Google has reportedly been locking users out of their own data after what one affected user described as “creepy monitoring.”
“Imagine you’re working on a Google Doc when, seemingly out of nowhere, your ability to edit the online file gets revoked. What you see instead is an error message indicating that you’ve violated Google’s terms of service,” wrote the Washington Post‘s Brian Fung on Tuesday. “For anyone who stores work in the cloud, suddenly being unable to access your data — especially due to a terms of service violation — may sound scary. And it’s really happening to some people, according to reports on Twitter.”
Google has seemingly been setting up tools to read its users’ private data and documents in an attempt to search for Terms of Service “violations.”
National Geographic Reporter Rachael Bale was one user who reported the problem.
Has anyone had @googledocs lock you out of a doc before? My draft of a story about wildlife crime was just frozen for violating their TOS.
— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017
Weirdly, this is one of the more tame articles I've worked on recently. It's actually about legal, but ethically dubious activity.
— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017
Just to be sure, I reviewed the TOS, and there's nothing in this doc that I can see that actually violates it.
— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017
In a series of posts on Twitter, Bale called the revocation of access to her own content “creepy,” before sharing a screenshot of the error message she received, claiming her content had been “inappropriate.”
I like to use Google Docs for drafts because my editor and I can work together in real time, but this kind of monitoring is creepy
— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017
Though clearly very naive of me not to have considered it before…
— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017
This is the message I got. @selenalarson pic.twitter.com/EysgcU4uXQ
— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017
After several hours, Bale eventually announced that her access to the document has been restored.
And it looks like access has been restored.
— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017
Jacobin Magazine Founder and Democratic Socialists of America “hype man” Bhaskar Sunkara also reported the problem in a post on Twitter.
Tfw your finalizing a piece on E. Europe post-socialist parties in Google Drive and Google removes it because it's in violation of its ToS??
— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) October 31, 2017
Original author can still view it, but can't share it because it's "inappropriate". We can of course request a review. Don't trust the Cloud
— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) October 31, 2017
According to ZDNet, some users even reported their files being deleted by Google in error.
“This issue should now be resolved and you should be able to access your files,” declared Google following the incident. “For more details, this morning, we made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked.”
“A fix is in place and all users should have full access to their docs. Protecting users from viruses, malware, and other abusive content is central to user safety,” they continued. “We apologize for the disruption and will put processes in place to prevent this from happening again.”
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.
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