“Your File May Violate Google Drive's Terms of Service” | Hacker News Reader

“Your File May Violate Google Drive's Terms of Service”

48 pointsdeathanatos22 comments

According to Google,

> $name contains content that may violate Google Drive's Phishing policy. People that you've shared this file with will still be able to access it, but they will see a warning on the file. If you think this is an error and would like the Trust & Safety team to review this file, request a review below.

…if I open it, the Google Sheet tells me "It contains links that might be used to steal your personal information." But it doesn't tell me which like.

The sheet is a list of wedding vendors — we're trying to plan a wedding. So if one of the wedding vendor's sites has be pwned, a.) I'd like to know, and b.) how TF is that my fault, such that it translates to a ToS violation, Google?

Of course, the appeal button offers me no ability to include an explanation, or a request for which link …

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I'd check the urls contained within against Google's Safe Browsing Site Status[0], then maybe virustotal[1] or urlscan[2].

Sucks that Google isn't more transparent in its email.

[0] https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?h...

[1] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload

[2] https://urlscan.io/

So I know which URL it is now, as I've gotten a different UI in Sheets now.

[0] and [2] say the allegedly bad URL is clean. [1] thinks it isn't.

Wayback has a several month gap, before which the site is fine, and after which their provider appears to have suspended them, so presumably something happened there.

But, yeah, thanks for just shooting the wrong person, Google.

You could bisect the sheet. Bisection would be fastest algorithm to identify the "bug".

Bisection would be to split the sheet into half and half into new files. Split the offending sheet further and so no on until you identify the offending entry.

This method should work even if more than one vendor/ row has a problem - you bisect the parts which are bad and keep doing it until there is only one record.

Note: This assumes that Google scans consistently and immediately the same way immediately each file

Important Note: Your ToS violation notice may become a suspension if more than one violation is tagged to your account.

Knowing Google's support quality I wouldn't personally risk my Google account and would move the entire file contents to say Notion which perhaps is more suited tool for this kind of planning .

> Important Note: Your ToS violation notice may become a suspension if more than one violation is tagged to your account.

Given the near weekly “My account was suspended without recourse and I lost everything” HN articles, surely OP is not using their main, personal Google account that they are dependent on for things like E-mail, right? Right??

Be careful and have a backup plan.

> surely OP is not using their main, personal Google account that they are dependent on for things like E-mail

If you can accidentally have a file that violates TOS, surely you can also accidentally send an email that violates TOS.

> Given the near weekly “My account was suspended without recourse and I lost everything” HN articles, surely OP is not using their main, personal Google account that they are dependent on for things like E-mail, right? Right??

"They say most wrecks happen within a mile of home, so we moved."

… whatever account I use for email is the account I use for email.

Perhaps, yes, I could abandon Google. It's just like, I'd like to spend my life living.

Sadly my personal server is down due to parts failure at the moment.

We've reached the point that being a Google user is like hiding from the secret police.

(I was never into Google services that required a login, and that turns out to have been a good decision.)

> how TF is that my fault, such that it translates to a ToS violation, Google?

Because ToS violating links are against the ToS regardless of your intent.

It doesn’t appear that they’re shutting down your account. It says people you’ve shared the link with will receive a warning.

>> It doesn’t appear that they’re shutting down your account.

Not yet. The rule of thumb is that you should expect the worst as it's a free service

I'm kind of impressed that Google almost did the right thing here in giving some type of warning (even if an incredibly vague one), rather than just randomly blocking/banning your account. Baby steps forward.

Congrats on your wedding.

Since posting, the UI has changed. Now, instead of a banner at the top saying I am "doing" "bad" "things", that's gone now. Now, if I hover over one of the links, I get a popup saying that link is bad.

At least now, I know which link is bad.

I specifically ran that link through transparency report, and it's marked as "No unsafe content found."

The domain no longer resolves. Perhaps the venue has gone out of business, I don't know.

I removed the URL from the sheet, and I now have another, fresh email saying the sheet is violating the ToS.

"It's not your fault, but it is your problem."

Can you programmatically create a set of sheets that each exclude one vendor to see which one doesn't get flagged and identify the culprit?

Good idea... almost. You're assuming that there's only one problematic link.

It might be better to go the other direction - create a set of sheets that each contain only one vendor, and see which (and how many) get flagged.

Yes you're right, that makes more sense, I don't know why doing it the other way is what came to my mind first

Because if more than one vendor causes the problem, you have only skimmed off a minimum of possibilities.

You can recursively bi or tri-partition them, and the amount of documents you will have to create are only proportional to the number of compromised vendors multiplied by the log of the number of links.

That's extremely bot-like behavior and likely to turn the warning into a suspension.

Do not do this.

Your URL is probably a positive match from this DB: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?h...

You need to see which is returned from here.

None of the links in the sheet are flagged by that tool.

So split the file into single links, and use Combinations of the 7 words you cannot use on television for naming.

Spreadsheet to spreadsheets... you could program it in a single spread sheet...

Given the amount of Google Docs/Google Drive spam/phishing attempts I get, I'm amazed that your personal file is getting this much attentiom

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