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Romance author gets locked out of Google Docs for "inappropriate" content
- bitwize 2y agoSee, the thing about computing with someone else's computer is, that someone else ultimately decides what you can do or say with their resources... for good or ill.
- kazinator 2y agoBah, you crazy old man, shaking your fist at the cloud. :) 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.
- OutOfHere 2y agoThere is nothing illegal about an adult romance novel. There is no regulation that prohibits it. As usual, Google overstepped.
- justin_oaks 2y agoAnd as usual with Google, you have no recourse.
- 9991 2y agoNot true. I don’t use a single Google service. That’s my recourse.
- Nasrudith 2y agoA whole lot of what can get you reamed in court is perfectly legal but looks bad. Hell, auto-companies are afraid to even say the D-word, "dangerous" for fear of subpoenas. There is a reason why "First thing lets kill all the lawyers." is a line of classic literature.
- OutOfHere 2y agoIf it looks bad, they just shouldn't be offering such a service. As it stands, they're misleading people. Moreover, the right time to scan a file is when it is created or updated, prohibiting the action at its onset, instead of unnecessarily suspending the user at a future time. Google has a very nasty habit in that it just doesn't care about its users at all. I happily moved away to a different provider (an alternative to G Drive) that has no such ridiculous issues, and is substantially cheaper too.
- bitwize 2y agoI didn't mean it in an "old man yells at cloud" sense so much as a "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" sense. We're now at the point where people should be aware that anything they do in the cloud will be subject to any arbitrary configuration of acceptable use policies, terms of service, codes of conduct, et weary cetera, at the cloud provider's sole discretion and prepare for the consequences if any violations are found, which could be anything; and if you wish for your beta readers to access your spicy novel you may do better to simply email them a copy, perhaps in a password-protected .zip file.
- mediumsmart 2y agoRomance author gets blocked from sharing her spicy artistic Google Docs content within the Google Docs universe seems more like it. filed under rotten choices and moving on
- mediumsmart 2y agoDid I misunderstand? She said her artistic romance content is spicy. She got blocked from sharing it in Google docs not locked out as per headline and in light of this it looks like a rotten choice to use Google docs for this. Should I have stayed instead of coming back now and complainwhining about me downvotes?
- fortran77 2y agoJust don’t share on Google docs.
- gessha 2y agoJust don't use Apple products, just don't use Microsoft products, Just don't use ... Until when?
- philipov 2y agoUntil no one uses their products anymore.
- Larrikin 2y agoIt is increasingly becoming a reasonable prospect to run a home server you can share aspects with other people. If you need extreme scaling because you are hoping to make a profit it won't work. But technologies like Tail scale, docker, let's encrypt and increasingly cheaper low energy but more powerful computers make it a real option. Even generative AI and LLMs have reasonable results being run on home user gaming rigs and the latest Mac chips. The author would have had zero problems on a home server sharing a Nextcloud link to just 80 people. Multiple projects seem to be converging on a single box solution that can be shared, but none are quite there. Tailscale has basically made it zero risk to share to a trusted network. But it would be nice if the Raspberry Pi people or a similar project would be willing to put out something they're willing to stake their reputation on that could be near immediately shareable without opening yourself up to attacks from everyone on the Internet.
- gessha 2y agoI agree with you on an ideological level but I don’t think home server hosting is as convenient as making an online account. I really hope the single box solutions get at least close to it.
- S201 2y agoI've never been locked out of my LibreOffice documents stored locally on my Linux box.
- pmarreck 2y agoThe problem with these is that if they are in error, it is almost impossible to reach a real Google person to rectify it
- justin_oaks 2y agoIndeed, this needs to be factored into your threat model when considering the security of your data. Sometimes people forget that part of security is availability.
- pmarreck 2y agoI am guilty of this EVEN AS a person who once got hacked and locked out of their main Google account for weeks :O
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fbdab103 2y agoWhat's next? Cannot write a lewd letter to your partner? Too many suggestive emojis? I have to imagine more than one erotic publishing house has content hosted on Google Docs. Random website claims that 39 million printed romance novels were sold in 2023.
- SoftTalker 2y agoTIL that "Hockey romance" is a genre.
- justin_oaks 2y agoI'm wondering if it's literally about hockey or if it's a euphemism for something else
- jjmarr 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_bunny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_bunny There's a dedicated subculture of women that like hockey players called "puck bunnies".
- gfourfour 2y agoIt’s literally about hockey. Big market for women to read about rich athletic white men.
