"I keep all my work on Google/Apple/Dropbox/Office" is really the new version of "I kept all my work on my hard drive and didn't back it up". All of these companies have shown repeatedly that they will cut off your access with no notice for any or no reason and with no recourse. Cloud backups used to be a smart thing to do. Now they are a liability.
"Cloud backups used to be a smart thing to do. Now they are a liability."
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.
Even if they are just a backup, all these companies scan your data for offensive material and report it to the authorities if their algorithm deems it fit. There have been plenty of cases of parents being investigated by the police just for taking photos of their kids on their phone.
It depends on how you want to store it. You could store it encrypted. Any true backup worthy of the title should, in my opinion, be encrypted. Otherwise it's just a copy.
Surely you jest, you joker you. The number of problems with that idea far outweigh the benefits.
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.
Even if you don't care about all your data being published in the future, and even if you don't care about getting your data deleted (or door knocked in) because of a random content scanner false positive, you still need to encrypt them.
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.
> I’ve lost more data by forgetting passwords than I care to admit
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.
Even if the files are actually a backup it's not a good idea if it also gets your email/etc accounts nuked. Megacorps with many online properties are landmine fields because you can get banned from a dozen services for a BS 'violation' on just one of them.
That idea is true for the rest of those services too. We could just stop using all the services if they are all run by the same Corp and subjected to the same BS rules. If your Google drive got banned for explicit material, it's only a matter of time your Gmail would trigger it because you sent drafts between you and your publisher instead of using Drive.
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.
Do you just push to another remote that you host locally, or are you capturing other github items too? Like, for example, Issues and PR reviews/discussions?
I'm just capturing the code at a specific working version on external media. I'm not concerned about history and discussions since they are all small solo projects with low user bases (I suck).
Yeah, I don't want all the history and stuff. I also don't want any sort of upstream connection from it. I just want the code. A snapshot of a working repo with no connections or dependencies to anything.
They can still be smart for off-site backups in case of local catastrophic issues (like your house burning down). But they are just part of the solution and shouldn't be a single point of failure.
Why bandaid fix it at the government level, when you can solve it right now by yourself: stop creating single points of failure. Store backups in multiple locations.
Worse, these cloud storage providers actively mislead users into thinking their files are safe and durable when stored on their services. Google Drive and Apple iCloud advertise themselves as a safe place to keep all of your data, and will nag users of Android and iOS devices respectively into enabling their storage services, setting them as the default storage provider for documents, and enabling automatic deletion of local copies to "free up space". They want users to rely on them for all of their photo/note/mosc documents storage and synchronization needs, it's good for their business if they do. But they also don't want to store anything questionable and be held legally responsible, so they automatically scan all of the "safely stored" documents, and purge users who get flagged. So their business incentives align such that they
- coerce as many users as possible to become maximally dependent on their services
- retract those service that users depend on for any slight or potential liability
and if business incentives say you do something, you do it, and no amount of techies informing the masses is going to outperform Google or Apple's messaging. So how do we fix this? We change the incentives; if you delete someone's data you should be punished. They trusted you with it, they may have even paid you to store it. If you break that agreement then you deserve some heavy fines at a minimum.
I imagine the overwhelming majority of them barely even know how to use a computer and just use Google Docs because it's convenient and they can access it on their iPad or their laptop. Most people, even most tech-savvy types, value convenience more than privacy, security and even reliability of the service. People are also in denial and believe that arbitrary account suspensions or other arbitrary moderation decisions can't happen to them.
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...
I actually use three local hard drives in rotation plus a cloud provider to hopefully cover the "building catches on fire and I don't even have time grab a drive" scenario.
Maybe a second cloud provider would also be good. I'm going to think about this.
Key point is that the cloud provider version should not be your "main" version, it should be used for backup only. If it's not on your physical computer that you have direct access to, it's not -your- data anymore.
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 don't necessarily disagree, but I feel it's important to call out every time I see it in a tech community: this is a reasonable sentiment for the less than 1% of cloud storage users who are sufficiently tech savvy. For the other 99% who have little more than marketing material to direct their understanding, the cloud is Fort Knox for your data.
That take has a "victim blaming" vibe going on. Those texts were not lost, they were deleted. Yes, backups are a good idea, but we shouldn't just accept that kind of behaviour.
I suspect that large tech companies are going to be increasingly relying on AI moderation to identify "unusual" behavior and ban accounts for it.
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.
> 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.
> My assumption is after the review I'll either get everything back or lose it
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.
> 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.
