Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content
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Local hard drive + a cloud provider should give you like 99.999999% reliability
This has been my general strategy for personal data. I have also been trying to figure out if there was a reasonable way to get long-term very-cold storage (e.g. backups of family pictures). Something that would last decades just sitting in a fire-box somewhere (reasonable temps, no moisture). Been considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC, but interested to know if anyone has other ideas...
Maybe a second cloud provider would also be good. I'm going to think about this.
They were only ever "the smart thing" because they took some hassle away at the point of creating the backup.
If they're actually a backup they can be a good idea. If it's a single source, then yeah, it's asking for trouble. I even backup my GitHub stuff locally because who knows what could happen.
If it's a true backup, it should be encrypted in my opinion, especially on the cloud. Then it doesn't matter since they can't see it.
Should I go into detail?
Love your profile text, by the way.
EDIT: one quick example is that I’ve lost more data by forgetting passwords than I care to admit. They’ve all been from an age where I thought it was a good idea to encrypt my secret documents, lest prying eyes get to them. Turns out the secrets would’ve been interesting to me, but are no longer accessible. I suspect this isn’t uncommon.
Many cloud storage services try to understand and then "clean up" file types they understand. If you don't believe me, upload and then download a TB or so of images, documents, music, videos, etc. Then, compare the checksums of the original and restored copies.
On top of that, there are services like Amazon Cloud Drive that have content-type restrictions.
The only reasonable litmus test I've seen in this space is "there is a cryptographic proof that some middle manager didn't screw up my backup".
Unfortunately, that means you need to manage the encryption keys somehow. Cloud storage kind of sucks.
This is a you problem. 100 percent PEBKAC.
I've been encrypting every backup, local and cloud, and plenty of other things, for probably 30 years. I've done my share of restores, and have never lost the only key to anything I later wanted back. That's true even though I have forgotten a few passwords, because I had failsafes for that situation.
This requires memorizing only three or four long passwords, which change very rarely, plus a little bit of discipline and occasionally some maintenance of your archives.
On the other hand, putting something somewhere, like some cloud service, without seeing all the implications, is a mistake that's easy to make and hard to clean up. Storing stuff in the cloud in the clear en masse is an insane thing to make into a normal part of your routine.
Do you think the average erotic fiction writer is keeping abreast (lol) of cloud data access + integrity news?
And yet people never learn. Every couple of months you see someone begging for help on HN because Paypal, Stripe, Google and so on cut their access
At most they should be able to put it in RO mode to let you take it out.
Failing to proactively ban a tiny obscure account posting illegal or extremely unpopular content just sets you up for political attacks either in the form of hostile new laws or of activist groups contacting your advertisers to convince them to stop doing business with you. Outlier users are definitely potential liabilities.
It’s not a backup when it’s the primary (and only!) copy.
The average user isn't aware of this. This kind of stories usually do not emerge in mainstream, or user-exclusive spaces.
My family use a mix of Office 365, Exchange Online and Google Workspace for email, documents, etc. Add to this the required Microsoft Account for Windows logins and OneDrive.
I use a Synology NAS and they have packages to backup all these kinds of accounts, including versioning.
Even if an account is closed their files and emails live in our NAS.
If someone's life depends on anything digital, backup is a minor inconvenience or cost.
> I find out at midnight tomorrow if I lose my docs all together. I've transferred them to word and backed up onto my hard drive.
Further along ...
> ... As of today, I'm unable to share my docs with my alpha and Beta readers. After reading the policies the only rule my docs "violate" is that they contain ̶s̶e̶x̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ explicit content. I've since backed everything up to my computer and filled an appeal. ...
Further along ...
> As of right now, I don't know. I cannot access any of mine to check at the moment. Thankfully an alpha reader of mine saw it happening and I downloaded everything to my laptop before I submitted an appeal. After processing the appeal, a pop up said my account was frozen pending review. My assumption is after the review I'll either get everything back or lose it, but I don't know for sure.
> Sexually Explicit Material
> Do not distribute content that contains sexually explicit material, such as nudity, graphic sex acts, and pornographic material. This includes driving traffic to commercial pornography sites. We allow nudity for educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic purposes.
There's a third outcome: the appeal is never finalized, all you get is "your account is suspended while under review" and it leaves you with absolutely no recourse.
