It’s no surprise that Google has detection mechanisms in its services to analyze every file we upload to the cloud. However, the case we are going to talk about today does not make any kind of sense. And it is that if we upload to Google Drive a text file that contains a ‘1’ or a ‘0’ inside, is detected by the platform as a copyright infringement.
What can be considered for us as a totally harmless file, Google Drive does not think the same about it. But nevertheless, the company is already aware of this failure, and soon you will have a solution for it.
If we upload the file to Drive, we get an email alerting us of ‘copyright infringement’
This was discovered by Dr. Emily Dolson, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Through a tweet, he alerted the company that one of your files containing a single line of text with the number ‘0’ was detected by Google Drive as copyright infringement. However, this is not an isolated case. And it is that from the Hacker News forum they have also assured that it is an error on the part of the Google service.
Uh, @googledrive, are you doing okay? This file literally contains a single line with the number “1”. pic.twitter.com/4tLhOzQY1T
— Dr. Emily Dolson (@emilyldolson) January 24, 2022
At the time of this writing, we can confirm that this happens if we choose to share the file publicly on Drive. Not only when we upload a text file with a ‘1’ inside it, but also with a ‘0’, or with many more numbers according tests conducted by Chris Jefferson, a researcher at St Andrews. When uploading the file, in a matter of just under an hour, we received an email from Google indicating that, indeed, our file contains a copyright infringement. In this way, the file remains inaccessible to everyone.
Following the tweet written by Dolson, the Google Drive team responded stating that they are already working on a solution for it. However, they have not provided details about the reason for this error.
Via | TorrentFreak