Numbers seem to be violating Google Drive’s terms of service right now
Google Driveis one of the most popular cloud storage platforms in the world — most people with a Google account have probably used it at some point. But just like many other Google services, it’s sometimessubject to hilarious bugs. Today, we’re finding out about the company’s absolute hatred of certain numbers, manifesting itself in Drive’s automatic file moderation tool.
As reported by Dr. Emily Dolson on Twitter, uploading a text file on your Google account containing a single line with the number “1” will cause it to get automatically flagged and deleted for a violation of Drive’s terms of service.Testing by another Twitter user, Chris Jefferson,has shown that the same will happen on text files containing the numbers 173, 285, 304, 500, and 833, while a handful of others will get flagged but not deleted.
Why would these numbers be against Google’s terms of service? As funny as this seems, it appears to be an issue with how Drive scans for copyrighted content stored in the platform. The takedown notifications themselves clarify that the files taken down are violating Drive’s Copyright Infringement policy, while if you seek to access a file post-takedown, the website will tell you that it was taken down for “legal reasons” and the decision cannot be appealed.
Or maybe someone randomly trademarked a bunch of tiny files storing random numbers. We may never know. What we do know is that an automatic legal takedown tool is out here removing random text files with numbersinstead of doing its actual job.
Before you strive to upload your favorite number to Drive, be mindful that doing so might actually get you in more serious trouble, as there’s a possibility Google could go ahead and ban your account for repeated violations of its terms of service. Getting yourself banned for uploading random numbers is perhaps the lamest reason for a ban imaginable — Google needs to sort this out.
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