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Comment by jonnycomputer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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A recent high profile example is the lab leak "conspiracy theory". Facebook block discussion of the possibility that Covid-19 started from a lab leak, but now scientists are seriously considering the issue.

Imagine if Google had this policy last year, and a scientist posted a Google Slides presentation about the merits of the lab theory (and imagine it was banned under the misleading "health" information umbrella) ....

Disclaimer: I use dropbox (mostly since they have supported linux since when I started using the service, and when I started using the service, the syncing was much better than google drive) But now I have another reason!

Something similar that is happening now is the Ivermectin discussion, which right now, to some sounds as crazy as the lab leak, to some, sounded a few months ago. So we have learned nothing from the lab leak debacle.

There is a distinction between discussing a theory, and presenting it as the truth with no evidence.

Not a distinction I imagine automated moderation systems are going to manage well, of course, but it exists.

This distinction never mattered. Any discussion of the theory besides refuting it as "debunked" was banned on Facebook.

Rarely does anyone have a problem presenting a majority position as the truth with no evidence.

We should be a little more forgiving of minority positions and a little less forgiving of majority positions, so that the truth can be determined more readily.

A reminder, at the start of the pandemic, the majority position was "Masks are bad". The "Masks are good" minority position had no evidence to back it up besides common sense, yet it is only through the efforts of those people fighting the conventional wisdom that the truth came out.

Google will gladly distribute public PDFs that say the elimination of Jews "must necessarily be a bloody process," presented as truth with no evidence.

Why do they get to be the arbiter of what information deserves presentation as truth with no evidence, when they allow Mein Kampf to be presented as such?

This is all assuming that setting a file to public in Google Drive is considered "presenting it as the truth with no evidence."

I agree with this to some extent, how direct should the harm be before you stop distributing it?

I don't think there is an easy, obvious line there—direct calls to harm (murder these people) shouldn't be accepted, and I believe even beyond that there should be limits, but find that line and enforcing that is very hard.

You are downvoted but this is exactly what happening in the Arabic sphere of discussion and nobody really cares because Google, like most of the discussion here, is very America centric. This is not even about truth but rather about calls for murder which are against the law in many countries.

In some way though, I am happy that this "diversity of thought" exists because that's the only thing that can stop companies like Google from becoming the arbiter of truth. It is just sad that a lot of those countries are also ok with calls for murder and violence.

That is a rather curious argument. Google's management come from Silicon Valley and statistically will have a left bias. It is quite likely that a substantial number of them genuinely believe that, say, attending a right-wing rally is similar to presenting Mein Kampf as truth with no evidence. If they start censoring one it is pretty likely they will start censoring the other.

Also, if they use controversy as their metric instead, they're going to start squashing minority views. It is actually much harder than you might think to decide what is and isn't obviously true, particularly when there is a team of moderators involved (or team of people calibrating the robots which is maybe how Google does it).

Censorship is really dangerous.

Maybe it should be the scientists and journalists exploring that possibility, not random Facebook conspiracy nuts? Once an conspiracy is broven true, then FB can let it ride.

Science isn't a god with priests telling you what it says. It's a process that anyone can and should do.

First of all it isn't "proven true". It's just not proven false. Which has been the case the entire time.

One of the reasons it was assumed false was that the scientific community bought into the original letter from Peter Daszak. It turns out Daszak has conflicts of interest regarding WIV and GoF research that, in theory, could have caused the pandemic.

It is incredibly naive to allow people to be the gatekeepers of information that is inconvenient for them.

Scientists? Sure. Journalists? No. Banning discussion but allowing the mass media free reign means people are being fed propaganda.

The same scientists who lied about mask effectiveness at the start of the pandemic which may have contributed to thousands of additional cases and deaths?

The same journalists who said lab leak theory was "racist" (NYT's chief COVID editor made this claim less than a month ago)?

The same organizations who said COVID was not transmisable human-to-human in late January, following orders from the CCP (the WHO made this claim repeatedly, without independently verifying it)?

I remember the original theory going round that was getting removed being that it was a lab leak of a bioweapon not the current theory that it was more normal 'gain of function' research that got out. Those are two very different accusations.

If we are honest however, these are theories however "unfounded" they might be...

Science is a continual pursuit of what is accurate and even then when we have a scientific proof, it's often not always permanent.

It was a theory that this came from a lab. It was perhaps another theory that the lab was working on this perhaps in part as a bioweapon. We can get into the politics of why China in general can't really be trusted and so who the heck knows... and that of course leads to skepticism and theories such as these.

These theories may or may not be true the same way "covid-19" came from a wet market may or may not be true. It's okay to say we don't know, here are some theories... That's science.

We should try to get to the bottom of it so that whatever happened is exposed and we can learn from this.

A third party getting in the way and deciding based on who knows what, what theories are okay to talk about and what theories are not okay to talk about is a horrible idea.

