Title 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.
And thank heavens for it. I used to get porn spam from bots sharing Google docs directly to me. I would get a notification on my phone while I was at work and a nude woman would pop up my phone. After a few of those I was ready to uninstall Google drive.
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.
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.
Google uses one wording for all of these. "Flagged as inappropriate". If you look you'll find examples of people being unable to share their business spreadsheets, and "inappropriate" turned out to mean "I don't like that you have read receipts turned on and nothing written in the message field".
Legally speaking it's incredibly unlikely that Google is actually parsing the textual content of stuff on Google docs. The reason being that if they demonstrate that they can, then suddenly legally they must, and also they open themselves to being sued for doing it incorrectly and failing to remove content that is illegal in certain jurisdictions. There's really nothing in it for them.
Edit: seems like Google has also a different mechanism for telling you if the file itself is the problem - you get an email saying [filename] is a terms of service violation.
the 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.
if 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.
How 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.
I'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.
Sure, business is hard. When doing business you have to spend money and labor solving problems for customers. This is one of the problems you have to solve when you store people's data for them.
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.
Not really; pretty much any service that will allow contacting random people will have the shit abused out of it.
And to be clear: what happened is that she was prevented from sending more share links after sending 80 or so of them, with "spicy" content. She wasn't "locked out". Title is wrong. This is basic spam filtering, which does have the occasional false positive.
> 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.
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.
Having built tools to organize and drive human curation, human review only means that you get different errors and different people get fired as scapegoats. When you're doing content moderation, rather than simple data curation, you don't even get "far" better results - you frequently get worse results! - and you start traumatizing your moderators enough to destroy them. On top of that, who the fuck would ever use a product if their private notepad was going to be read by a human moderator? There is no easy answer here.
The very least you could do is have human review of these cases where accounts are shut down, have an actual human appeal system. You can't convince me that this wouldn't significantly decrease the false positive rate (without significantly increasing false negatives), learning to better outcomes. Obviously when appealing you'd consent to having your content reviewed by a human.
> On top of that, who the fuck would ever use a product if their private notepad was going to be read by a human moderator? There is no easy answer here.
Besides, we've gotten to a point where it's not clear if A. every single thing being ingested as data to create a profile of me off (current situation, e.g. Gmail) is better than B. Only a portion that has been flagged being reviewed by a human.
There's a lot of low-hanging fruit which humans-in-the-loop would be used for to give far better results. A very obvious example being Meta's key role in the Rohingya genocide. Plenty of outsiders banged on Facebook's door, but they wouldn't listen, costing thousands of people their lives. There's lots of such "obvious" cases. Content moderation is extremely difficult when it comes to things that toe the line, sure, but I wasn't really talking about those.
> 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.
That won't protect from outrage, as inevitably something really bad will be exposed to be on your service. You'll have to either defend keeping your position or creep up surveillance on user content to avoid a similar thing to happen.
Users, regulators, investors etc. all want different things that are mostly incompatible, and you're bound to piss some and please others to varying degrees.
> 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.
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.
There was this old site called voat.co, a reddit clone with almost no restrictions to what you could post. IIRC, only child porn and bestiality was off limits. It was located in Switzerland.
Soon the site filled with nazi stuff among other things, so the author in fear of getting in trouble, relocated the site to a more free-speech country. Where? To the USA.
A free speech country is not the same as a country where some companies have restrictive policies. You cannot post a nipple in Instagram and then cry "muh freedom of speech". Use one of the endless sites to post such things or roll your own: the government won't stop you.
The problem is specifically that the government won't stop you. American free speech principles have been warped and distorted to give platforms total control and no responsibility over what they host. Hell, back during the last wave of Net Neutrality regulation, Comcast was arguing in court that common carrier regulations were a free speech violation. Which is absolutely insane.
Additionally, we should stop measuring the size of a country's free speech commitment by how legally easy it is to host Nazi bullshit. Let us not forget that Nazis hate freedom of speech and use all sorts of extralegal bullshit to stifle it. A country or platform in which it is legal or permitted to express Nazi political opinions is one where you have less freedom of speech, not more.
