likely to break but it doesn't try to impose any opinions on my data. Overall the risk of data loss is much less with redundant personal storage.

At least just disable the sharing feature but don't delete it or ban the account. It makes the service completely unreliable as a storage medium. Sharing is only a tiny part of the features of these services and the only part where such limitations should apply.

For example I don't have anything really bad but I do have copyrighted stuff on my O365 like ISO images to have handy when I need to reinstall something. I'm not sharing them but if they'd be deleted anyway I'd be really really pissed.

And really, Google/MS shouldn't even be able to see what we store on Drive unless we try to share it publicly. It really should be zero-knowledge encrypted. Luckily there's apps like Cryptomator.

Not sure if related, but for the past 2 months, on a daily basis, sometimes 2-3 times per day, I get a Drive notification about someone "resolving a comment" with me tagged, and the document is naked ladies and other pornographic ads.

Generally by the time I get to the document, it's gone, and otherwise I mark it as spam, but it hasn't put a dent in the daily notifications I receive...

As I read this, there is not one link to an alternative to Google Drive in the comments.

Any suggestions? Distributed solutions (or self managed) preferred.

I can't believe we give a company such power in exchange for so little.

Three points.

One is that our assumptions and norms around free speech/press aren't from digital communications world. They're from TV & newspaper world. Letters & Telephone world. In the last generation, lines have been blurred between mass media, conversational messaging, documents, information, software. Apple's app store escalated the software part of it, AWS further confused it. What "speech" is, for the average person, is hard to draw lines around

Douglas Adam had a good bit on this. Paraphrased: It's explaining to rivers how "the coming of the ocean" will affect them. Currents and such will still exist in the ocean, but... Thus with online media. Do free speech ideals still matter? Yep. What do they mean? How do they work? What do they do? Those aren't, IMO, trivially answerable with analogies to telephone, letter and newspaper world.

Two is that whatever the hell freedoms like association, speech, assembly, media and such mean today, they run through FB, Google, etc. In parts of the world where FB have the dominant free internet deal, even moreso. It's their structures and rules that matter. Say a politician from medium-sized country X is banned from FB or Twitter, this can seriously affect their chances. Same for any kind of activist group, political party, union etc. FB policy people don't necessarily even know the language of the country. Where there are tensions between democratic rights and the new world, the tension is usually highest where a tech giant is.

Three is back to one. There is an interconnectedness here that's hard to stop. We have a digital democracy. It's young, but it's here. Whatever democracy is, happens digitally now.

I hope this isn't cynical, but I've kind of become accelerationist on this. Let's play this game. Force Google's policy courts to be public, maybe.

A Russian troll farm buys some election ads on facebook and it’s a national security crisis with years of investigations and hearings. Google decides to play god with the flow of information and I highly doubt they receive anything more than the slightest pushback from our political establishment. Our elected officials are asleep at the wheel.

It's crazy how real live is almost impossible to satirize at this point. Consider this attempt:

https://babylonbee.com/news/to-avoid-1st-amendment-concerns-...

Google drive reserves the right to remove content it deems misleading, when it wants to, or not.

So nothing has actually changed.

Going to plug our new subreddit: https://Reddit.com/r/ifa

We need to pass an amendment abolishing copyright and patent laws.

We need to make (old) Napster, torrents, Pirate Bay, Sci hub, legal, and decentralize the control of information. Otherwise it’s 1984 baby.

Yet another reason to avoid using cloud (i.e., someone else's computer that you don't control) products.

FYI rclone is a great cli tool that can let you easily pull all content out of a Google drive and push it to several different easily configured backends, or store locally.

It can also be used to encrypt all content on your drive, presumably hiding content from big brother, but also making it useless for sharing.

It's not entirely clear to me which of these policies apply to any and all content you upload without sharing externally.

Both the misleading content and sexually explicit material sections start with "Do not distribute content...". So does that mean as long as I don't enable sharing, I'm free to upload such content? If I'm the only person who can access these files, then I'm not distributing it surely.

