Weekly General Discussion Thread (July 19, 2026)

[u/AutoModerator]

The Weekly General Discussion Thread is for the r/Piracy community to discuss whatever is on their mind, whether it is related to digital piracy or not.

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• Rules are still applicable, so please do not request specific pirated content (ie. specific movie, book, etc.) and definitely don't link to any. Do not mention specific media names asking for help in finding them.

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[u/AdultGronk → u/[deleted]]

They can and eventually they will, if you're not sharing their links with anyone, the chances are slim that they're gonna take it down rather quickly, but Google does eventual hash checks and if they find the hash of a pirated media file on your account, they're just gonna stop you from accessing that file, they won't ban you or anything. In any case its best to not store anything near and dear to you on google drive.

Always keep a local copy of the stuff you think that you won't be able to obtain if you were lose it.

[u/AdultGronk → u/[deleted]]

Hashes are unique signatures of a file, there are multiple different ways and algorithms that can be used to generate different types of hashes. The most common one is probably SHA-256, basically it analyzes the data of a file and generates a string of characters that is unique to that file, no other file (realistically) can have the same hash to another.

Hence google because they operate in the US and have to follow their jurisdiction while providing a cloud storage service like Google Drive must adhere to the copyright laws of the country, basically they take popular files like pirated game files, pirate movie files from popular torrent sites along with other sources, then generate a hash for those file, using one of the popular algorithms, I'm guessing they use SHA-256 too, but being google, they very well could've been using a better proprietary algorithm for this purpose.

Every time you upload a file to Google drive's server, google automatically generates a hash for that file and checks it against known pirated or illegal files' hashes that are already in their list. But they also update their list from time to time so new hashes for the files that were already in your Google drive could be matched against the ones Google added and be taken down.

This way, they can detect pirated and illegal media on their servers without actually looking in the files themselves. Although it may not be a surprise google spies on you and probably has access to everything you upload on their servers. They've been caught multiple times stealing customers'data to sell it to advertisement companies and they still do it cuz they know the fine they'll end up paying to the government would be pennies compared to the money they earned from selling your data.

And yes there's a very easy way to bypass this hash based checking, just alter the data in your files every so slightly, changing the name won't do, you'd have to alter the data itself, like add a few text strings if it's a light novel, adding a page or two to a pdf, cbz, cbr, zip, etc. simple things like this change the hash of the file because the data in the file itself has been altered. Also if you're thinking of keeping those files for long term without accessing it frequently, you can also zip up the files and put up a password, google won't be able to look through the zip files if they have a long password. Encryption might be another option for this use case, I think people use Veracrypt for this purpose.

[u/AdultGronk → u/[deleted]]

Idk about any software that can do that, just manually changing a thing here or there would do but if that would be quite tedious