Something related I’ve been wondering about is the change in language catalyzed by social media companies and their morality / fear of advertisers.
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.
Part of it is feared censoring / demotion in the algorithms; part is hypersensitivity / hyperconsiderate, because some people have indicated they are triggered by certain words, and I'm guessing another part is maximising reach. That is, if you use explicit language, your content may be marked as 12, 16, 18+ content, and half your engagement may drop because people in comment sections seriously underestimate how much "engagement" a teenager with a phone and infinite time generates.
Yes, those are the the proximate causes. I'm worried about the effect these causes will induce going forward. With enough time, this expanded hypersensitivity will move out of TikTok and into wider culture permanently.
You see that on Youtube as well. Creators will also censor su*cide, both in audio and video, because Google / advertisers don't like sensitive content and the video will make a lot less money if Google thinks it's about mental illness or suicide.
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.
Popular words are easy sacrificial signals so that people can provide an example of social intent by avoidance if questioned.
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.
There's a lot of this to be found everywhere on the Internet. People have recently taken to spelling offensive and/or censored words backwards, and there's a lot of bigotry and racism on social media that gets through automated detection this way.
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.
Author’s last screenshot states that her whole account was frozen just after submitting the appeal and she no longer has access to her docs.
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.”
Meta does this too. My guess it appears as some signal to some "AI" somewhere that this is Legit Bad Stuff, and they then send it over to an underpaid overworked exploited moderator somewhere who doesn't care, and just takes it to the next level.
Explicit writing without some sort age verification may be in a gray area. The classic "smutty writing magazines" of old were still on the over 18 shelf in the magazine store.
(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
...
Media type is not defined - text may be interested to fall within that definition.
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.
> 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.
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.
Misleading title, none of the authors involved are claiming they're locked out of the accounts. The exact quote from the OP's mastadon is "An author lost access to her explicit writing when she shared it with alpha and beta readers."
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.
That’s not what the author wrote. A popup said her account was frozen. See the last screenshot.
“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 have no position here but reading this a few times (and not digging further for additional context) it's unclear of what the situation is here, at least to me.
> ... 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?
I understand the idea behind banning sexually explicit writing, but that basically means that large large percentage of literature cannot use Google services. Anyone writing a novel basically shouldn’t use docs in case they might someday want to include sex in their writing.
Google's policy doesn't say anything about using their services to create sexually explicit content, only using their services for distribution.
> 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.
Or, presumably, Office 365 (does Office still have a pure-offline mode?). What's an aspirant writer of Naughty Literature to do? Or, as you say, really any writer who might at some point add a sex scene, which is fairly common.
Distributing sexually explicit material is subject to many tricky laws around the world. It's illegal in some places, requires age restrictions in others. It's reasonable for any hosting provider to say they are not going to get involved in that legal quagmire.
It is also reasonable for any client to say they are not going to involve themselves with a platform that will freeze their account and cause them to lose data because some faulty heuristic triggered and the company is not even willing to manually review things (even though they sometimes falsely claim they do review things when they didn't).
That's reasonable, but a non-sequitur here surely. The author's account is not suspended, they have not lost data, and any heuristics were clearly correct in that they were publishing sexually explicit material.
For one example, Florida introduced a law enforcing age verifications for pornographic content; it's easier to prohibit using a platform to distribute said content, than to introduce a content rating and age verification system.
Things are very unclear. The author claims to have been able to download their own work prior to filing the appeal, so perhaps that's exactly what happened.
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.
The title is accurate. The linked Instagram post clearly states that the account was frozen.
> 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.
Good open source self-hostable alternatives exist! https://nextcloud.com/ (no affiliation, just a longtime happy user) is great for file sharing and even collaborative online document editing.
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.
My nextcloud instance killed itself during an update. I wrote a blog post about it and people regularly write to thank me, so it wasn't an isolated instance. Syncthing is much simpler, and practically bulletproof. It really just works.
I have never once had Nextcloud updates work properly. It doesn't matter if I update as soon as the new version is ready or if I wait long enough for my current version to go EoL, the updater breaks something critical and my instance is non-functional.
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.
Weird, I've been running and updating NextCloud since version 13, and I never had any problems as long as I didn't try to upgrade 2 release up at once and carefully applied the recommended database updates, etc.
Do you run many plugins, or do you keep it fairly stock? I'm beginning to wonder if that could be some of the issue, even though the upgrade guidelines include instructions on upgrading plugins. My setup has otherwise been pretty simple (single host for db and web server hidden behind a separate reverse proxy) and I follow the upgrade guidelines as closely as possible (which is usually exactly). Restoring from a backup doesn't work either because it thinks I'm trying to downgrade the version, which isn't supported.