I also find it curious the section on circumvention makes no mention of the use of encryption. I suppose doing so would show imply Google scans your content and use such techniques to find files in violation of their policies. With that not explicitly banned, I'll continue to use Cryptomator to keep my private documents out of Google's hands.

I'll be cancelling and migrating away from Google as soon as I have a free weekend to identify alternatives and get it done.

Now to find a vanity email domain... My last name is taken, so brainstorming something that is professional and individualized could take longer than the migration...

Are they insane? We routinely share important documents in Google Drive. Boring, non-controversial stuff, but vital. We can't run the risk of a _good_ ML algorithm, the type that outputs a wrong decision 1 in 1000, deleting it. Can you imagine the nightmare?

I recently started working on a program that distributes my own relational data in my web browser (IndexedDB) between my devices using WebRTC so that I can build applications on top of it. It seems like it will be needed more and more over time.

Well isn't this just rich (in a poor way), considering Google is notorious over the years for making the display of their ad placements harder and harder to differentiate from actual search results, thus more and more misleading....

Can we ban that too?

Give me a break.

For those who object to a ban on the distribution of "misinformation" and "hate speech" on Google Drive:

https://takeout.google.com/

Google provides a convenient, though not instantaneous, way to download all your content to a local drive. You can then publish it to your own website, problem solved.

Google has the right to impose terms of service, particularly given that their service is free and they believe they have a reputation to protect and legal liabilities to defend from.

You have the right to house your data elsewhere.

What could go wrong.

Misleading title. Google Drive bans *sharing* "Misleading Content," which means they can disable sharing if a doc containing blatant misinformation starts to be widely shared on other platforms. (Edit: This doesn't mean they'll go into your drive and remove doubleplusungood content)

Google Drive is now widely used as a social media platform -- I even get spam from google drive share notifications now! And so I'm sure they will stumble in all the ways that all the platforms do around content moderation.

Man, we are completely unprepared for the level of control it is not possible to have over speech. I guess I get where Google is coming from, maybe, but this is getting downright Orwellian.

Can all the people moralizing, grandstanding, and otherwise signaling their outrage stop using and recommending Google products? Yes, even if you feel like the alternatives are inferior.

The problem essentially was created by tech companies such as Google and Facebook. The fact is that everything you are reading online are from both ends of the political spectrum, the majority middle do not speak out, the same as in real society. Algorithms using likes to amply voices from both extremes. The people in the middle don't care about liking it, but having to bear the result of recommendation algorithms, and can't help to be political.

It's very inconsistent. How gender, as a purely ideological construct not grounded in science, can be protected under the "hate speech", while at the same time, under the misleading content, it could be easily classified as "Misleading content related to harmful health practices".

In principle, it also boils down to who owns the content. If host - Google, claims moderation rights, it undebatably becomes a publisher and should be treated as such.

I'm switching from Gmail to Protonmail so I don't have to worry if Google thinks my messages or those of my friends are misinformation.

I would argue that the very notion that we're somehow dealing with a nefarious, shadowy era of exceptionally pernicious misinformation is itself a form of misinformation. I strongly suspect that the current media and associated tech company obsession with misinformation is largely rooted in a certain very disagreeable politician winning the U.S presidency in 2016 despite all the best efforts of major media sources to convince everyone of what was supposedly best for them, and because these same media/tech interests share a political bent that's currently more dominant in the social sphere, suddenly, misinformation is a boogeyman as never seen before. Evidence to the contrary be damned.

Humans have been misinforming each other and creating echo chambers of rigid thought for as long as we've had culture. On this little has changed except for new additions to the mediums through which we can communicate ideas.

Censorship and restriction of opinions to those that are "verifiable and correct" is such an obvious hole for bad decisions and misuse that support for it should be laughable after decades of seeing just how badly governments and other major authorities can fuck up their notions about what a correct stance on anything really is, and this not to even mention the many, many, many historical examples of official narratives deliberately being manipulated for the sake of control or special interests... Those of you who think modern democratic institutions are somehow immune enough to such things that we should have public free expression monitored and restricted due to misinformation dangers are absurdly naive.

This is ridiculous, I agree with most the top comments about a need for a new platform.

