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Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

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Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#141

Post by whitehexagon »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #87
squirrel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Takeout will give you an archive of your email (and everything else).

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 t…

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.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#142

Post by nottorp »

mjburgess wrote: post #71
vouaobrasil wrote: post #28

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 t…

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.

Citation needed...

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#143

Post by vouaobrasil »

mjburgess wrote: post #71
vouaobrasil wrote: post #28

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 t…

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.

I never said it made you violent, only that it provides an outlet for distraction.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#144

Post by soraminazuki »

nickelpro wrote: post #62

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…

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.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#145

Post by idle_zealot »

swarnie wrote: post #24
paxys wrote: post #6

"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.

Sure, to us technically minded types who work in the industry. Do you think the average erotic fiction writer is keeping abreast (lol) of cloud data access + integrity news?

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.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#146

Post by caskstrength »

jupp0r wrote: post #109
zb3 wrote: post #82

What's wrong with sexually explicit content? Is Google controlled by Taliban or something?

Where have you been living for the last 30 years? Most major tech companies have similar policies, for better or worse.

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.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#147

Post by giantg2 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #125
giantg2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

That sounds like a password management problem and not a problem with encryption.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#148

Post by lupire »

nickelpro wrote: post #131
aqme28 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

The problem is that the rules are Byzantine, and not every user has legal department.

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.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#149

Post by UncleEntity »

jupp0r wrote: post #123
namaria wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

There is plenty of scientific evidence out there that even people in western rural areas enjoy sex because it's fun.

Though, to be fair, the barnyard animals might disagree...

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#150

Post by hedora »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #125
giantg2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

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.

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