Maybe if you know someone at the company internally, or have a way to effectively threaten someone with decision-making power there -- otherwise, it's permanent limbo.
You see it especially in TikTok videos. When people aren’t straight up censoring themselves with bleeps, dead audio, or cuts, they use euphemisms instead: kill -> unalive, rape -> grape, sex -> seggs.
Even more concerning is that what is considered in need of censoring is expanding. I saw a video where the creator censored “white” when referring to Caucasians.
Two creators I follow had to re-upload censored versions of their videos after the youtube audio filter decided that "dead" was too spicy.
Not to drag Orwell out of his grave for a commiseratory drink, but this is double ungood.
Basically everyone wears a combination bracelet and choker that works as a futuristic smartphone, but doubles as a "sexually explicit language" censorship device - say the wrong word and you're arrested. Offhand, substitutions I remember from that series include "hose" in place of "penis" and "docking" in place of "sex".
It's mostly a comedy but gets pretty NSFW. Anime has both a censored and uncensored version.
It’s annoying right now that we have a doubled dictionary to signal intention, but it is also concerning looking forward… Because at some point the social standard could expect technology to target the concept instead of the word to prove a good faith attempt to avoid interaction with non neutral ideas.
It does look like the author just lost access to docs they shared with others, not their entire account. Author is currently appealing.
We have seen this kind of thing in the past. Drive has to be careful, as people will use private drive links and doc links (could have embedded images) to share explicit material that may be illegal. From my understanding, Google will start running some kind of automation against things when they are shared with other people if they might contain things that could be illegal. I have no idea what the heuristics are, or how often they get it wrong. But they are kind of between a rock and a hard place.
Googler, opinions are my own.
I would have far less of an issue with this if certain docs were marked unsharable, or even if her entire account could no longer share, but losing access to previous work written before the policy change feels like a big misstep to me.
Here’s what she said:
> “As of right now, I don't know. I cannot access any of mine to check at the moment Thankfully an alpha reader of mine saw it happening and I downloaded everything to my laptop before I submitted an appeal. Atter processing the appeal, a pop up said my account was frozen pending review. My assumption is after the review I'll either get everything back or lose it, but I don't know for sure.”
Google presuming guilt until proven innocent. An appeal locking the account in retaliation is absolutely disgusting.
please read the post before asking questions in bad faith
Some states may further restrict this and go after the distributor or publisher ( https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/3/BillText/er/PDF )
(e) "Material harmful to minors" means any material that:
1. The average person applying contemporary community
standards would find, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient
interest;
2. Depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way,
sexual conduct as specifically defined in s. 847.001(19); and
...
Google is also a multi-national company and would need to comply with laws in other countries too. If the individuals are represented as being minors (again, changes with jurisdictions) this gets into further complications in many places.
That share links are neither checked for age nor jurisdiction, google would be liable for knowingly distributing sexually explicit material without proper checks in place to limit consumption by minors or in jurisdictions where such content is restricted.
Why is this particular example is being singled out? Calling current conflict in Ukraine "war" or "invasion" is also illegal in one particular jurisdiction. Would Google also ban me for distributing draft of a book about it via Drive? How about a fantasy novel about adventures on Winnie-the-Pooh in China?
> That share links are neither checked for age nor jurisdiction, google would be liable for knowingly distributing sexually explicit material without proper checks in place to limit consumption by minors or in jurisdictions where such content is restricted.
As far as I understood the draft was shared with particular group of people. It is not like author uploaded porn video on youtube and made it public.
Google says you may not use its services to distribute sexually explicit content. This is a very common and reasonable policy. The authors violated that rule, and while none of them are being straightforward about exactly what happened what seems to be the case is the violating content has been removed/locked.
“As of right now, I don't know. I cannot access any of mine to check at the moment Thankfully an alpha reader of mine saw it happening and I downloaded everything to my laptop before I submitted an appeal. Atter processing the appeal, a pop up said my account was frozen pending review. My assumption is after the review I'll either get everything back or lose it, but I don't know for sure.“
> ... I cannot access any of mine to check at the moment ...
"at the moment" makes it sound like they were not on a computer, or out to eat or something where they couldn't easily check?
> ...I downloaded everything to my laptop before I submitted an appeal...
Makes it sound like they still have access to their account and were able to access the content in order to download a copy?
However, the point about downloading to her laptop is consistent with her story.