But if you have such “misleading” content as Big Brother sees it, shield it from them.

Encrypt the content, give out the key. Even if it’s a simple key, who cares. I’d bet you could even share it as a doc to other people, their internal algorithms surely aren’t sophisticated enough to figure it out.

This is definitely a bridge too far.

YouTube is a public facing media platform, they can do as they please.

But dipping their toes into private content is Orwellian.

This has to stop.

This is a future I want absolutely no part of. My computer won’t let me type things if it thinks the ideas are bad. Crazy.

>> "Misleading content related to harmful health practices: Misleading health or medical content that promotes or encourages others to engage in practices that may lead to serious physical or emotional harm to individuals, or serious public health harm."

One can hope that this will apply to the massive anti-vax campaigns on YouTube

This is an insane policy. The only way to know what's true vs false is by allowing free expression not supressing it.

Google is not exactly fairy godmother.

They're very commercial entity with the management having very political biases.

Anyone can walk away from Google at any time. No one is forcing the one to use any of Google services.

Every time i use google i assume there are thousands eyes going through my docs. I accept this as a tradeoff for quality serivces.

If i don't accept - i walking away.

We need distributed, uncensorable social media - full stop. And we need it now. We already have the White House admitting that they are telling Facebook which posts they should delete. We now have Google deciding what is and isn't misleading content.

This kind of behavior has historically had disastrous results. See World War II.

First link in my "Shared with me" tab in google drive

Falung Gong will never leave me alone !

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FimYh4ES-ZggupJFmjj_Firdkhj...

Google turns over user data on any Google user instantly to the US government without a search warrant, including that of US citizens. Anything in Google is free for the taking by the feds.

There are already sufficient reasons to stop trusting them with your data. This is not the first and it won't be the last.

Google delenda est.

"Do not distribute content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users."

Confuses?

That is a really bad wording. Watch a pro-foam insulation video, than an against-foam insulation video - which one is right? One is confusing the audience, both can't be right. Which is the one that can't be distributed?

It's been there since april 2020

https://web.archive.org/web/20200428011901/https://support.g...

As a common carrier they should not be allowed to discriminate. Like railroads cannot discriminate against traffic they do not like, and restaurants and hotels cannot discriminate. As a society we decided long ago that if you hold yourself out to the public you cannot discriminate

My wife gets a gdrive share ~5x/day from strangers filled with xxx material. Maybe related/

Is "misleading content" going to be determined on a per-country basis? Will Google ban activists in Hong Kong from distributing "misleading content" about the PRC? How about people in Hungary sharing "misleading" resources for LGBT youth?

Call me old fashioned, but in my day spies, subversives, and criminals kept their communications secret instead of hosting them in plaintext on the servers of a megacorporation almost certainly hellbent against their cause and ready to turn them over to the feds.

I don't have much experience with Googles policies, but is this some "report only" type of thing.

That means it will only be enforced if someone reports a file I created or should I expect some google employees or ai to scan my files for the mentioned content?

OK, fine. If I share a document with all of Hacker News saying, Google will delete this document without my express written permission, and they apply their policy without exception:

Do they delete the document because it's misleading? If they do, it's not.

Gotcha Google.

If this doesn’t motivate you to remove Google from your life (and career), nothing will.

After reading this you might feel depressed. Maybe this will cheer you up : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcMMzrzgOQo

So I could be banned for sharing a document that says 'Google is evil' ?

Remember, Google can just outright ban your full account and not explain why.

This seems like a move to lessen upcoming monopoly legislation by preemptively banning stuff that the government is about to deem "misleading" or "dangerous."

Have a look at Arweave - https://www.arweave.org/

It is an interesting exploration of crypto-based storage.

Of course everything is in the interest of the public, so everything is going to be transparent, accountable, appealable, based on clear rules. As usual for Google.

Looking for an easy way to self-host your own Web drive at home? Try HomeDrive:

https://www.homedrive.io

> Circumvention

> Publicly sharing apps suspended by Google Play Developer Policies.

> Publicly sharing videos that do not comply with the YouTube Community Guidelines.

Google bans people for this? Wow.

