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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

Honestly surprised they weren't forced to do this earlier, Google likely already hashes files for deduplication or integrity checks, making it rather trivial to keep a database of known pirated movie hashes.

Obviously it can be easily defeated with encryption / changing the metadata, but it's so easy to implement I'm shocked they didn't do it earlier.

Google drive is commonly used for a backup of media or even a host of media when using rclone.

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This is, suddenly, a FAQ for us.[1]

Many, many pre-sales conversations are now focused on whether or not we hash files or keep databases of file hashes, etc. Do we collude with other cloud providers to report file incidence. Or, for people who really have no idea who they are talking to "which cloud do (you) run on top of".

This was not the case before. I think the advent of 'rclone'[2] has created a lot of use-cases that very efficiently use (cheap online drives) and all the kids are storing their warez with it.

Yes, trivially easy to defeat with encryption and rclone has a very nice and simple workflow for this.

[1] You know who we are.

[2] https://rclone.org/

Wait for ToS banning 'double encrypted files' aka 'we encrypt your files on google' and user adding rclone or other crypt on top.

They have been doing it since at least 2017. I noticed it on my account with Game of Thrones episode and when I googled it at the time, it was a known issue. They didn't warn you like they do for virus, the files simply wouldn't show up when people opened the shared folder.

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