Do file hosting services check user data manually by human?

Question

I wonder if file hosting services like Dropbox, MediaFire, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. manually check user data for piracy or copyright infringement. Although their terms of service always say that they respect user privacy, I heard that many user accounts have been suspended because of storing copyrighted contents, so I doubt that they DO. I know they use hash to check for known copyrighted contents instead of doing that 100% manually.

Encrypting data before uploading to file hosting services is a solution to avoid data being checked (both automatic and manual). Now I think of a case: After encrypting a file, then I name that file as "Office-2013-with-crack-fully-working.rar." The file name obviously shows that its content might be a pirated software. Although file hosting services can't open it because it is encrypted, will they notice that file or try to do something?

Answer 1

Yes and no.

There are examples where such companies analyzed content stored by particular user, where it was a part of eg. criminal investigation. So, yes.

However such companies host amount of user data, that manual analysis of everything would by physically impossible, or at least unscalable and horribly expensive.

So, if any company would try to implement any anti-piracy mechanism, it would surely be fully automatic, where human analysis would take place only in later phase, for files automatically marked as suspected or something like that.

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On the other hand, if we are talking specifically about piracy indicators, then there already exist several more or less intelligent analyzers, that will detect possible piracy attempts even by more subtle things than strings like "crack" in the file name.

Many aspects can be taken into consideration: file name, size, date of upload (correlation to eg. movie premieres), upload IP, relation of uploader account with other accounts etc.

If you want to know more about this matter, google for Hotfile.com closure.