Google Docs Drama Reminds Us How Vulnerable We Are In The Cloud

[Ben Pottinger]

Why is the content of your document of any relevance to the service? I don't care if they scan your shit for targeted advertising, but if they start censoring you, that's a whole different ball game. Google is a monopoly with a political agenda who contributes millions to particular presidential campaigns. This should be a red flag that it's basically an extension of the government using a "private company" loophole to get around the constitution.

I agree 100%. I wasn't all that worried about my email and crap being scanned for ads but censoring your documents? I was using google docs because its just so easy but now I'm tempted to switch back to open office.

You can get around some of this crap with encryption. Just use google drive (not docs/sheets/etc) and encrypt any files you upload. I honestly wish I could convince my lazy friends and family to start using PGP for email. Not because I have anything to hide (im too small fry for the .gov to give a crap about) but simply because it will screw with their scanning/advertising/censoring software.

 

[cirdecus]

Who gets to decide whether written content I have is "abusive" or not? This is why entrusting your data to a third party is a bad idea, unless you don't care about making your own decisions.

I suggest you host your data at home on a NAS and simply use your own cloud tools to access it from anywhere

 

[InvalidError]

Who gets to decide whether written content I have is "abusive" or not?

In Google's case, that would probably be the same broken AI that's wrongfully demonetizing videos by the thousands on Youtube and robbing creators of revenue from views in the critical first several days while the demonetization appeal is under way.

 

[samer.forums]

Any one who uploads sensitive data or documents into another hand servers being the external cloud or Google , is out of his mind.

Either you have your own cloud Servers (huge company) , or just dont do it.

and if you think "oh they will not read billions of documents" you are wrong , They dont "read" them , they let their supercomputer scan for key words / company source , and categorize them for review or not.

 

[alextheblue]

Who gets to decide whether written content I have is "abusive" or not?

In Google's case, that would probably be the same broken AI that's wrongfully demonetizing videos by the thousands on Youtube and robbing creators of revenue from views in the critical first several days while the demonetization appeal is under way.

I agree with you except you should know it's not broken. It's working as intended, at least in the case of YT demonetization. Google is not neutral no matter what they claim. The organization itself is widely a progressive echo chamber, and all decisions they make regarding content are largely informed by the political disposition of their teams (especially those in positions of power).

In other words, they target and demonetize those with a strong opposing worldview, and feel justified in doing so (makes sense coming from their viewpoint, see Damore interviews). They also will not promote said videos to the general public even if they have tons of views (unless they already have a viewing pattern of related videos). Bigger guys can take the hits and have alternate revenue streams, but it definitely discourages smaller channels. So yeah, don't expect much of a massive "fix" any time soon to their current model at least on YT.

With regards to the documents, I don't like the idea of them scanning non-public documents, period. I'm not a huge fan of cloud for primary storage of docs (we use Docs et al at work and I do not care for it, preferred MS Office or LibreOffice/OpenOffice), but I do use OneDrive for backups. But I have offline copies... and MS isn't as aggravating as Google. Plus with my Office sub I get 1TB of storage and I have my Office apps installed offline too.

 

[InvalidError]

I agree with you except you should know it's not broken.

If it was working as intended, it wouldn't be demonetizing perfectly fair content by the thousands and force those creators to file manual appeals for each individual video that got wrongfully demonetized. EEVBlog for example is just about as politically-correct as a YT channel can possibly be yet many of Dave's videos get demonetized for absolutely no apparent reason. Same goes with Leonard French and a bunch of other YTbers who try to go out of their way to avoid anything that could possibly lead to demonetization but still have to file tons of manual appeals the bulk of which get granted a week or so later.

The threshold for demonetization is extremely low for channels that haven't been granted special protection against demonetization such as Pewdiepie.