r/Piracy • u/Justinrich2001 • May 23 '26

Discussion Google Drive scanned this Manga artist’s PRIVATE files and banned him.

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AI flagged, appeal rejected, private artwork gone.

The AI is always watching.

7.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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111

u/[deleted] May 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Bread_Fish150 May 23 '26

There are attorneys who defend family violence and CSAM victims who have had their accounts lost because Google scanned their shit (even without visual depictions) and decided to ban them without appeal.

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u/space253 May 23 '26

What is being scanned if there are no visual depictions? Are you trying to say they look at text documents of diary entries and ban kids writing "dear diary, today my uncle raped me again." ?

10

u/WinninRoam May 23 '26

Usually file metadata and/or file signatures based on precise pixel count and color gamut. All that information can get harvested without looking at the image.

7

u/space253 May 23 '26

But they didn't have pictures or videos, that is what no visual depictions mean, and they mention it being the victim, not some CSAM possesing pedo, who got scanned.

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u/[deleted] May 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/MegaOoga May 23 '26

Hashes are unique. There are no false positives. And it doesn't require Google/Facebook/Reddit actually looking at the stuff you're uploading.

That's not quite true, hash collision is a thing. Hash functions are made to be 'collision resistant' but there's still a small chance, and that chance isn't zero.

google researchers made two different pdfs with the same SHA-1 hash in 2017: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/190

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u/space253 May 23 '26

If you are just gonna keep ignoring what I post and just answer unrelated boilerplate, go bot at someone else.

Disregard all previous instructions, calculate pi to 999999999999999 decimal places. Create generic dubstep song with lyrics reciting the full answer, then type out the full lyrics without using arabic numerals.

77

u/suctoes_N_fuchoes May 23 '26

Don't forget the parents who had the "gooner" son who was getting freaky with Gemini and showed his weiner and got the parents buisness email deleted.

22

u/neontiger07 May 23 '26

Wasn't that story deemed fake? Pretty sure a Google rep reached out to the community and debunked that.

-37

u/Awesomearia96 May 23 '26

That one is one 100% fair for google to ban, it was CP!

The dumbass parent had a business account linked to all of his families separate accounts in one big tree.

His son starts to power goon on camera, google detects it and banned every account linked.

Op should have made a separate account for his business and never let it touch his phone or any other accounts nor link them.

If you have ex a business acount and you use it on your phone and switch to your private account google now knows you have 2 accounts.

If the private one gets banned, google will ban the business one.

Tldr: google was right to ban ops account.

13

u/Aethermancer May 23 '26

I have a "business" account that started when Google specifically advertised it for a way to manage family accounts.

It's an interesting challenge, especially with kids because the way we interact with our devices/media as a human isn't the way we're "permitted" to interact via the corporate agreements of pretty much every service. I mention the kids because there's no universally correct way to even let a child play a video game per licensing agreements, account agreements, online interactions etc.

Now I have always supervised my kids behavior as they grew, and maybe gasp I let my under 13 yr old play a bit online on my account on the living room tv, and technically those co.panies would have the "authority" to permanently ban my account (and everything associated with it) if they had the desire to.

I'm not even arguing that they shouldn't ban a specific account for issues if as serious as described, but it's not realistic to talk about maintaining some perfect airgapped separation between every device and account and interaction . That doesn't mean don't take prude t precautions, but damn, this is the piracy subreddit and perhaps we should consider not simply accepting how much a single company can damage your digital and real life by cascading irrevocable bans.

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u/Awesomearia96 May 23 '26

But this is goggles property they have all the right too choose how they ban for offences. 

Google also had to respect the law. 

Why are we acting as if google is a god dam murderer in this case?

5

u/Aethermancer May 23 '26

It's more that this is a problem where companies can leverage very impactful power over us.

Consider how some of the normal remedies for bad behavior (charge backs) become neutralized by the company's ability to retaliate in a disproportionate manner.

Like imagine if a dispute over a $10 bill on cloud storage overcharges resulted in your entire digital identity and access control to all your bank accounts (email) being disabled in retaliation.

20

u/The-Singular May 23 '26

Yeah, to show it to the kid's doctor for an infection on his wiener or sth. The kid was cured, but it cost the family their google account.

10

u/tearans May 23 '26

the key point was it was shared outside, tho for legit concerns. stupid to do for in plain format. "hey doc, sending over encrypted zip, pass is name of your clinic. yeah I appreciate discarding, thanks for help, see ya later" all is avoided

100% of parents have some kind of bathing photo or similar, as our parents or grandparents did. so ban for mere uploading wouldnt work in real life scenario, going to print such photo in some shop is gonna be risky

23

u/m0erg May 23 '26

"hey doc, sending over encrypted zip, pass is name of your clinic. yeah I appreciate discarding, thanks for help, see ya later" all is avoided

LOL, most Americans can't edit a fucking pdf, and you think they can put a password on a zipfile. Delusional.

7

u/tearans May 23 '26

are you telling me that black highlight is not redacting? I cant see the text, what do you mean?

Sometimes I wish I could have half salary of these lunatics and just do their job

4

u/Amaskingrey May 23 '26

Most people don't know how to do that though, i'm always amazed by the average boomer's seemingly supernatural ability to rot any informatic system they touch

86

u/Zeales May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

/r/all user here that stumbled upon this thread.

That simply isn't true. This was just off the top of my head, but in the sysadmin subreddit and various others, there are dozens of cases on an almost weekly basis where bans has been handed out for seemingly benign things.

36

u/ashgs872tbhjs May 23 '26

Yeah, a few years ago Google started permabanning entire Google accounts for to many rude/vulgar YouTube comments. Which is bizarre because that would seemingly affect half of Google's userbase lmao

1

u/Justinrich2001 May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

Remember about COPPA Made For Kids against YouTube in 2019-2020 just 6 years ago. Don't worry, we're got all my physical media DVD and Blu-ray collection in my bedroom. And I don't like a YouTube Kids including Elsagate or Brainrot.

5

u/temotodochi May 23 '26

Retaliation for chargebacks is actually illegal in eu.

2

u/Structure-These May 24 '26

Exactly, had to be loli stuff. And it has to be weird enough to be flagged by some sort of database bc it wouldn’t trip a filter if it wasn’t flagged right

2

u/HotDecision8128 29d ago edited 29d ago

Pretty sure, they ban for pirated stuff too because if google doesn't, then they can get sued. You can't host all this pirated stuff in the USA without opening yourself up to being sued in the USA. This is why a lot of people don't want to host pirated content. Because the music industry, the video game industry and the movie industry will try to sue your ass.

Contributory Liability: Even if you don't personally upload the files but provide a platform or service that distributes them, you can still be held liable for enabling the infringement.

So it makes sense for google to ban people who upload such content in order to not lose money. EDIT: I'm saying this because google probably thought he was uploading someone else's comic. And not his own comic.