Some users proclaimed being incompetent to share their reports; others said their records could not be viewed in Google Drive; and a few insisted their work had been lost, though we’re told what was wasted has been found again.
Several hours ago, Bhaskar Sunkara, Founder of Jacobin magazine, via Twitter said an editorial on Eastern Europe’s post-socialist policies had disappeared from his Google Drive space due to terms of service (ToS) violation.
Rachel Bale, a reporter for National Geographic, said a draft of a novel about wildlife crime had been suspended for a ToS violation.
And Jason Heppler, an assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, posted a screenshot explaining that a requested file had been removed from Google Drive.
Similar tales litter the Google Docs Help Forum.
The incident indicated reiterations of longstanding anxieties about the downside of cloud-based services, namely that files stored remotely can be cleared away at any time for any reason. And it comes at a time when Google and its companions are under scrutiny in the US for not identifying more about those who share content and pay for ads on social platforms.
Google offers Docs and Drive under the usual rules, which ban abusive or illegal content. In most cases, it does not scrutinize private content stored on its servers, though it does have automated arrangements in place for detecting illegal images, at least in Gmail.
YouTube also has a method for detecting copyrighted content.
For shared content like Docs files, much of the ToS policing has been foisted against other users, who are invited to flag stuff they deem inappropriate.
It’s that flagging mechanism that went haywire, we’re told. Shortly after noon Pacific Time, Google acknowledged its errant flagging frenzy and attributed it to bad code.
“This time, we made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as insulting, which caused those documents to be automatically prevented,” a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement to News. “A fix is in site and all users should have full access to their docs.”
Take your time to comment on this article.