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It’s a list of candidate names and website addresses so they could be archived.

I keep material in Google drive because my graduate school uses Google - so I use it to be able to share material with my professor.

I made the file in October 2021. It was removed in July 2022.

Is this something researchers using Google Drive should be aware of? I guess so!

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Weirdly, my sheets containing many more candidate websites and info have not been removed. I’m curious what triggered this.

I’m in grad school for library stuff and have been mainly fooling around with digital archiving so I’m curious about this - particularly because I know so many people in this space use the built in scraping tools in Google sheets (importxml)

I have put in a request for review and will update when/if I learn more. But I’m also now going to ensure everything is also in a csv on my hard drive and back it up somewhere else as well.

I guess if you use a cloud-based product to store research you should also back it up. (this is also digital archiving!)

(Also fascinating that the content was flagged. Could this be an issue for IRBs?)

I would make a terrible phisher btw.

I think this has been hacker newsed. Welcome. I mainly tweet about bagels.

Update: Google emailed me! Stay tuned.

I emailed Google. It looks like I can now access the file, but it still says it's restricted. I'm pasting what I see so you can see it too. (Many of these websites have gone offline - that's what I'm tracking as part of my master's work.)

I have....dozens of these files because that's how I was keeping track of sites during my coursework with

@NoahLenstra

(who can vouch that I'm definitely not a phisher!) I'm curious a) why this one in particular was flagged b) if this could affect other researchers' IRBs

c) if researchers who keep work on Google Drive (as many of us do, because our universities use Google) should be made more widely aware of this (probably!)

I really appreciate the

@googledocs

team reaching out so quickly. I'll pass along what I learn (so we can all figure this out together!)

I'm a part-time weird old graduate student, but I love solving mysteries!

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Also cc'ing

because this likely affects his ongoing work (and I owe you an email!)

Ok! Update time from Google: 1) The sheets was available for anyone to view (which I think I had so my collaborators could see it) 2) One of the URLs in the sheets had expired and become a phishing URL 3) If I delete that URL and request a review, the banner will go away

This is interesting for anyone who tracks URLs as part of their research or job.

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Hey, care to enlighten us about this? Shady stuff.

Josh Conway

@CrankyLinuxUser

How quaint. You think they care....

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Some brain-dead algorithm that's searching for the names of candidates who may be sending users fundraising emails? But why would even these be "flagged" by Google as "phishing"? Shouldn't it be up to end users to decide which fundraising emails they want to receive?

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Interesting (and a little worrisome), thanks for sharing! Some Qs if you feel comfortable answering: - How many rows is that Boston election sheet - Is that sheet programmatically accessed, e.g. such as a Python script that regularly downloads it as a CSV

I don’t remember. No, though I may have used something like importxml or importhtml to scrape a site

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Stab in the dark: Are all the candidate websites still running, or has a domain's registration lapse and resuscitated by some malware-pushing outfit?

DJ Is In A Constant State of Rage

Oh they’re definitely not all still running. Part of what I’m looking at is how quickly they go offline once an election is over.

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Hi Melody, I've passed this onto the product team to investigate further. We will be in touch. Thanks.

Cool! I’m melodykramer@gmail.com and m_kramer@uncg.edu

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My best guess, if you shared it, one of the viewers hit report button.

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Google Drive recently deleted/ disappeared/removed several shared folders that an organization I’m part of has used for nearly a decade. Budgets, meeting minutes, membership rosters, educational programs, and more - poof, gone. We’ve recovered some, but not all.

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Just call their support to sort out what happened and get it fixed. Oh wait. Welcome to our glorious future of “internet scale” companies which make money by taking advantage of the information YOU GIVE THEM don’t have care, and can’t be made to.

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I wouldn't trust Google drive to store anything you want to keep for any amount of time. It is pretty much the opposite of a storage drive, more like an anti-drive where they come by and throw away things they aren't in favor of for whatever reason.

Eftychios Theodorakis

@EftychiosT