Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

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  > Yesterday there was a HN story about a guy who got
  > kicked off Google Docs because an automated program was
  > trolling/mining through their users files and its
  > judgement was not to be questioned by mere mortals.

Wasn't that the user who was using a Docs form/spreadsheet to collect passwords from his customers? Google has stated that such forms are reviewed manually after being reported (for example, http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/7pKj6aXBK...), which means there must have been at least two humans involved.

IMO the risk with cloud storage isn't in getting suspended by some daemon run amok, it's in data being too easy to leak. Files stored in Google Drive or Dropbox are just one accidental "share" click away from becoming public.

I think you have your facts wrong. The topic I mentioned about the Google Docs user being summarily ejected was discussed here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591133

The link you submitted was a genuine scammer issue which was reported by users and dealt with correctly by Google.

That is the story I was talking about.

The link in my post is just a citation as evidence that account suspension is a manual process.

Actually I was using a google docs spreadsheet to store usernames/passwords for various forums I had registered on. I didn't want to use any of the various password storage systems, the usernames/passwords weren't something I really cared if someone got a hold of them..

I created the file.. added a few forum links with user/pass combos.. and within about 48 hours, the file was nuked and I had an email from google stating a document I had put on google docs broke their terms of service.

I went through the terms of service and couldn't find anything regarding passwords, but it did say that anything I put in google docs was owned by google and publishable by google, so I guessed that was the reason (they can't publish passwords?)

edit: I didn't get kicked off of google docs altogether though, just the one file got nuked

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