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.
Yeah, Nextcloud is not the first thing I would reach for if all you want is "simple" and "bulletproof". I am not a pro-SRE, but I have managed, with the help of backups, the successfully run a Nextcloud instance for a small group of people for the past ~5+ years. It has not been without glitches, but the challenges have been no worse than any other service I host. The more features you have, the more things can go wrong...
I have so many problems with nextcloud! It kills itself from time to time, often during updates. Randomly problems with folder rights when everything was working before. It's slow and the code is php. The official documentation and forum are a mess.
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.
The companies are prudes because the countries they operate in, as well as the payment providers they use, have laws and regulations regarding age-rated content.
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.
Many years ago, I used to work for a company specialising in IoT devices. One of their projects was about teledildonics and required the purchase of some ... testing gear. At the time they had their book keeping on Google Drive and when the invoice for said purchases had passed through their emails, their entire workspace was suspended for a couple of days until they could clear it up.
Google operates in many countries and is subject to many laws. Even in the US websites need to check whether you're over 18 to view (or read?) pornography, and Google Docs does not appear to have an age check at 18. Do you think this is an important feature that Docs should be working on? I'm not sure I do personally.
I am not aware of any laws in the US about selling books that are only text (no pictures) to minors.
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.
Not sure where you're getting your information from: Google platformed hardcore porn up until 2015 [0]. Tumblr permitted it through 2018 [1], while Reddit and Twitter allow it today.
- "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."
They usually have them in order to not spook the advertisers who don't want to see their ad near anything remotely objectionable. Don't see why they care about somebody sharing a document from their Drive.
Yep, I wonder how many of these stories it's going to take for people to learn that if the data is not on your physical metal, inside of your physical property, it's not yours.
The post only says "An author lost access to her explicit writing", which sound to me that she cannot access that document anymore, not her account got suspended (I skimmed over comments and didn't see people said otherwise).
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.
> I've since backed everything up to my computer and filed an appeal
> 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.
I'm not sure if the author is in Europe but DMA lead to Google offering services separately[1].
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).
I'm not sure to be honest, but the other day I got a popup asking if Google Search could link their data about me with YouTube and some other Google services, so I'm assuming there is at least some isolation between the services.
How topical. My wife and I were having a freak out this morning about how vulnerable we are to having our lives choked out at Google's whims. They have no customer service, and delegate more and more to "AI" to manage these things.
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.
I don’t know if it will save me but I purchase a domain of my own, use an email address from that domain, and forward to Gmail. I could easily forward to any other service. When Google locks me out of my account I’ll see how resilient this idea is. Obviously I’ll lose the ability to search my decades of email, which will sting a little.
Yes I've done that recently, too. But it's really something that needs to be done periodically.
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.
I switched to hetzner hosted 'own domain' a few weeks ago, which includes webmail (I use thunderbird client). YouTube failed to delete, even though I'd deleted all content a couple years back, but deleting the complete google account worked! (and feels great!)
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.
For the curious, here's what Google's official corporate communications on this general topic were, back in 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."
Wow, the state of freedom of speech is probably worse than the soviets ATM, since during the soviet times the speech scanning tech was primitive and the thought control was rudimentary and blunt.
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 are unsure because you are making both a strawman argument and historical inaccuracy.
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.
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.
Notion is okay. a bit heavy mem-wise(). i don't know how much it costs.
() 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...
This looks as though the author shared the document with around 20 people, which combined with the nature of the content would have flagged the author for sharing explicit spam.
May be less of a big deal than is being suggested.
Or just that it got flagged for review, and upon review was found to be in violation of the terms of service perhaps? The ToS say you can't distribute sexually explicit material.
When YouTube Gaming was doing livestreaming, people who posted in stream chats also risked having their entire accounts flagged.
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 you're not self hosting in 2024, you're doing it wrong. With our internet connections being so fast and plethora of server daemons out there, there's really no excuse.
An unfortunately reasonable excuse is the ever-increasing complexity of the systems most people access. Trying to host something on my pocketable computer with cellular access ranges from nightmarish to impossible, for no good reason. And that's even on the Linux-based option (Android).
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.
This would work similarly to how a bank must be FDIC insured to lend out its customer deposits. Data is money in the information age and needs similar protections, especially with the rise of AI and profits generated from derivative works. A business which refuses to follow this law would be unaccredited, meaning that Google would be unaccredited in this case, so probably nobody should be using their services.
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?