Oh, Google Drive bans advertisements? Interesting... ;)

People often forget that "slippery slope" is a fallacy. Political censorship is indeed of general concern; censoring anti-vax bullshit does not imply an inevitable path to political censorship.

The real solution, of course, is to out the hypocrisy and malfeasance of the spineless GOP/Fox leadership that panders to this ignorance, and gives it mainstream legitimacy. Without that legitimacy, these conspiracy theories will fade back into background noise where they belong.

I, for one, am happy about this decision.

If there's one thing that's became way more obvious to me over the past year and a half is just how susceptible a lot of people are to conspiracy theories and other similar content.

In an ideal world we would have different solutions, however we don't live in a perfect world so I welcome decisions like this. Yes it does open doors for more government control and censorship, but I'd take that if it means reducing conspiracy theories, racism, etc.

It'll be scary the day Google develops an API for this and any where you go it follows you. You'll no longer be able to store documents that Google doesn't see fit, they'll simply get auto-censored. What if Apple developed a similar API and embedded into Mac OS, just like auto-complete that works on any input box, "auto-censor" makes sure you're not going out of line as you type sentences and paragraphs.

> "This includes information about public voting procedures, political candidate eligibility based on age / birthplace, election results, or census participation that contradicts official government records."

Google going full Russia/China now. Democracy and free speech certainly declined in value when you are not allowed to document and host alleged voter fraud anymore.

In Europe this would easily be rejected in court.

How long until this applies to Gmail?

It sort of makes sense, if it is a document, that is public or widely shared (anyone with link can access), in which case it serve not only as a collaboration tool, but also a sort of "CDN". Though even then, limiting access seems appropriate, "removing the content, and limiting or terminating a user’s access to Google products" is too much.

Another asshole move from Google. How, might you wonder, do you report abuse? Do they actually read anything sent to "abuse@google.com"? Hell no.

They expect you to visit phishing / spam links hosted by Google, then use a button on the page to report. Or they expect you to be logged in to Google.

They don't care a tiny bit about RFCs or about doing the right thing.

Time to double down on self hosting a Google drive clone. I don't trust Google any more.

Nifty, censorship built right into office tools now too. It's so great my word processor and my spreadsheet app can police my thoughts now too.

Maybe they'll be able to use AI at some point and just detect when I'm writing the wrong combination of words together and preemptively block me from even writing things.

Does this apply to Google ads?

Like when they said photo storage was free forever, or only applies to other?

It’s ironic that the largest advertiser is concerned about misleading content.

Companies should really decide and be either platforms (only remove directly illegal material, when reported, and carry no responsibility for other stuff) or a published (cherry pick what they want posted/hosted, and carry all the responsibility for the posted content.

The very idea of corporations deciding on what is correct thought should shake people to the core regardless of ideology. Some might come up with hair-splitting justifications but this will come back to bite all of us and we let it happen. I'd bet the bank on it.

No more CNN clips. Got it.

The more any of these companies start to filter not-illegal content,the less it becomes justified to keep them exempt from liability for the things the _do_ allow. Because at some point we are reaching that 'have your cake and eat it' point.

A non American perspective:

A government is the administrator chosen by the people to take care of its collective concerns.

If the people identify negative issues that affect the demos - they may ask their government to interfere. In any democracy this power is limitless, with the minor caveat of supranational authorities like the UN.

In that way - any government can and should censor speech if its populace asks it to, given it’s the legislature who sets the law. (Prime example: German laws about Nazi symbols).

A company, as Zuckerberg requested, should not be in the position to make these decisions arbitrarily. It should suffice if it follows the law.

In America the legislative breakdown, in combination with the fanatic believe in free speech, seems to be standing in the way of this, bringing the entire western world to the brinks of a precipice.

I'm sure they will immediately start their crackdown on nigh all religious scriptures hosted there, not to mention on many “scientific facts” that become public knowledge but were actually disproved a long time ago.

Idiots found the right place to publish the knowledge. Google drive, yeah. If they were true scientists, that would be an excuse. Scientists are unaware of popular technology, they deal with pure science.

