Google removes Drink Champs interview from your Google Drive | Hacker News Reader

Google removes Drink Champs interview from your Google Drive

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33 pointsnumeromancer44 comments

When this has happened in the past, it was only for Google Drive items that were shared publicly, and those for private storage were "safe". Can anybody confirm/deny if that is the case here?

EDIT: As a matter of fact, I think that is the case here. Notice how the message doesn't say anything about removal, and instead says "some features related to this file may have been restricted". OP's editorialized title is completely wrong, I strongly suspect they're just turning off sharing for the file.

I can absolutely confirm it's happened to private, unshared documents, because it happened to me.

Google deleted a COVID-19 video I'd uploaded to Google Drive to keep for prosperity. I'm a bit of a bower bird [0] and I'd kept it because it was the most "out-there" thing I'd seen. Nowhere is safer then a Google Drive right? One day, it disappeared. Another "out-there" video I'd uploaded about the same time (it was a sales pitch from a some USA data collector demonstrating how they could tracked phones to plot COVID spread) remains to this day.

The disappeared video was selling a preppers handbook. The sales pitch was CVOID-19 is a US government conspiracy, and you needed to prepare for the downfall of the USA. If I was internet publishing company there is no way I'd be letting my platform host the video. But I wasn't publishing it.

[0] A Bower Bird is an Australia bird that lines it's nest with shiny's humans typically regard as rubbish. https://external-preview.redd.it/n6PtPZ53zWofwSlDHp4l0xkM__4...

Maybe you should make your own post then posting the evidence for that, in this post and previous variations of it I am yet to see what you describe.

It's on a new pro kanye west subreddit and I bet it's fake and done for clout or easy karma. I uploaded a rip from youtube (there are hundreds of versions online btw.) and nothing happened... yet. The strange thing is there are no google/bing/kagi/ddg/usenet/torrent hits for the filename. The only time it appears is in two reddit screenshots and no one of the OPs posted the md5 even after being asked.

I find it bizarre how lax society treats digital property.

To search my home, you need a warrant, based on a reasonable suspicion. Opening my snail mail is a federal crime. When I hire a storage box at a private company, it can't be opened for as long as I keep paying and don't store anything physically hazardous.

In the digital world, all your private files turn out to not be private at all nor is your communication. It is pro-actively scanned without cause. Guilty until proven innocent. Not just for crime, now also for "wrong speak".

Feds raided a safe-deposit box company and opened all the vaults because some of the owners were criminals. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-ba...

And that was headline worthy news for government overreach.

Meanwhile your email provider can do this to improve some ad targeting metric by 0.00N percentage.

That’s implicit in the terms of the “free” service.

Yeah, that's the norm now, and I can understand that is what enabled the internet boom.

This is very different from the norm for physical property.

It would be illegal to offer such a free service if there are physical goods involved, and for good reason.

> We don't want to promote false narratives on our platform

TIL Google Drive is a "platform". Time to get my stuff off of it.

Utilizing the popular cryptocurrency "Not your keys, not your coins" we can easily change it to:

> Not your disks, not your data

Trusting Google with your data and expecting it to always be there is a risky bet.

We already have the saying “There’s no cloud, it’s just somebody else’s computer”.

If you didn’t touch the hardware, all bets are off.

If someone else touched the hardware, all bets are off.

It's context dependent. If you manage all hardware as a team, that statement is wrong. However, if this means your hardware integrity can't be guaranteed, you have bigger problems.

Google Drive is the first stop for media piracy all across the internet.

I don’t think I’m going too far to assume they have some pretty significant automatic enforcement mechanisms, especially when it comes to trademarked/copyrighted media.

In fact, from the first result I can find:

> Google Drive matches the hash of copyrighted video content with files that are stored to identify pirated content [1]

File hashes seem like the tip of the iceberg, IMO. I mean, the original video was posted on YouTube, so Google presumably has access to some DEEP info on that media.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/telecom.economictimes.indiatime...

It doesn't make much sense that Google would give a shit about any of this, so I'm guessing there is "more" to this story, as there often is.

Yes there is more, it is disabling sharing, not removing the file.

Be very skeptical about this random post from one random pro-Kanye subreddit. This appears to be fake. No proof is offered by the OP.

Context: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/kanye-ye-w...

