Google might nuke your account if you got questionable stuff on google drive
So a youtuber I've been watching for a decade recently got harassed by some scammer. He managed to anonymously join the scammer's whatsapp group and downloaded the chat logs.
He then uploaded those chat logs to his google drive where google, without his knowledge or permission, checked the log's contents.
Turns out that scammer and his buddies aren't very nice people. They posted a lot of hate speech in that whatsapp group, and google's hate speech filters picked up on that. Google then send the youtuber a message that his entire google account, youtube account included, will be deleted for hate speech in thirty days, despite the fact that he never publicly posted those logs anywhere and had them just sitting in his google drive.
So, apparently having something that contains hate speech in your google drive is now grounds to get your entire account nuked, regardless of context. Must be great if you're a reporter, lawyer or writer or something. Oh, and turns out google also looks through all the files you store in their cloud... which really shouldn't come as a surprise.
Anyway, for now it's "only" stuff like hate speech, but I wouldn't be surprised if google extends this policy to adult content in the future as well. So if you write smut or whatever with google docs or got some other explicit stuff in your google drive, it might be high time to get your stuff off of there and start looking for alternatives.
Time of writing: June 11th 2025
