Google: "You can't share that on 'Google Drive.'"

[Jolly]

Trust bust needed.

[Axtremus]

Google’s end-user agreement already states that they will prohibit certain material. See https://www.google.com/drive/terms-of-service/ . This is just adding enforcement mechanism.

Yeah, “the Cloud” is in many ways “other people’s computers.”

If you really want to share something from your own computer, set it up as a web or file server. The Apache web server software is free, so is many FTP server software.

[George K]

[LuFins Dad]

[George K]

[Mik]

This is why I do not use most Google products. I have a gmail but I don't use it much and I sure as hell don't use their cloud or applications. Maps is still the best out there.

[George K]

@mik said in Google: "You can't share that on 'Google Drive.'":

This is why I do not use most Google products. I have a gmail but I don't use it much and I sure as hell don't use their cloud or applications. Maps is still the best out there.

Same here. For search, it's DuckDuckGo. I have a gmail as well, and never use it. I do use their maps on my phone.

By the way, I just uploaded a file to my google drive identical to the one referenced in the OP. Let's see what happens.

[Axtremus]

@george-k said in Google: "You can't share that on 'Google Drive.'":

By the way, I just uploaded a file to my google drive identical to the one referenced in the OP. Let's see what happens.

Just “uploading” is not quite the same as “sharing”. Try to make that file publicly accessible to every one or explicitly share with a specific organization or group of people to see what happens.

[Axtremus]

@mik said in Google: "You can't share that on 'Google Drive.'":

This is why I do not use most Google products. I have a gmail but I don't use it much and I sure as hell don't use their cloud or applications. Maps is still the best out there.

Most websites you visit uses Google’s API and various Google analytics services under the hood without you knowing. Not that they are trying to hide it, just that there are so many dependencies for modern websites (so it’s impractical to disclose them all) and limited regulatory requirement to disclose (often limited to personally identifiable information), so most of the dependencies don’t get disclosed. For an experiment, if you configure your home router to block everything to/from “google.com”, chances are very good that you will find an overwhelming majority of websites and web-based services broken in some ways.

[Mik]

You make my point for me.

There are many things I cannot control. I will do what I can.

[George K]

@axtremus said in Google: "You can't share that on 'Google Drive.'":

Just “uploading” is not quite the same as “sharing”. Try to make that file publicly accessible to every one or explicitly share with a specific organization or group of people to see what happens.

Done.

[Copper]

1

A single line with just a 1 and nothing else is not allowed as a post here either.

Nor should it be

[George K]

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.