Here's what we definitively know:
1. First, something about her ability to share her docs was disabled, but in a way that still left them accessible to her;
2. She then submitted an appeal;
3. Upon submitting the appeal, her account was summarily frozen pending review, and her docs were no longer accessible to her.
It's their servers, they can do with them what they want.
> Do not distribute content that contains sexually explicit material, such as nudity, graphic sex acts, and pornographic material. This includes driving traffic to commercial pornography sites. We allow nudity for educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic purposes.
This squares with what happened to the authors here, who were only subject to enforcement actions when they shared the content via Google Docs.
But yes I think the basic idea of being unable to "trust" a free service which has no contractual obligations to you as a user is a given under any circumstances.
It's not true that you cannot share sexual material.
What is true is that if you share sexual material, your whole account might be locked or disabled. That's a big difference.
We're following a bread crumb trail of discord screenshots and instagram posts, no one is being straightforward about what is going on.
Google of course is a black box about enforcement actions on the foundation that transparency benefits spammers and doesn't help their bottom line, which is likely also true.
> This is a very common and reasonable policy.
Common? Maybe. Reasonable? Debatable. At least the response isn't proportionate. Not even remotely. Locking people out of their digital lives like that is not okay.
> none of them are being straightforward about exactly what happened
That's some cheap victim blaming. It's hard to see this type of vague unfalsifiable claims as being made in good faith. Especially considering that you haven't even bothered to read the actual claims of the victim that you accuse of being unforthcoming.
If you do not want to host your own instance, there are many great providers who will host one for you at a low cost.
Despite that, nextcloud/owncloud do what I want/need and I'm not sure if Syncthing does. So I keep stubbornly re-trying and just spin up a new instance when the old one dies.
I just spun up a new instance, I'll see if keeping it simple works for me. It's also on a VM now so I can take a snapshot and roll back to that if it breaks rather than relying on the faulty backup steps.
I have a lot of files, the database is not able to handle them correctly, even the cleaning commands take hours and do not work.. I regularly lose files in the database and need to re-upload them from the file in the server..
The app on Android has a lot of issues synchronizing my files, too many too often I guess.
I'm hoping to see a good alternative to nextcloud one day.
Having terms & conditions and blocking users that violate them is easier than dealing with the legal problems that may cause them.
Restricting access entirely is another way, like what US based websites do for EU based visitors, or what Pornhub does for Florida.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9098875 ("Google bans 'explicit' adult content from Blogger blogs", 2015)
- "Until today, Google's Blogger platform previously allowed "images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity," and stated that "Censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18590944 ("Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th", 2018; 464 comments)
The only "banned books" lists apply to school libraries/librarians.
I cannot possibly see what the justification would be for such a law. It's just words. It is no different than saying 'fuck' in front of a minor. It is clearly protected speech.
Of course in this particular case, it might be worse (because she lost her entire writing if without backup), but it's not the same as losing an account.
Anyway, it won't surprise me if she did also lose the account. In my experience, any shared documents or files (for Google Drive) are always very strictly moderated.
> one romance author explain that all her work was suspended by Google [...] She has no access to these files or her other works
That would seem like an account suspension, not just one document.
Edit: I guess it might also be a Google Drive/Docs specific suspension, rather than Google-wide.
The services are: Search, YouTube, Ad services, Google Play, Chrome, Google Shopping, Google Maps. I think Workspace (Mail, Docs, Drive, ...) are still a single service. If I remember correctly DMA or another recent law targeting gatekeepers also requires suspension to be followed with a way to appeal, proper justification and to only suspend "one service" (you don't loose your Mail if you get Youtube strikes).
[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/14202510?hl=en
> After processing the appeal, a popup said my account was frozen pending review
Sounds like Docs only prevented her from sharing her work. Until she filled for an appeal and her account was frozen, which is perhaps even stranger than suspending the account in the first place.
Do they do that? I've only ever heard of people being entirely locked out of their Google account, not specific services.
Not sure if that applies to suspensions though.
This has all been giving me anxiety since the time I had my Facebook account partially locked for over a month because I shared a picture of my son at the beach with no shirt on and their "AI" couldn't tell the difference between him and a girl because he has long hair and somehow concluded I was sharing explicit imagery. When I appealed, they extended my lock.
I worked @ Google for 10 years and still wouldn't trust them even though I could possibly find someone on the inside to ring some bells for me (questionable).