- jlarocco 2y agohttps://www.amazon.com/hockey-romance-books/s?k=hockey+romance+books https://www.amazon.com/hockey-romance-books/s?k=hockey+roman... I had no idea, either. There are stranger genres, but what an oddly specific fetish.
- apantel 2y agoYeah there’s a lot of pucking.
- educasean 2y agoHow many years until my Pixel phone locks up as I'm writing a lewd text to my wife? Thanks Google, for appointing yourself as the Sunday school snitch.
- schaefer 2y ago0.3
- tedunangst 2y ago[flagged]
- vincnetas 2y agoif they are willing recipients, whats wrong with that? Don't forget, that we live in society where everything is allowed what is not illegal. Or at least we want to believe that.
- arp242 2y agoHow do you know they are willing recipients? All Google knows is that the same message is sent to 80+ people. This is basic outgoing spam filtering that you need to have for any service that allows contacting people out of the blue. And this will always have false positives.
- Euphorbium 2y agoIs this society in the room with us now?
- squigz 2y agoWhose "normal"?
- fragmede 2y agothe author didn't get locked out for writing, she can still access the document, it's sharing to more than 80+ people that's been prevented. which is still a problem, but a different sort of one.
- justin_oaks 2y agoOne of the benefits of privacy is that you're free from someone misinterpreting your data. This is why my cloud-stored backups are encrypted prior to upload.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Wired source: What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257826
- Fkrir589 2y ago[flagged]
- WirelessGigabit 2y agoHold on. She's not locked out. She couldn't share it with someone else . Completely different.
- jan_Sate 2y agoYeah. The title is a click bait. It looks like that most people didn't read past the title. 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.
- bewaretheirs 2y ago"Publisher given unsolicited sexually explicit manuscript, declines to publish it".
- brokenmachine 2y agoGoogle is a publisher? So I can sue them if, for example, I read about how to do something dangerous and hurt myself? Or libel? Interesting.
- bewaretheirs 2y agoGoogle does a lot of things in a lot of different contexts. It's not always acting as a publisher but here I think it is, and it has claimed to be one in the past. In 2012, Eugene Volokh argued on behalf of Google that it was indeed a publisher: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/business/media/eugene-volokh-ucla-professor-makes-a-case-for-google-as-publisher.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/business/media/eugene-vol...
- yieldcrv 2y agoBoth happened, according to the article
- Thorrez 2y ago
- resolutebat 2y agoFrom the Instagram of the mentioned 2nd author who had a similar issue: But, I did find out google thought I was spamming people. Which I’m hindsight is kind of funny. Sharing your first chapter with 80+ people on a google doc link I guess would look a little sus. Oops. There may be more than meets the eye to this one as well. Not unrelated: a previous HN discussion complaining about getting spam from Docs/Drive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34933173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34933173
- neilv 2y agoOnce again, if Google is going to run the world, Google needs to learn about due process, and checks and balances.
- jonathankoren 2y agoI don’t understand why you think Google’s freedom of speech and association should be restricted. It’s not like you can’t just go someplace else, like you’re own computer.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoBecause it sucks and is lame. It would be nice if it wasn’t that way. I don’t care even a tiny little bit about the free speech rights of a multinational corporation if it makes things suck more.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jonathankoren 2y agoIt doesn't suck as hard as lack of imagination and using better tools.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoI deliberately avoid google products, but am able to do so because of extra time and knowhow that I invest. Not everyone can.
- robertclaus 2y agoReminds me a bit of net neutrality. Can a SAAS provider get so ubiquitous that it's basically critical infrastructure for a swath of the population?
- andyferris 2y agoThis is what Europe has been pondering for a while.
- jlarocco 2y agoI just can't feel bad for people still using Google for anything important.
- schoen 2y agoI've thought that it's hard to appreciate how much large tech companies (and communications and payment intermediaries) are in a terrible double bind about many content and policy issues. If they enforce some community's or culture's norms, or proactively try to avoid enabling any violations of some jurisdiction's laws, people will find things about that that outrage them, including misunderstandings, or ways that those norms aren't shared by others, or ways that they can be oppressive. If they don't do that, other people will get outraged about how the companies are allowing or facilitating "bad stuff" which they obviously could have chosen not to allow or facilitate to the same extent. But there might be no actual possible course of action which would avoid both forms of outrage! 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.
- weikju 2y ago> But there might be no actual possible course of action which would avoid both forms of outrage! 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.
