Kalakshar US

Google Drive users have recently been reporting that files and folders have gone missing, with some saying that months worth of data has disappeared from their accounts. Now, Google has acknowledged the issue, saying that it appears to be caused by the Drive for Desktop app, 9to5Google has reported.

The issue is pretty alarming, obviously. One user on Google’s support forums said that an expense spreadsheet they regularly updated has lost all data from nearly the last five years, with the version history showing the latest version as January 2019. “I’m really mad as this had all the important data which I do not have any local copy for. I need this data retrieved at any cost.” Another poster said the drive reverted to May 2023, with all subsequent data disappearing, and others report similar issues.

In a post from yesterday, Google said that “we’re investigating reports of an issue impacting a limited subset of Drive for desktop users and will follow up with more updates.” It noted the problem affects Drive for desktop v84.0.0.0 – 84.0.4.09. It advised users not to click “disconnect account” within Drive for desktop, and to not delete or move a specific app folder called DriveFS as detailed here. It even recommends making a copy of the app data folder if you have room on your hard drive. 

Google offers several ways to recover (or at least check) deleted files. That includes checking the trash, which is now automatically emptied after 30 days. It’s also a good idea to check the activity panel, which shows any files deleted or moved along with the relevant date. For this latest issue, however, the activity panel doesn’t appear to show that the files have gone missing, according to Google’s support forum users. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-is-investigating-a-drive-issue-that-causes-files-to-go-missing-092028653.html?src=rss 

Following X’s alleged ad controversy involving antisemitic content, it is now Meta’s turn to be put under the spotlight for its content algorithm. According to an experiment conducted by The Wall Street Journal, Instagram’s Reels video service would serve “risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos” to test accounts that exclusively followed teen and preteen influencers — namely young gymnasts and cheerleaders. These sort of ads were supposed to be forbidden on Meta’s platforms.

To make matters worse, such salacious content was also mixed in with ads representing notable US brands like Disney, Walmart, Pizza Hut, Bumble, Match Group and even The Wall Street Journal itself. The report added that the Canadian Centre for Child Protection achieved similar results with its own tests separately.

While Walmart and Pizza Hut apparently declined to comment, Bumble, Match Group, Hims (retailer of erectile-dysfunction drugs) and Disney have since either pulled their ads from Meta or pressed the firm to address this issue. Given the earlier controversy on X, advertisers are obviously even more sensitive about the type of content shown next to their ads — especially for Disney which was affected by both X and now Instagram. 

In response, Meta told its clients that it was investigating, and that it “would pay for brand-safety auditing services to determine how often a company’s ads appear beside content it considers unacceptable.” However, the firm stopped short at providing a timetable nor detail on future prevention.

While one could say that such tests don’t necessarily represent real user experience (as tech companies tend to argue with), Instagram’s tendency to aggregate child sexualization content was a known problem internally — even before the launch of Reels, according to current and former Meta employees interviewed by the WSJ.

The same group of people suggested that an effective solution would require revamping the algorithms responsible for pushing related content to users. That said, internal documents seen by the WSJ suggested that Meta made it difficult for its safety team to apply such drastic changes, as traffic performance is apparently more important for the social media giant.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-reportedly-served-up-child-sexualizing-reels-to-followers-of-teen-influencers-053251960.html?src=rss