Oh no! I have an OKR sheet that might be in violation.

Crypto, get off the bench. You're in.

Well it is google's service and they can do whatever they like on it. If you have a problem, just make your own online office suite.

This seems like a bad idea.

Related:

@BreesAnna First time I’ve seen a cloud drive blocking a document...

It was a very long document re vaccination headlines from around the world.

https://twitter.com/BreesAnna/status/1384763150109716481

Is this part of the general push by the White House to censor such content across all communication channels? I know Biden was going to push telecoms to monitor and I think even censor text messages that spread anything about COVID that doesn't agree with the official narrative.

Wow... 1062 comments, but only three top level comments. Edit (well, four now).

This is fucking embarrassing. I cant believe any of you put up with this shit

Archive.org shows this was added in April 2020. This isn't news.

So, Google is going to stop advertising its own products?

That's great news!

Do you mean ads?

Wow. Just wow.

And who is to judge what information is “misleading”? Google staff?

I am glad I no longer use Google Drive for anything serious but I am terrified at the prospect of additional services going this way.

In the end we will have to migrate back to using local hardware that we can control ourselves and manage all backups and availability ourselves.

This policy follows recent years trend against liberty. Though that trend is long - it has accelerated terribly ever since Brexit, Trump and similar events where people chose differently than their supposed leaders had intended.

People who thought this would stop at banning Alex Jones may want to reconsider. You are next.

This is bad

Good.

Just more censorship and gaslighting.

Like many on HN, I rely on Google's services to a degree that I find worrying. The reason for my immobilism is the usual one: Google's services are extremely convenient, and switching to alternatives is extremely costly in time.

Like many of you, I make it a point to investigate alternatives to G-Suite, Android, etc. Sadly, the answer to "is there a practical alternative to Google" has so far been a resounding "no".

After thinking about this some more, I'm beginning to think the question is ill-posed. I'd like to ask a better question, and I'd really appreciate your input. But first, let me list a handful of observations about my behavior as a user and customer that I think are important.

== OBSERVATIONS ==

OBSERVATION 1: I don't mind paying for software, I just hate accounting.

I don't often buy software, especially subscription-based SaaS products. For the longest time, I thought my aversion had to do with frugality, but I now realize it has to do with peace of mind. I refuse to accept the burden of tracking my subscriptions, being responsible for cancelling them when no longer in use, and chasing down the odd unexpected charge on my bank statement, or trying to remember how much a subscription costs and whether or not to cancel before its automatic renewal. Life is too short. The mere thought of such a snake-it provokes a response approximating an anxious rage. My reaction is visceral; one cannot reason with me on this point.

Subscriptions-management services don't solve the problem. They might remove accidental complexities that emerge from managing subscriptions -- visualizing pricing side-by-side, alerting me when a subscription is about to expire, performing the (un)subscription automatically, etc. -- but it is impossible for them to solve the essential complexity of subscription management: thinking about subscriptions.

OBSERVATION 2: I am a software developer, but I am not an advanced user.

I am technically literate, but most of the work I do in G-Suite is basic. I draft documents, often collaboratively. I use track-changes and comments. I use Times New Roman in 12-point font. I sometimes make basic slide decks, using the default theme and paying no regard to aesthetics beyond ensuring proper alignment. I rarely use spreadsheets, but when I do, I use the basic functions, and rudimentary formatting.

Same goes with email. Helvetica, ll-pt. Attachments.

OBSERVATION 3: Cloud storage is actually pretty great, but I mistrust you deeply.

In a utopian world, Cloud storage and SaaS software would be perfect! I almost always have access to the internet when I need it, and during the rare times when I don't, it can wait an hour or two. In this utopia, I could take full advantage of Cloud/SaaS offerings, effectively freeing myself of the need to store, organize, back-up and garbage-collect local copies. It would be great!

Only, here's the issue: I can't do that. I can't do it because SaaS platforms can't be trusted to have adequate disaster recovery in place, spy on me, routinely hold my livelihood hostage [0], and might arbitrarily deplatform me.