- Nasrudith 2y agoCynically I've come to the conclusion that the only proper solution to pleasing everyone is to start telling every "activist" to just go fuck themselves, irrespective of the contents of their demands because the perpetual outrage cycle is just that bad. Sure they'll get mad but they have no attention span and will move on to more pliant entities when they don't get any more stimulation.
- Terr_ 2y agoTo some extent this is a self-inflicted problem by companies seeking to be--and permitted to become--global quasi-monopolies.
- xeromal 2y agoThe title is incorrect. She was locked out of sharing the document. She still has access. DANG!
- ufmace 2y agoI suppose it's already covered how the title is clickbait because the doc was blocked from being shared, not from being accessed. Also not described is exactly how "out there" the content was, how many people it was attempted to be shared with, was it shared to specific people or with an open-access link, was it ever accidentally or intentionally directly shared with anyone who might object to the content, and other things that could make this seem to be a very reasonable action. Google may not always be great, but this sounds like a nothingburger until proven otherwise to me.
- jonathankoren 2y agoOnce again, never use someone else’s computer. Again, this means you SHOULD NOT BE USING CLOUD APPLICATIONS. Full stop. They’re convenient sure, but they’re also restrictive and all too often just a protection racket via subscriptions. Sorry, but that’s just how it is.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- servus45678981 2y agoYou are right
- jonathankoren 2y agoBut the kids these days think someone else's computer is their computer, and just whine and roll over instead of punking out and DIYing it.
- __lbracket__ 2y agoTIL: people write lewd letters to their partners on Google docs.
- glandium 2y ago> "Whims said her content is explicit" Shouldn't that be called Erotica rather than Romance, then?
- thaumasiotes 2y agoNo, explicit content is what "romance" means.
- andrewflnr 2y agoIt's absolutely not. Romance is a big term containing, among other things, subcategories that are resolutions resolutely against any explicit content. FWIW "erotica" is probably also wrong for similar but oppositely directed reasons.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoWhere are you getting this? "Romance novel" means a pornographic novel. The term is euphemistic, and universally understood. Compare this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/r8cqrh/are_there_any_romance_books_without_sex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/r8cqrh/are_th... Where, as you can see, the title is "are there any romance books without sex?", the poster acknowledges that this is a strange thing to ask, and the responses identify special terms for romance novels that are missing the defining feature of the genre.
- andrewflnr 2y agoBecause I'm an aspiring writer who learns a lot of things about publishing by the wayside. Romance is a major genre and frequently discussed, including its subdivisions like "clean", "open/closed door", etc. And the top replies in that thread clearly agree with me, so I don't know why you think it's helping your case. Edit: and actually, you made an even stronger claim that romance and "explicit content" are definitionally equal, which really suggests you've never heard the term "erotica" which is well-established to be different from "romance".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arp242 2y agoTitle is hugely misleading; she wasn't locked out, she was prevented from sharing the document. What's going on is basic spam filtering. That's it. Anyone who thinks this ISN'T necessary has never operated a service that allows emailing or otherwise contacting random people. > a friend texted to say the shared Google folders where Renee kept her works in progress were no longer accessible. Her friend had planned to read and make notes on one of Renee’s stories and was surprised to be locked out. “You no longer have permission to view this document,” said the pop-up message. “If you believe this is an error, contact the document owner.” [..] > Renee logged into Docs and tried sharing the documents again. Then she received her own message from Google. “Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text. [..] > That author later posted a video to Instagram explaining that it wasn’t the adult content in the files but rather “Google thought I was spamming people.” Apparently, sending the same doc to scores of people—for example, alpha and beta readers—can make it appear as though the doc was unsolicited.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoYou don't know and you cannot verify if it indeed was spam filtering. I think that is part of the problem here.
- arp242 2y agoWhat else could it be? Can I prove this with absolute certainty? No. Is it the straight-forward common-sense explanation when you just shared a document with scores of people? Yes. But whatever the case may be, title is still hugely misleading. Lots of the comments here are railing against a situation that doesn't exist.
- Dylan16807 2y agoYou think google's lying about the reason? And them lying is the obvious common-sense answer? A friend of mine had a saucy document get locked from sharing recently, and it definitely wasn't spammed. Also "that author" is a completely different person from the subject author.
- kkfx 2y agoWell... I see no point in office automation WYSIWYG tools anyway, but those who choose to depend on such platforms, especially online-only or still maintained by third parities choose their own fate...