Perhaps Google is working on a multi-billion dollar deal with China to put Google in all of the phones made in China? You better believe that if China told Google, "Hey this theory is false (trust us), you better take down anything that talks about it"... Google would be very pressured to comply.

How could we tell the difference without knowing the motivations of the people responsible for it? Has their conduct been likely to inspire confidence that they were on the up-and-up? Gain-of-function research is used for offensive as well as defensive purposes; it is inherently dual-use, and it can be hard to draw a line between the two. We aren't in a position to be able to exclude the possibility that this research was being carried out with the intention of being transferred to pure weapons development once suitable candidate pathogens had been developed.

They are exactly the same accusation, with the only difference between them whether that researcher is your friend or your enemy. It is, much like security research, easy to predict but hard to be certain which is which until it's been deployed.

I'm not defending Google's policy here. But imagine for every lab leak that Google falsely blocked, it also blocked many dangerous conspiracy theories before they got out of hand. I think is boils down to numbers and I think Google is probably in the best position to have the most accurate numbers, the question is are they also making a decision that is most consistent with those numbers.

There's a big difference between earnest scientific inquisitiveness and at a minimum conspiracy nuts spreading racially biased clickbait, at max coordinated political propaganda to influence an election.

though covid is interesting in other ways too. like vaccines.

I'm ok with allowing someone to think whatever crazy bs they want.

But I'm also fine with removing the 'megaphone' for words that are dangerous to our health. You're allowed to stand on a soap box in a public square, but you're not guaranteed to have your speech boosted on the giant billboard screens above.

The dilemmas we are facing here are inherent to how these platforms are setup and optimized.

The algo is designed to boost the crazy-ness to infect others, therefore stopping the spread of this danger tends to stop the individual speech in terms of how normal posts/content works.

Shadowbanning seems like the answer, and that seems to be what Google is doing here. Though not allowing for instance a public doc url isn't in the shadows.

The key start of the policy is "Do not distribute." Which is why I don't understand why people are up in arms about.

it's a totally different thing if Google goes beyond this and just deletes private content from some algo filter.

The Hunter Biden laptop scandal is maybe the worst case yet¹.

New York Post got hold of it, published some very damning articles in mid October.

So Facebook and Twitter promptly banned sharing the article as "misinformation". It has all since been confirmed, but now the election is over.

¹ Or maybe there are worse cases where the silencing was more effective.

Lab leak theory has always been taken seriously but it was also largely hijacked by racists at the time who were much louder than the scientists. If memory serves.

I heard it was hijacked by Emmanuel Goldstein and the Brotherhood, those vicious rogues. Just look at the evidence.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein

edit: viscous indeed

Viscous rogues, the gelatin based lifeforms fighting in the shadows

Is your position that scientifically plausible ideas should be censored because random racists use it?

No.

Many of the components of the abuse page talk about "distribution", but the one about hate speech is simply "Do not engage in hate speech".

The way I read that, they could conceivably boot you just for having a private diary of racist rants. I don't know if they intend it that way; it's also possible that they'd interpret "speech" as meaning "speech where somebody else can hear you".

But if you were looking for more reason to drop your Drive subscription, that might be it.

Also, what if the content wasn't racist when you wrote it?

The Terms of Service are written broadly and that's on purpose so that Google can take the liberty of interpreting things however they please. Ultimately, it comes down to the culture of the team that deals with content scanning and take-down requests. I'm willing to bet money that it is staffed by Progressive Bay-Area folks and the implications should be self evident.

Even more problematic is the difficulty current algorithms have in distinguishing "engaging" in a certain class of speech acts from studying said class. This requires a subtlety of parsing humans are (sometimes) capable of, but machines still struggle with.

The headline is misleading. This makes it sound like anything that's misleading is banned which is false. They are banning very specific things that are veritably false like spreading fake election rules, spreading false election dates, etc.

These things have happened:

>The Trump campaign has sent Facebook advertisements to tens of thousands of voters in swing states, erroneously telling them it was election day after the social media group’s ad blockers failed to detect messages that violated its rules on misinformation

Is the election date a matter of opinion? I don't think that lying about what day is election day is protected speech- its malicious and attacks the very foundation of Democracy.

Chiming in on your update. It's my understanding as well that it's only related to distribution of content. There's nothing keeping you from storing misinformation on your personal Drive, but if you're linking to it from Facebook and using it to, say, sway a political election, cutting off others' access to it makes some sense.

Does this apply to google workspace (paying)customers too?

If so google is actually scanning what is supposed to be private information.

I looked closely but I cannot find anything that says that paying customers are excluded. So I would assume it is included.

It makes sense, though, to enforce one single policy: otherwise, just becoming a paying customer would be a loophole to circumvent phishing etc policies.

I guess the crux here is when, exactly, they start scanning the content. Is that perhaps the moment the content is first shared?

It doesn’t seem to be documented.

> If so google is actually scanning what is supposed to be private information.