Cases like this always make me think of the 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 copies of the data, 2 different media, and 1 off site. I sometimes feel like I'm paranoid when backup up my files and photos like this until I read stories like this. I don't know how people outside of IT would even think of making 3 copies.
truly the darkest side of these is the opportunity to exploit
if someone shares a document with the internet with read/write access, can I upload smut (or anything very naughty or illegal) onto their google doc from some anon connection/account? Can I get them banned thusly?
Can I log into their wifi and post threats on whatever renowned toxic boards and again, get a person in trouble?
The problem with the right-think industrial complex is the heavy hand itself can be fooled easily and thus weaponized.
Since this relates to Google Docs, is anyone aware of open source hostable replacements for Google Docs? Rich text editing, inline comments, maybe concurrent editing as features?
It's weird and paradoxical isn't it? I have no idea what this lady was writing, but smutty romance novels and horror novels with weird sex scenes have been sufficiently acceptable to "community standards" all over the US to have been available in grocery stores at least as early as the seventies. Not so frequently seen anymore, but that's a death-of-brick-and-mortar-and-print-media problem. You could leave one on your desk at work without a visit from HR (just don't leave it open to a spicy page or read aloud from it). But share similar material from your google drive? I don't know! I really don't.
This is my point. Are Google being "morality police" here, or are they just meeting some possible legal requirements (IANAL)?
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.
This is terrifying. I'm a writer, and all my work is backed up on Google. Some of it likely only exists there. I'm literally shaking my head here in incredulity. How could anyone at Google have thought that this was a good idea?
It's a "story" if any random idiot can make a random claim about your work and get you cut off.
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.
That wouldn't be a 'random idiot'; it would be the story's beta-reader, and someone the document is shared with. Also- if it's true, then... what else was google supposed to do here?
> That wouldn't be a 'random idiot'; it would be the story's beta-reader, and someone the document is shared with.
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.
Fuck yeaahhhh murrica ...we like all kinds of sick fucked up shit but nonono don't show my kid any titties on TV or lord behold text with sexually revealing vocabulary. Laughs in European ...
The cloud is "someone else's computer". You don't make the rules, they do. Keep your stuff on your own system, and maybe use the cloud for backup. Honestly, I don't even recommend that, unless you have actually read the T&C.
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?
> 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.
Another option is to keep a memory stick is in your car or even at work, if you keep it encrypted.
The other day, I saw a movie scene on YouTube where a guy is knife-fighting with another guy. There is a stab in the throat at the end, where all the life drains from his face. Blood is gushing and we see a human being kill another human being.
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.
Violence is channeled by western society as a righteous vengeance. Sex is channeled as the reproductive force of nuclear families. It's not that one is celebrated and the other oppressed. Violence against the innocent is always punished by a righteous warrior. And sex is not condemned. It is celebrated in the context of long term coupling to raise children. Promiscuity and non-reproductive sex is therefore seen as threat. An eligible target for the fury of the righteous. Non reproductive sex in western societies is only celebrated in the context of overpopulated urban centers.
Watching violent films doesn't make you violent. Watching sexual content does (occasionally) make you want to have sex.
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.
Violence is one of the key tools of the exploitative capitalist system. Society (as we have it set up) wouldn't function without a means of oppression, and so it is widely celebrated in popular culture.
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.
By "the non-woke parts of the world", you mean the parts with less advanced technology, less per-capita economic production by every measure, less personal security, less general education of the populace, and just generally less of every possible benefit of having "a civilization".
And by "always" you mean times with less of all those things.
Was Roman Empire obsessed with sexuality when it was its peak?
Was the western empire today obsessed with sexuality or more conservative when it was the superpower in the world?
Western people project their trauma with Catholicism to all cultures and traditions for some reason and they think they owe their development to abandoning norms and just having public orgies in SF streets.
When people think of west these days they think about pee and drug smelling dirty streets and collective madness of making all kinds of weird sexual acts public.
The superiority of West of now is pure narcissism. High skilled people now prefer working remotely if they have to work for a western company, instead of moving there permanently.
Visit China to see how civilization is built in 20 years.
Ironically, I think the users are partly to blame for that. They were definitely complaining about some of the stuff that was on discord and discord then stepped up their enforcement of everything.
It was less the users, and more hitpieces from censor-happy journalists.
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.
But that's just a question of which kind of discord servers you're in. That stuff is still going to happen, you just won't be invited to those servers.
I never encountered that in discord and I've been using it daily since early 2016.
Warning is not possible, have you seen the amount of spam the web has?
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.