As such, I find myself in the ironical situation of having to manually backup my Google documents by exporting them to RTF and storing them in a well-organized folder hierarchy for a rainy day. My life has actually gotten a bit worse, but not so bad that I'm willing to give up collaborative editing.

== QUESTION ==

Taken together, the above observations point to something approximating:

1. Self-hosted service. Or, at least, some kind of ability to continue working in the event that the Cloud-based mothership fails or banishes me. Such self-hosting should be prepackaged and easy to install/configure.

2. Non-subscription based monetization. More generally: non-recurring expenses.

3. Optional cloud-based storage. Perhaps just a dumb S3-style API into which data can be backed up?

Does anything like this (or better!) exist?

[0] I'm looking at you, Lastpass.

This is wrong, obviously.

This will end well.

I'm not quite sure how Google's announcement that Drive is now subject to censorship comes as a shock to anyone. Google already heavily censors their search results and I am concerned that no one is talking about it in relation to this. As bad as the voilation of privacy and dictatorial intentions that now apply to Drive are, I believe that search result augmentation is far worse. In absolute terms, now that "to Google" is synonymous to every possible form of "to search", "to know", or to "to discover" it as an organization is actively crushing independent thinking. Throughout many conversations with younger folks and even hapless adults, I have discovered the prevailing attitude toward the act of thinking to have diverged outside of the notion of self. When something is to be discovered, it is to be searched for. There is no critical thinking involved in this process. Due to the immediacy of seemingly correct or cogent information, people have ceased relying on any other metric in the evaluation of information besides a measurement of consensus. The problem is that they directly associate this measurement with the rank of a result in a search engine. The thinking goes that because it is ranked towards the top it must be more true.

But what happens when truthiness is only measured through consensus and commonness? The most dire and direct consequence is that the rate of convergence toward true diversity of thought is absolutely flattened. This artifact is one of the main causes in the existential division in the U.S. The real crisis is that the ranking of the truthiness of an opinion on important social issues that are presented through Google's search results is treated and evaluated like objective fact. When presented with only opinion and information about social issues that one strongly agrees with, the disciplined and liberal thinker might imagine themselves on the other side of the situation and consider what to do when faced with only information that he or she disagrees with. What then?

As an example, try searching Google for the phrase "Systemic racism is not real". The only results that appear are in opposition to the assertion. The searcher is then faced with a quandary about whether to question the reality that all opposing points of view are absent. But as I've pointed out, the new default to laziness and consensus acceptance guarantees that the searcher's true belief about this complex issue will default to what is offered. The noble cause of the searcher, to believe in an America where Good and Honest people are free to seek others who wish to treat other humans based on their character rather than a pitifully shallow discriminant as melanin level, to learn about the noble spirit of their own country, and who hate to be told that they must be complicit in some sort of hellish oppression of others are faced with nothing but a brutal emptiness. No wonder everyone thinks America is damned and doomed! No wonder we all feel so alone. We sit in our apartments and stare at the consensus feed. We let it alter our emotions and perceptions without thinking for ourselves. We live in vast cities of millions of individuals who want nothing more than to be fed the consensus and forget our neighbors. By censoring and skewing social issues like this we are forced to abandon the liberal notions that are the foundation of Western thought. What free thinker is brave enough to fight the shallow consensus of millions of lazy thinkers who are being spoon fed perspectives of a select few far left technocrats? This is the modern book burning. The Arbiter of the zeitgeist sits behind an innocent text box and it grows ever more powerful.

I challenge the reader to be truly disciplined in their analysis, set aside their political leanings, and objectively consider the perspective of a right winger who just saw Twitter silence their leader and watched Amazon boot the only social network where they could speak their mind, Parler, out of existence. We discuss these companies as if they are just organizations who are just private companies out to make money but any rational person can look at these actions and evaluate them to be political forces that are heavily biased and who are asserting their control. We circle endlessly around discussions about whether they are publishers or platforms and it is obvious that they are both. Google has intentionally steered the very nature of the internet into their control. The only way to be known is to advertise on their platform and you must pay them to do that. They protect this modality at all costs and offer the free services that we are discussing as an indirection away from their intent. Make no mistake: Google wants to become the internet. But the horrible reality is that they already have and no one has noticed. Google and Amazon alone control an almost absolute majority of servers that host the entire internet. They could turn it off if they so chose. Companies are willingly giving control of the critical parts of their business to these companies. If Amazon and Google go down every business that hosts on their servers is doomed.

