Update and more: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-drive-flags-macos-ds-store-files-for-copyright-violation/
Google Drive was seen flagging '.DS_Store' files generated by macOS file systems as a violation of its copyright infringement policy.
'.DS_Store' is a metadata file commonly seen by Apple users when they transfer their folders and archives from a macOS to a non-Apple operating system, like Windows.
Is '.DS_Store' copyrighted?
A user reported seeing a ".DS_Store" file on their Google Drive being flagged for violating Google's 'Copyright Infringement' policy.
And, it seems this isn't the first time it's happened either. A similar issue was experienced by some last month, specifically with '.DS_Store' files [1, 2].
Apple users often see mysterious '.DS_Store' appear when they copy ZIP files and folders from their macOS devices to another operating system, such as Windows.
'.DS_Store' files are automatically generated by macOS' Finder application to store custom attributes and metadata such as icon information and background image location. This information helps Finder render the layout as per the user's preferences.
On macOS systems, .DS_Store files remain typically hidden within Finder. In fact, the file is analogous to the hidden desktop.ini and thumbs.db files seen occasionally by Windows users (if their Explorer settings permit showing 'hidden' files).
However, when uploading archives and folders to a third-party cloud service, such as Google Drive or Dropbox, the storage provider's file manager may regardless show ".DS_Store," "desktop.ini," and other such files, otherwise obscured on a user's personal computer.
It isn't known yet what causes this behavior, and BleepingComputer has been unable to reproduce the issue at the time of writing.
One plausible assumption we had was, Google relies on checksums to keep track of copyrighted content, and a possible hash-collision between copyrighted files and benign files sharing the same hash can trigger false violations.
Last month, Google Drive users were left baffled on seeing their nearly empty files being erroneously flagged for violating the company's copyright infringement policy.
These text files contained nothing other than numbers like 0, 1, 173, 174, 186, and a few others.
the issue with files that contain just digits, as opposed to '.DS_Store' files. The latter could be quite unique for individuals, producing specific hashes—and as such hard to reproduce. But, this theory has not been authoritatively confirmed.
BleepingComputer reached out to Google with specific questions to better understand the issue.
A Google spokesperson explained that in January the company discovered and addressed the aforementioned issue that "impacted a small number of Drive files."
The same month, Google says, they had corrected "all known cases where files were incorrectly flagged for violating Google's Copyright Infringement policy" and took steps to prevent this behavior from recurring.
