Google Drive users are astonished by an incident where the automated detection systems of Google Drive flagged a file containing just a digit “1”.
Dr. Emily Dolson, who is Assistant Professor at Michigan State University reported on Twitter that she saw some odd behavior while using Google Drive.
She uploaded a text file named ‘output04.txt’ onto Google Drive containing just a digit ‘1’. However, as per Google, the txt file violated the company’s Copyright Infringement Policy and so the file was flagged.
What’s makes the situation even worse is the warning sent to the professor ended with “A review cannot be requested for this restriction.”
Meanwhile, Dolson wondered whether the file path ‘CSE 830 Spring 2022/Testcases/Homework3/Q3/output’ for file ‘output04.txt’likely triggered the false alarm.
The file was part of a collection of TXT files containing output for a homework assignment.
Furthermore, another user shared screenshots of the Google Drive account stating that “The 1-byte files contain just ‘1’, the 2-byte file is ‘1\n’, and the 3-byte (not flagged yet) file has ‘1\r\n’.”
Now, it seems that the odd behavior isn’t just restricted to the files containing the digit ‘1’.
According to an experiment carried out by Dr. Chris Jefferson, Ph.D., an AI and mathematics researcher at the University of St Andrews, the files consisting of the digits 173, 174, 186, 266, 285, 302, 336, 451, 500, and 833 were also flagged by Google Drive for copyright violation.
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