I backed up all my photos recently and am trying to figure out what to do about email.
By "figure out about email" I meant: where to move my email & whole life to. I'm thinking about registering a domain and taking up residence on another email hosting provider that lets me use my own domain.
I have started self-hosting my own photos on my own local NAS running Immich, with limited, controlled exposure via tailscale for when I'm out.
Funny thing was that I was then blocked from sending email to other gmail accounts. Turns out there are a couple simple switches in the hetzner web interface to enable some of the anti-spam measures these big tech receivers require.
- "Until today, Google's Blogger platform previously allowed "images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity," and stated that "Censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-bans-explicit-adult-con...
Everything surrounding this current zeitgeist is a recent cultural development. It was not always this way.
Back in the old school totalitarian days at least your writings were banned after they were written.
Even 10 years ago it was fine, the worst was about blocking keywords and making printers refuse to print images of money.
What a sad state of affairs for the civilisation that used to claim to be about freedom not too long ago, even when The Matrix was released the internet was just catching on with the promise of global freedom. It turned into personalised police.
You don't go straight to gulags most of the time. Most of the time the officer screams at you and takes your books and notes your name.
I also don't claim that this is the same as being sent to a gulag. This is just suppression of speech and mind control.
It's going to be so much fun when those in power lose power to those they hate. Then they will be introduced to the value of privacy and freedom of speech.
Here is Google's Program Policies document that their Terms of Service references:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505#zippy=%2Csexua...
The section about Sexually Explicit Material says:
> Do not distribute content that contains sexually explicit material, such as nudity, graphic sex acts, and pornographic material. This includes driving traffic to commercial pornography sites. We allow nudity for educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic purposes
I'm not defending Google's actions here. I'm just trying to interpret what led to this situation and what it means in a general sense.
() Recently I had a tab taking 644MB in Chromium (with no pix). After a ctrl-A, ctrl-C, and ctrl-V into notepad++, it was 52kB. That's about 10,000x...
While its database is useful, having no offline access is a big bummer. I don't use its AI features.
There's a public instance in France to try it out.
May be less of a big deal than is being suggested.
In the EU, Google now offer the option of separating your Google accounts from each other (Gmail, YouTube, etc), but someone warned me that it broke a lot of stuff for their friends, so it sounds a little like the usual malicious compliance with regulators we're used to.
Has anyone in the EU actually taken Google up on the offer and split up their Google/Alphabet accounts, and did you live to tell the story?
If a business profits from the personal data of its users, then it must back up their data for a duration (say 3 years after upload) and make that data available to them, even if it removes that data from public access due to terms of service (TOS) violations. Failure to do so would result in the business being dissolved, this clause would mainly be to protect stakeholders who go out of business and can't afford to maintain backups.
IANAL, but personally I might extend this to work something like personally identifiable information (PII) laws, where all of the user's data is considered private, but part or all of it may be shared publicly under the TOS which the user agrees to. The sharing would be at the discretion of the business, but the data would always belong to the user under copyright law until proven otherwise. The process of proving copyright ownership would first require full sharing of the data back to the user under court discovery laws.
The crux of the matter is that we have laws preventing the sharing of PII, but to my knowledge we don't have laws that protect access to a user's own information. Which seems doubly odd since companies profit from that data. Holding a user's data for ransom so that a business can make money from it seems akin to extortion, although I can't find the exact word for it.
Maybe the California Consumer Privacy Act of (CCPA) or similar laws could be extended to protect access to one's own information?
https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
https://www.neighborhoodindicators.org/sites/default/files/c... (pdf)
Apologies if what I'm suggesting already exists, in which case filing a lawsuit should be straightforward.
How we've regressed...
The problem with the right-think industrial complex is the heavy hand itself can be fooled easily and thus weaponized.
All things being equal, a company would most likely rather do nothing, as that's the cheapest option. The fact they aren't suggests a good motivating reason, and potential legal obligations trump personal moral opinions, which are hard to pin down anyway in a large multinational company.
For that matter, it's a "story" if you're exposed to judgements that affect your livelihood being made by automated crap and "reviewed" only by overworked near-slaves with almost no agency of their own.
The System(TM) doesn't know what a "beta-reader" is, and will react the same way to any random idiot's report. You're pretending that Google somehow responds to categories that neither Google's policies, Google's automated systems, nor probably many of Google's employees and agents, even know or care about.