Freedom of speech is a balancing act in which we tie the hands of people in power to allow those out of power to speak their mind.
I live in a country with laws against certain hate speech forms. All we really got is not less hate (we have plenty of nazi bullshit), but comedians, musicians, journalists... heavily fined, exiled or in jail.
A woman almost two years to jail for dark joking about a guy killed in 1975: https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_Cassandra. Later revoked in the Supreme Court. The jokes were all well known, I've been hearing them since the 1980's.
There's even a lawyer firm that only exists to sue people for offending christian beliefs (https://abogadoscristianos.es/), the modernized version of the spanish inquisition you didn't expect.
If you live in the USA be careful if you want to limit freedom of expression, because you will end with a tool to bully people. You dislike a newspaper? Sue them and hope it goes well. Nazis are at least gone? I'm afraid, but no: they are stronger than ever in the last 50 years.
> But there might be no actual possible course of action which would avoid both forms of outrage!
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.
Cynically 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.
From 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.
Yeah. 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.
Google 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:
Well... 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...
A similar thing has happened to me. I've had a Google account since I was 16 - and my Google Drive and Photos have almost two decades worth of photos and important personal documents.
My account was disabled due to a false-positive detection like this, and all appeal avenues that Google provided were all rejected. I also had friends at Google make appeals for me, and these too were rejected.
Despite being in IT, I never thought to make hard-drive backups, so lesson learned.
For those reading in Australia, or the EU, there seems to be some hope.
In Australia, the Privacy Act 1988 states that you own your data, and you have the right to request this data from companies. See https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/your-per...
GDPR applies to residents of the EU, and seems to apply retrospectively. So if you are or become an EU resident, you can make a GDPR data access request.
For Australia, you can submit a data access request under the Privacy Act 1988 yourself and at no cost. I'll keep you posted if it works.
It'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.
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.
Because 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".
> And the top replies in that thread clearly agree with me, so I don't know why you think it's helping your case.
Because they don't agree with you. "Clean romance" is to "romance" as "fish vegetarian" is to "vegetarian". It's a contrast, not a subtype.
The idea that "clean romance" is "romance without sex scenes" immediately tells you that "romance" includes sex scenes. That's what "the exception that proves the rule" means.
I'm familiar with the term "erotica". It is not restricted to books, but erotica in book form goes under the name "romance novels".
Why are you so sure it's not a subtype? I'm not going to say that's always how the "<descriptor> <noun>" structure works, but you have to admit it's pretty common. (Ed: compare to "healthy adult", "terrestrial vertebrate", "clean socks", etc)
You're literally the first person I've ever encountered with this idea, after reading/watching dozens of articles/talks about genre from people in the field. You're also the first person I've seen to mention the term "fish vegetarian", which is indeed stupid; that's probably why those people are usually called "pescatarians".
> You're literally the first person I've ever encountered with this idea, after reading/watching dozens of articles/talks about genre from people in the field.
That might be the problem. Taking an example from a different field, I am comfortable using the term "finite" to mean "more than zero". This is a common mathematical usage. (If you're curious, it contrasts "finite" with "infinitesimal" as opposed to "infinite".)
People without mathematical training tend to object to it.
If you're marketing books, because you're a bookstore, or a publisher, then you need to put clean romance somewhere, it shares most of its audience with romance, and it's natural to think of them as a group.
But this is looking at the question from the wrong direction. If you ask "what's the term for a book with explicit sex scenes in it?", the answer to that is "a romance novel".
> But this is looking at the question from the wrong direction.
No, you nailed it with the marketing angle, the overlapping audience is the exact reason it's useful to put them all in one group.
> If you ask "what's the term for a book with explicit sex scenes in it?", the answer to that is "a romance novel".
No, the answer is just "book with explicit sex scenes". That's a cross-cutting feature across all kinds of genres, some of which are neither romance nor even erotica. You can have a thriller with explicit sex. To my knowledge there's no specific, shorter word or term for it.
A romance in publishing-speak is actually a very specific formula in many ways. