80/20 incomplete machine learning model.
One day people and institutions will get the message and stop using Google for important things.
Sadly it won't even be the next generation as they're all rusted into the ecosystem with Chromebooks provided by their school districts.
Meanwhile, they seem to be taking their eye off the ball when it comes to the spam filtering that many of their users might wish for. In just the past week, I've received noticeable amounts of spam via: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Photos.
I'm puzzled about how Google are choosing to allocate their resources. It doesn't seem likely that governments would be asking Google to specifically police spreadsheets for possible phishing data. The owners of the files definitely aren't asking for their access to their own data to be cut off. So what are the origins of this effort?
I have to admit, I originally thought that Google Drive was the obvious choice over every alternative that existed, but I can see now that I would prefer an offline or privacy-driven alternative. The risk of losing files to a Google Drive machine learning black hole & then facing Google's customer service black hole might be small, but it's also nightmarish.
Thankfully I'm about ready to close down my Gmail account (still stuck needing a Google account for now) but it's a good reminder of what I won't be missing when I finally get out.
The risk of facing the "black hole" may be larger then you think. There's a person who posts a common "recovery how-to" in the support forums when people get locked out and that page got 83,878 views last month.
I received a notification from Gmail the other day that "Someone added <made-up-email-address@my domain> as their recovery email.". And my only option was to disconnect the email. By disconnecting the email, I would be confirming to the account owner that the email landed in someone's inbox. By not confirming the email, I would be allowing my domain to be associated with a Gmail account potentially used for nefarious activity.
Given Google's scorched earth approach to deactivating associated Google Accounts when it comes to things like the Play Store, I felt I needed to disconnect the account.
Google Drive
> Random Name (randomcharactershere@gmail.com) has invited you to view the following document: Private__file-Nyela-(random characters)
> If you don't want to receive files from this person, block the sender from Drive
The painful part is the last bit, you can only block that single sender, you can't turn off all notifications.
Google Docs
> Random Name (randomcharactershere@gmail.com) mentioned you in a comment in the following document Direct_message_with_Salma
> 1 comment
> Random Name • 4:58 PM, Jul 11 Contact Helen and rate her request to date here https://morerandomcharacters.example/evenmoremorerandomchara...
Google Docs has the same problem, you follow the link to turn it off and you end up at:
> Notification settings of myemailaddress@gmail.com for Direct_message_with_Salma
So you can only ever disable notifications from that single document.
Removing files in google drive will kill drive. How can you trust them?
I looked at an "out of the blue" example just now:
1. Sent from a Gmail address where the name doesn't come close to matching the name suggested by the sender address.
2. Email body is in Latvian, a language I have no association with.
3. About 20 other recipients, none associated with me.
4. Subject line is nonsensical (not even words) and an email address.
5. Email body is one line.
6. PDF attachment, with no mention of it in the email body.
7. Looks automated, but came from a Gmail address.
Of course, none of these in isolation is a definitive indicator of the email being spam, but given that there's at least 7 anomalies, considering the amount of data Google has & that they pride themselves on machine learning, shouldn't they be catching something like this?
I wish I was being facetious.
Still scratching my head at how their calibration can let something like that through and stick a random genuine circular from Twitter in my spambox though...
I would think any first class modern day regime would be on the lookout for anyone who might have it in their mind to challenge that authority, and election related keywords could certainly fall into that filter depending on how coarse it is. I wouldn't expect they would just blatantly take down documents though, so I suspect I am being excessively conspiratorial here.
One report and the entire website is blocked, we clean the website immediately but already all the shitty antivirus and security software is blocking our domain, it took us weeks to have those bastards fix the issue, one of the big security companies even had the form you need to use to submit reports broken for weeks... So unfortunately if a "bad" link appears on your website it will costs you a lot of time to get it all back to normal, my advice , for user generated content just use a different domain so if shit happens your main domain does not get blocked by the browser makers and antivirus companies.
I'm not being miserable or spiteful when I say I'm really glad this happens. Mono-cultures are dangerous and undesirable, and whether the cause is "network effects" or more active monopoly tactics it's good that there's some drivers towards alternatives.
Ultimately, when we have interoperability (by legislation if necessary), people will have the genuine choice to share documents via Google, where their work may be censored or arbitrarily deleted, or through another service. It will not matter whether others in the group use AcmeDocs or GoogleDocs, we will all be able to share and edit via interoperable protocols. But when Google screw up like this, they will lose customers who have no barrier to migrate to another Docs client.
That will raise software quality. It would be a real marketplace.
The reason why Google Sheets was so handy was because it's a great interface for data exploration. I could show students features about the data, and sort/filter/highlight, without having to distribute/create spreadsheet files. I guess if Google Sheets ends up being draconian with its content filters, I could link to Github-hosted CSVs, but it's not quite the same.
Haven't checked my classroom Google sheets recently, but if they're untouched, it might have helped that they were all set to public view. Maybe the flagging algorithm looks at private sheets with much more suspicion.
You could be right, but jeez... shouldn't it be the opposite?
When you have literally millions of people whose livelihood depends on gaming algorithms, or getting past content filters, then some highly intelligent and motivated individuals are going to get through, that's a fact of life.
When someone figures out how to train their robots better than Google, then Google will have some competition, but they seem to be about a decade ahead of everyone else, and only accelerating relative to the rest of the field, so I'm doubtful that anyone is going to catch up any time soon.
Of course Google and Microsoft both punish me by sending my mail to spam (even years later) for using my own domain but that's what I'd expect from the big players.
From what I can tell it's just that small domains are guilty until proven innocent. However it seems at lower volumes you can never send enough email to get past the thresholds they've set so you're forever guilty in their eyes. Very convenient.
I've also signed up to both Microsoft and Google's email tools and neither shows any information because I don't send enough mail while they still keep making my mail as spam. It's getting to the point where I'll probably have to use a 3rd party SMTP rely as the family don't appreciate their mail going to spam while all their friends on GMail go straight to the Inbox.
A nice new addition is Microsoft is flagging any links I include in my message as "suspicious" and giving the users scary warnings. Meanwhile I can see they still take the opportunity to scan and fetch the URL and yet still can't determine it's safe.
Interestingly when I logged into Microsoft's Smart Network Data Services I could also see my VPS provider had claimed the IP block as well so they were clearly invested in making sure spam was under control. But nope, still not enough for Microsoft. At one point the mail was even getting hard 550 refused. I contacted their support who to their credit replied, but to less of their credit gaslit me and claimed there was no blocking occurring despite me pasting them full error message with all their tracking IDs in it. The next day mail was allowed in again but still ends up in spam.
I think to switch to my own domain mail adress but I think to use Migadu [1] instead or even try to host anything.
If only they would send everything to spam. Microsoft outright blocks all mail from my VPS because some other IP on the block allegedly sent spam. Of course since I'm not running a commercial business I can just tell people to use a better mail provider if they want to create an account - not worth my time to deal with shitty megacorps.
> Everything else is much, much worse IMO.
I wouldn't say it's much much worse. Lot of the digital service I use, I pay for. And they have human support when I need it.
I don't miss Google services at all.
Yes. I went from self-hosted to Proton recently. Spam filtering is better, UI is better, and customer support / transparency is way better than anything I've seen from Google in the past decade. Of course the various outages / issues over the past three days have been frustrating so there's that.
No, we moved to google because they provided three orders of magnitude more storage than other free mail providers. Also, the interface was slick and fast.
Spam is an overrated problem - it doesn't take much time at all look over a dozen or so mail subjects a day to determinine if they are legitimate. Scammers are a problem for the more vulnerable but Google is never going to block all of their own kind either.
This is so true that it hurts. I went back to college later in my life starting in 2018. It's astonishing to me how ingrained Google services are to the kids I'm in school with. Even though we have Office 365 and a full suite of apps available to us for free, when we do group work the de-facto decision that students come to is to create Google drive shares, or shared Google docs that are tied to personal accounts. It gets so stupidly messy and the apps just seem so inferior. Everyone uses the same Slides template so everything looks the same. Ugh.
I've taken to telling people for years now, for this exact reason, that friends don't let friends use Google's password manager.