Microsoft is just as bad. They are actively trying to take away the control of user's computers by hosting Windows in the cloud. What happens when they only make it available in the cloud on their servers? Worse still, we developers are giving up all of our control to them by hosting everything on Github. What did they do when we made all of our code and expertise avialable to them for free? They trained an AI on it with the intention of centralizing the very skill we gave them and are going to try to sell it back to us in the form of Copilot. What happens when your employer only trusts you to verify Copilot's output and not write anything for yourself? What happens to the next generation of programmers who don't even know how to write code without their help? Microsoft's seemingly benevolent attitude towards developers is just another example of the damage centralization is causing.

This announcement is just another assertion of totalitarian control. The ruthless centralization these companies are seeking is an existential danger to everyone. The threat is critical! We are in mortal danger. We have given them complete control and are doing nothing about it.

The only option that can save us is to build an alternative and compete with them.

I also wonder how much control Google has over data stored on a Chromebook?

Do they apply ownership to the data on your physical storage device?

I've seen multiple comments assigning Googles illiberal behavior to Chinese influence or pressure.

This is patently false, Big Tech is beholden to Western dictate. There is currently a coordinated effort by non-partisan forces to push the United States into a war with China. Don't fall for it.

Long overdue.

Freedom Speeches[tm] has killed how many? Millions?

If anyone needs their QAnon fix, there's always 4chan, OAN, Fox News, etc.

While worrisome, I'm surprised HN has essentially nothing negative to say about people spreading vaccine misinformation, peddling The Big Lie, or other conspiratorial zeitgeist stuff from the last 5ish years.

Big Brother is unhappy.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

To end the dehumanizing scourge of Nazism, racism, bigoted thinking, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, conservatism, republicanism, white supremacy, sexism, Islamophobia, Asian hate, transphobia, Satanic Panics, antisemitism, and reactionary ruralism, and libertarian "freedoms" some sacrifices must be made.

Google Drive is on the right side of history with this move. I just wish people would accept that to stop the greatest evils in the known universe, it's okay to take firm and bold stances like this.

This is digital tyranny.

Almost everybody here cheered when Twitter and Facebook started censoring and 'fact-checking' Trump. Few voices who said that this will end badly were drowned by the rejoicing crowd, not thinking about the consequences.

News such as this is a direct consequence of allowing big tech to become arbiters of 'truth'. And yes, it will be much worse than this.

Translation: Google implements censorship policy.

The same Whitehouse that is pushing tech companies to do this also said today that if you’re banned from one social media platform (for posting verboten material), then you should immediately be banned from all platforms.

This is third world authoritarianism, except they outsource the dirty work to the tech companies.

I know everybody hates playing the “If Trump did...” game, but come on! You all know exactly what the response would be to something like this and it’s the correct response.

So last year, the lab-leak would have been considered "misleading content".

It's even in the name, it's google's drive, not my drive, why would i expect otherwise

The doc in question (https://archive.org/details/frontline-workers-testimonies-va...) contains anecdotes mixed with blatant lies about vaccine side effects.

I totally agree that moderation can be overreaching, but this is not one of those cases.

(Edit: context from the submitter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27858045)

If this doesn’t convince you that Google of today is nothing more than the unofficial thought-police agency for the political left, I guess nothing will.

So, any company that works on, for example, civic or democratic processes, may lose all their documents on google drive. CONGRATULATIONS!!! The next step would be your gmail box.

I see Google got the DNC's memo. Gov't is asking private corporations to censor your SMS messages, because gov't itself can't. They want to censor every form of digital communication, period. We either have free thought and expression of ideas, or we all live under someone else's ideals of what those are, and most likely, if history has taught us anything....you won't like it but it will be too late. Your voice will just be gone, unless it's full of praise for whoever your "dear leader" ends up being. This isn't done. More will come. We'll hem and haw when we hear about it, but keep on keeping on...right off the cliff.

