Is this attitude prevalent in Google: pure trust in automated systems? Engineers should know better than any that software is not perfect and it's insane to have blind trust in it.
I can totally understand it in cases where the alleged offense is something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, where there is clear evidence and an audit trail saying "Here's what you uploaded, here's when you uploaded it, and here's the point where the rights holder registered it in ContentID, etc"
But this is a case where they thought my account was a bot. And I contacted the guy, as a very real person. At that point it's pretty much just sticking one's fingers in one's ears yelling "NANANANANA"
> I can totally understand it in cases where the alleged offense is something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, where there is clear evidence and an audit trail saying "Here's what you uploaded, here's when you uploaded it, and here's the point where the rights holder registered it in ContentID, etc"
Probably not the best example. There are countless reports of ContentID falsely claiming copyright violations. I personally had a gaming video muted for violating some copyright by some company I never heard of when the only thing playing were ingame sound effects (no music).
> something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube
Even that ain't clear cut. For example, if I upload a song to YouTube that's a remix of another song, and someone else uploads their own remix and registers it with ContentID, there's a risk that my remix will be flagged as "infringing" upon the other remix even though it is not a derivative of the other (and the other does not hold the copyright on the shared samples that triggered the ContentID detection).
I happen to know this because one of my own songs got erroneously flagged for this exact reason. Thankfully I was able to reach out to the company that submitted the ContentID registration on behalf of the "original" author, and they were able to rescind it (uploading remixes of songs to their ContentID management platform was in violation of their terms of service, so it was an open-and-shut case); else, I would've had to risk my own account getting flagged to death, since going through YouTube's appeals process would've been the only other option.
I've had staff at an unnamed $10B tech company in CA tell me that they 'trusted their system' and that 'the data never lies' after one of their staff members made a process mistake by failing to log some information a few minutes earlier at a support kiosk while we were getting our passes set up. The practical result of the failure, if unremedied, would have been that I was out $3,000 and a week of my life was burned.
What ensued was an hour long debacle with staff yelling at my girlfriend until she broke down crying. She was accused of stealing, defrauding them, ruining the event. It was not pretty to the point that I had to physically restrain a friend of mine from starting an altercation.
I repeatedly, politely, and calmly asked them to speak with the support staff member who handled our issue to see if there was an issue. The manager told me "he's an idiot. His opinion doesn't matter. The computer isn't lying."
Eventually, after a lengthy period of time in which the manager insinuated I was a laundry list of undesirable things, relented. He went to go speak with the staff member and in doing so saw that our passes were literally sitting on his desk in plain view. They hadn't been logged as out of circulation, so our new passes weren't working yet.
He returned, told us he fixed the issue, did not apologize and walked off. A day later the company suffered one of their biggest PR gaffes to date while the manager in question sat in the front row aghast.
Turns out nerds (and I use that term with the greatest affection) can be stupid too.
It's cheaper that way--for them. So what if a % are banned by mistake? It would cost $xxmillion a year to lower the false positives but that's a lot etc etc...
Having previously worked at Google and seen how they communicate internally - yes, many people absolutely do make that kind of money there without agreeing with everything they do, and while objecting to much of it. However that doesn't mean that the people making internal objections always get to overrule the people making the mistakes. Clearly not.
To be clear, at Google there are cases where internal objections do affect what Google does; but nowhere near always.
(Note I haven't worked at Google for almost 4 years now and am not speaking for anyone other than myself in this comment.)
But this is a case where they thought my account was a bot. And I contacted the guy, as a very real person. At that point it's pretty much just sticking one's fingers in one's ears yelling "NANANANANA"