Romance author gets locked out of Google Docs for "inappropriate" content

Glad they fixed it. Still, like others have mentioned, it's a pain that there's never any recourse if you get caught by the filter unintentionally.

The only possible course of action (which upends may a business plans/models) is to not host the data in the first place; not even encrypted.

Offer software that stores stuff where users choose to (local drive, NAS, private server, s3 bucket/backblaze/etc although that's getting close to "hosting data")... How computing used to be - and should hopefully one day become, again... Assuming we veer off this dystopian timeline.

We don't need to "appreciate it" any more than we need to appreciate how hard it is to get gasoline to the pump, I appreciate that by buying the gas, I appreciate Google's service by buying Workspace (or if you use Docs for free, which you probably shouldn't, granting them a license to use and resell some of your data).

Now specifically the problem with Google is that they don't want to do all the work involved in their line of business. They invest very little time in doing effective content moderation and support with humans and that's why you get ridiculous events like this one. Their model, and this is the key thing to understand, is to be large enough that they can cut costs and deliver worse service but you stay with them anyway because switching is hard and you don't have a lot of alternatives.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of monopoly-style market power abuse, and it's essentially illegal, so another way of putting this is Google's business strategy is to be large enough that they can violate the law without consequences.

They are a mafia.

These types of people are always saying "data is the new oil," well that means Google is the new Standard Oil. It needs to be broken up otherwise it will continue to violate the law willfully at scale.

> And, at a large scale, false positive rates and false negative rates are usually in a trade-off, even when people supposedly agree on what is supposed to happen. (Which they also don't actually agree on.) That's especially true when companies are using software and statistics to help them make judgments, or when they're not spending billions of dollars to have decisions made by domain experts, at leisure, with rights of appeal.

There is a course of action that leads to far better results; human review. But that cuts into the $billions of quarterly profits, so we don't want that.

The idea that it's unaffordable to these companies is a complete fabrication. It should be forced upon them. If that halves their profit, so be it, it just means their margins have been too high due to offloading negative externalities unto society.

Is weird to think outrage is normal ?

There's no pleasing of every single human on earth, and any company with a large enough audience needs to balance their position and have priorities. Once they made a choice, it's natural they get the scrutiny for the consequences, and if they're not happy with the tradeoff they're free to adjust and piss off another group of people.

If the goal is to give them a pass because choices are hard, I'd say no. They should deal with the outrage.

They won't get outraged, they'll just not use it if they feel unsafe. That means less ad money, which is death for a monopolistic ad company, that's all. No outrage required.

Anyway Google could actually lock her out if it wants to. That's why using cloud storage is a bad idea. If you're using it, at least make sure that you've got a local copy so that things like this won't happen.

Sometimes people forget that part of security is availability.

Actually, more nuance: the thing about computing with someone else computer is: that someone else's compliance with various regulations decides what you can do or say with their resources. Worse than it being Google idiocy is that it's something they may actually have to do, as advised by their lawyers.