Not that a "beta-reader" can't also be an idiot anyway.
> Also- if it's true, then...
You seem to be relying on the idea that Google might have been legally required to act against child pornography, so the "it" that would have to be true would be that the text was in fact child pornography.
As far as I can find, US child pornography laws don't mention or apply to pure text. Even if the unsubstantiated rumor you're spreading were true, then the unsubstantiated claim underlying it still could not possibly be true.
Any automated system or set of procedures that acts on the impossible supposition that a pure text document could even possibly be "child pornography" under those laws is automatically wrong.
... and the more credible claim is that the suspension was for "sexually explicit content", not "illegal child pornography", or the ever-popular "illegal obscenity", or illegal anything. That's a purely voluntary choice by Google. And even if that weren't true in this case, it is definitely true in many, many others.
> what else was google supposed to do here?
For the legal side, notice that text can never be "child pornography" in the US, and have it actually read for violations of any other law you're worried about by somebody who's actually qualified to evaluate its legal status and actually taking the time to do so.
For the "completely voluntarily chosen Google policy" side, which is the one that actually seems to be at stake here, hold off on doing anything until the material has been reviewed by a human who actually understands the issues, actually has authority to make meaningful decisions, and has the time and motivation to do so. Also, don't adopt pointless, silly policies.
Of course, commercial incentives assure that Google won't do any of that. And neither will any other provider of a similar cloud service.
So what every single user should do is get the hell off of all of those services. That would be a good idea even if policies weren't silly and if policy enforcement weren't hair-trigger, error-prone, capricious garbage, but it's especially important because this and other stories give every reason to believe that they are. On all of them.
That applies even if there is no commercially viable approach to handling these issues correctly. If a service can't be offered in any reasonable way, then that service should not be offered, or at least should not be used. "What are they supposed to do?" isn't a valid reason to use an unreliable, dangerous service.
... and the "story" is that many, many people are in fact using dangerous systems and should be moving off of them.
The simplest solution is to get two memory sticks and copy your data to them. One stays with you, the other is in a safe-deposit box. Rotate them regularly. It's really not that much effort.
That all said, WTF? Is this a new round of Puritanism come to visit? Why does Google care if adults are writing porn and sharing it?
Another option is to keep a memory stick is in your car or even at work, if you keep it encrypted.
I really don't understand why Google (and Western society) condones this sort of content while having a near zero-tolerance policy towards sex and love.
But I figured it out today: violent media re-directs our rage against the unsustainable culture and gives it an outlet. I'm not bashing on violent entertainment BTW: I like martial arts movies. But it does have a deeper function: to give us a sense of justice (good versus bad), and distract us away from the atrocities of consumerism (destruction of the planet which gave us life).
In short, violent media HELPS global capitalism and its destructiveness.
Then why is sex banned? Yes, we can look for the superficial reasons, like "oooh, parents don't want their kids to view this stuff". But that does not even apply here, especially because this was in a private Google docs. No, sex is treated harshly because it is primal and goes against civilization: it represents a more primal human connection, and human connection is antithetical to consumerism and the destruction of the environment.
Yes, we can also look for historical religious reasons, but there is a reason why such religious motivation survived, and other religious practices do NOT: any social practice which survives does so because it confers benefits to those who promote the practice. In this case, it confers benefits to the capitalists.
There really isnt anything more to it than that. People who want to censor sexual content are accurately assessing its disposition to arouse audiences; and accurately assessing violent film's disposition to induce catharsis.
I don't anticipate a murder.
I'm not saying it's some wild conspiracy, it's just the side effects of it being one of the core mechanisms of the society we live in - it resonates throughout.
Google really needs to stop preemptively locking accounts, though. They also need to warn ahead of time when someone is going to do something “bad”.
Ahh you think Discord has better policies?
You might want to rethink that.
I can very much see why people might’ve wanted some clean up.
I never encountered that in discord and I've been using it daily since early 2016.
Kind of forces your hand when journalists are digging up relatively obscure discord "servers" with edgy jokes and racism, or trying to get 'activist' discords they disagree with banned, or finding leaked military documents and framing them all as Discord's fault.
What’s possible though is a better handling of these scenarios. Don’t lock me out of my entire account, but stop the specific service/action breaking the ToS.