Am I just too cynical or are you naive for thinking they aren't datamining absolutely anything they can get their hands on?

Their policies for Workspace accounts has tight restrictions on what they are allowed to use your data for. So they shouldn't be "datamining absolutely anything that they can get their hands on".

The referenced FAQ doesn’t say that google workspace paid accounts are exempt from this policy…

There is a difference between "datamining" and scanning. they could very well be scanning files that were shared by workspace accounts. They just wouldn't be allowed to use the verdict for anything other than flagging the content as a ToS violation.

Logs are only useful if they are monitored.

This individual seems to look at events that happen that don’t align with their prejudices and assumes that the signal is an aberration.

Nihilists get burned. You have to hold people accountable for the consequences of their action rather than their intention.

Maybe they will compensate you with discounts on some of their upcoming offerings like Google Re-Education Camp or Google Kulak Liquidator. Kids, are your parents tainted with dangerous Bourgeois sentiments? Get a free $10 Amazon Gift Card for every tip you make on Google Informant.

If it's not end-to-end encrypted, it's not private from Google.

Google can and will scan anything you feed it.

I’m tempted to make a bunch of honeypot accounts just to see how Orwellian and/or gameable their system is.

What will trigger it? Fan pages to Trump/Qanon? Antivaxxer propaganda? The German federal police paper on how to clandestinely manufacture heroin? Or maybe just a 20mb text file with the “卐” character?!

If you do they will figure out your real identity and will terminate your real account without warning. I highly suggest you move everything out before that.

That is...true. Everything google account backed is now wiped from my iPhone. Just got to download the google drive stuff next.

Did it work

why consider it when you can do it? Behavior can only change when there's a massive drop in MAU and revenue, then the product team will consider backtracking

Because it would be a major inconvenience for me, that's why.

Update:

I'm getting a lot of criticism here.

If your aim is to try to get me to actually make the switch, then the approach you are taking is counter-productive. Instead, I guess you are doing what most people do when faced with something they disapprove of: they do the thing that is easiest and most satisfying, which is to criticize or punish the other person, and to pat themselves on the back for being better.

But criticizing people just isn't an effective way to change people's minds or behavior.

What would work in this case? Showing them a path forward.

In this case, I presented a real problem, that it would be a major inconvenience to switch. That is the truth. I don't live in some idealized fantasy world, where I can take actions for free.

Bang on. I think one of the best things we can do as engineers is help build alternatives to these authoritarian companies' tools, and to strive to make the on ramp as easy as possible. As it stands right now, it is a lot of effort to use Libre tools when compared to the poison pill corporate ones.

The second best things we can do is support projects and be vigilant against the creep of corporate interests into FOSS.

If you care about privacy and freedom of expression, you have to live it, not just complain on HN.

I dropped Google Drive late last year and it wasn't too bad. Setup another service, made a directory junction from GoogleDrive folder to new folder, profit.

Refreshingly honest

Yes, well said.

Please stand by while I puke and shit and regret opening the comments section of an article discussing whether the first amendment is still valid.

ah, so you're just talking the talk, without preparing to walk the walk... things don't improve because you just wrote a comment on HN, it has to materially impact the business for them to notice the disagreement with the policy.

Most people are like you though, too lazy to do anything and they'll subject themselves to whatever big G says is good for them.

Beware of extremist/polarizing arguments like this one, they're mostly manipulative.

You can voice your disagreement, and still use the platform as long as they don't cross the line. That doesn't mean you haven't prepared a plan for degoogling your life and accept the inconveniences.

> I do think Google has a legitimate interest in regulating use of it's services as means of distributing information

If so... do you think that your ISP also has a legitimate interest in regulating use of it's services as means of distributing information?

I think ISPs should be public utilities, so, no.

Perhaps the basic functions of the internet that Google provides like mail and basic document storage should be treated as public utilities as well

If that caused free speech restrictions to outlaw email service spam filters it would be like a utility hooking sewer into the fresh water supply.

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

It's definitely not just a hypothetical risk either. In the last month, Facebook blocked me from distributing my blog post on Django best practices because they claim it violates their community standards. It's literally a post about how to structure API code, but now they're claiming that it's advocating for genocide or something and there's apparently no one to appeal to or any way to reverse this.

For reference: https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2021/06/django-for...

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2...

That's crazy.

Twice in the last week a comment of mine got blocked on Facebook for violating policies. In the first case, I posted a link to an EPA website and a screenshot of a graph posted on it, showing a reduction in smog in the last 10 years compared to 1987. In the second, I pasted a screenshot of something from the CDC's COVID Tracking site and a link to a British research paper on the efficacy of the vaccines wrt the delta variant. In the second case, my link was broken somehow, which might have contributed to the problem somehow?

They never went back up.

> I think I would rightly be upset if Google refused to deliver the email

I hope you would be more than upset at that point. That would be terrifying.

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