this was all well and good to me until I saw that Google shut down someones account for violation of TOS. Im already mulling over alternatives. This might be one of them.

He had a spreadsheet with passwords and usernames of his client (they were a lot of them).

Automation of Google's algorithm thought he was a hacker, they fixed it and he got his account back.

You should have read the whole story ;-)

Hang on, that sounds like a "See, there is no problem"

They only fixed it because he pulled teeth, tapped friends on staff at google and generally had to scream and shout.

In no way was the trek he had to go through to fix an automation problem a good example of "Don't worry about it"

Plus the fact that if it happens to you and you don't have the inside contacts you have no guarantee of getting it fixed.

I'm pretty sure many people have had this fixed without writing blog posts or having friends in google.

Just like many people have had their hotmail, paypal, facebook, itunes developer account etc. suspended for automatic detection of breach of TOS, and they've appealed and had their access returned.

This is not so much a google problem, as a reliance on 3rd parties to store your important documents, when everyone is warned (in tiny print) as to what may happen when they sign up.

I'm not excusing google's behavior, it's as bad as the rest of them, but they are playing by the rules we all agree to when we use their services.

So why is Google looking inside the uploaded files, if the files aren't public? If the guy was a "hacker", so freaking what?

No human is looking inside. Files are simply security scanned and assigned a probability of breaking the TOS.

> No human is looking inside

Where's the relevance? I asked why is Google, the entity, looking inside of private files?

> a probability of breaking the TOS

And my question was, if the files are private, why should their content be against the TOS?

Also, locking somebody out of their account because of a probability generated by a script, without manual confirmation by a human?

OMG. Some people can lose their jobs or money because of such flukes.

Seems like it would've been best handled by an advance warning system, i.e., at least a few days or a week's notice that you're violating their TOS and need to take action.

> And my question was, if the files are private, why should their content be against the TOS?

They probably don't want to allow the services to be used to aid illegal activity. Say what you want about how technology should be completely agnostic to matters of culture and legality, but that isn't at all the case.

I know. I meant the "higher-res" ones do.