Free speech is not easy, but it is an absolute necessity unless we want to revisit some of histories uglier chapters, and all I see is pedal to the metal.

> And this campaign is far from a single-pronged strategy. According to Politico, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and “Biden-allied groups” – whatever that last phrase means – have plans to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively” and “work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”

https://www.eutimes.net/2021/07/us-says-it-will-censor-anti-...

Such rules are probably not for everyday enforcement. It is more like Russia laws - have something to use when needed and/or to publicly demonstrate that you care about the issue.

And to be completely consistent with their censorship and account termination on Youtube, their app store, and ads, their justification for banning "misleading content" will be opaque and frustrating. And if they screw up, you'll get the old "inadvertent error" or "administrative error" catch all.

The support and excuses for why this should be acceptable is pretty much summed up as: as long as it's not my ox being gored it's fine!

Good. this rule is pretty narrowly scoped and sorely needed on every platform.

We would have been similarly protected from Galileo’s misinformation too, right? I guess I’d prefer we not censor “wrong” ideas. The bigger the government policy footprint, the more trolley problems are bungled. Humility is understanding that sometimes less is more. “Let it be.”

People aren't seeing the forest for the trees. The establishment had a near perfect lock on the narrative before the internet became popular. There was a very tight Overton window on TV, radio, and publications that didn't necessarily match what people were thinking about or wanted to hear about. This was intentional.

When the internet broke into the mainstream, it was a strong feature, not a bug, that content was hard to censor, and sites like Google got a lot of their earlier traction due to their results not being gamed or massaged for profit.

You could hear the establishment gears grinding though. They were gonna take back control of the narrative even if it took decades. Well it did, and they have, to a degree. It's only going to keep getting worse as long as they can continue to wrest further control.

Do you think that only leaders of other countries like China want to control what people see, hear, and think? Do you recognize the immense power that comes from narrative control, militarily and financially?

edit: for those downvoting, would you care to point out flaws in my statements?

Just to be clear, this is about the "Report Abuse" button. This page lists categories of things that, if someone clicks on "Report Abuse", Google may decide is indeed abuse, and take action. So this does not apply to private files, but to files for which someone with access to the file decided to complain. Note the page title, and that it says:

> After we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review the content and take action…

There are a lot of comments here. Many may indeed hold the opinion that even when someone clicks on "Report Abuse" for a file being distributed via Google Drive on the grounds of "misleading content", then Google shouldn't take action like "restricting access to the content, removing the content, and limiting or terminating a user’s access to Google products". That's a valid position, and legitimately a criticism one can hold, and this discussion makes sense. But there are also quite a few comments imagining this to be about Google proactively scanning everyone's private files, so just making this clear. (The submitter probably understands the distinction as they put "distribution" in the title, but clearly, some comments do not.)

(Disclaimer: I work at Google but just posting as myself; have no special information here but this is just my obvious reading of the page.)

This move shouldn’t surprise anyone. This was always the next logical step for activist companies and institutions that have been openly practicing authoritarian censorship. Their previous moves faced no real consequence or meaningful pushback, and they face little competition because they are monopolistic, so why would they stop marching down this path?

What’s more surprising is that there are people here on HN who are excusing this by claiming that Google isn’t banning hosting the content but only distributing it. We need a new phrase for this kind of unhelpful trivialization and gaslighting - it isn’t just harmless trolling.

The biggest impact of this will be from how inconsistently this will be applied. Google will not ban activists from sharing “toolkits” used to organize riots or push left politics. They won’t stop false content like the core claims of the 1619 project from being shared via BLM materials for schools that are hosted on Google drive. Google will suppress one side and in effect amplify all others, propagandizing the world through their services.

It’s time we seek out alternatives, break up big tech companies, regulate them, and put an end to their abuse of power. For now here are some alternatives to Google:

https://restoreprivacy.com/google-alternatives/

https://www.techspot.com/news/80729-complete-list-alternativ...

https://fossbytes.com/google-alternative-best-search-engine/