I downloaded it from Rumble, put the unzipped full content into my Gdrive. It didn't filter it. I'm assuming if it's being blocked, it's only from the original URL and not actually content filtering.

I have not heard of that interview before, but now im very curious to see for myself why it is removed. Does someone have a link to somewhere where its still up?

rumble.com search on drink champs dozens of uploads.

Though truthfully I haven't watched it & just read all the coverage. I was just fascinated w/ the idea that it was censored and how (& tried to replicate it).

This has been discussed multiple times over the weekend.

The title here is incorrect.

The email in the screenshot says some features are restricted such as sharing. It does not indicate the file was removed.

Is that right? I’m not here to say, but many of you are basing arguments on faulty information.

"Your Google drive" is a contradiction.

While I don't necessarily agree with it, I don't see why people feel entitled to claim this as a free speech violation etc.

It's Google's storage property and they can remove whatever they want from it.

They're not obligated to host anything.

That is a scary concept in a world where cloud storage is becoming the default, and local storage may become extinct.

If you care about it, don't store it exclusively in the cloud (AKA somebody else's computer). Consumer cloud services offer no guarantees of the longevity of your data and providers like Google are well-known for turning off services that are not profitable to them with minimal warning.

> It's Google's storage property and they can remove whatever they want from it.

Many people are paying for that storage. I'm not sure Google should have the right to remove anything they want from it, just like the phone companies should not have the right to bleep out words in my phone conversations.

Oh I simply can't wait until the current 'well actually, its not a free speech since its a corporation" group find that their telephone conversations are filtered or anytime they try to type certain words into a web browser that their isp drops packets.

We about to speedrun why freedom of speech is important!

Bad example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...

Great example - shows that government enforcement of free speech requirements work.

I wonder, if this was proposed today, if it would have passed.

Freedom of speech: not just the law - it's a good idea too!

It's also only related to Government infringement. Not private companies.

I used to think that too. The problem with that formulation is that corporations control much of what was previously either unregulated or the province of government in the sense of legal restrictions against government power.

The public square is the internet these days. Freedom of speech is important enough that speaking in the public square should be protected, even when the square is seemingly owned and operated by a corporation... and probably especially then.

> The public square is the internet these days.

That's a nice idea, but it simply isn't reality.

My point was that it isn't just the law, it's a good thing generally to encourage, even if there are no legal requirements to do so.

I'm not arguing that it's not important, as I said I don't agree with it but when simply accepting all ToS, T&C's without even reviewing them becomes the norm, what do you expect ?

I wonder how happy these people would be if they were renters and stored some material in their house that their landlords disagreed with. And then landlord would enter and remove that material.

I take your point, but we’ve already decided in this country that owners rights are more important than renters. I don’t see how cloud storage is much different.

Maybe ownership should be different in this circumstance?

You might be surprised to learn that a landlord can charge extra or evict someone for nearly anything including working on/having cars they don’t like, having the wrong breed of dog, being LGBT, etc.

> They're not obligated to host anything.

Not when I pay rent to store my stuff on it. Then they are obligated to make google drive work like a drive where I put my files in, and when queried for them, my files come back out.

You're making assumptions of the user and their google plan. We don't know if they're paying.

The bottom line is this. People can down-vote this comment all day. The facts are as they stand. Google has the right to remove whatever they want.

You're free to host your own content at any time.

> You're making assumptions of the user and their google plan. We don't know if they're paying.

From my post: "Not when I pay rent to store my stuff on it."

I wasn't talking about them, I was talking about my own relationship with Google, and my expectation that a vendor provides the service they promised to in exchange for my money.

> Google has the right to remove whatever they want.

Nope.

I haven't read their TOS, but there's almost certainly a clause about how the service comes with no warranty and you're storing your data at your own risk. So they're not obligated to do anything really. They could decide to replace all your files with RickRoll videos and I doubt you'd have grounds to sue.

> but there's almost certainly a clause about how the service comes with no warranty and you're storing your data at your own risk

You can disclaim liability all you want, but there comes a point where you are selling data storage, and not delivering what you sold. Also, believe it or not, contract can contain terms and exclusions that are illegal and will be set aside in a lawsuit.

> So they're not obligated to do anything really.

This is what everyone sued for fraud or breach of contract thinks before an expensive, long, slow education takes place.

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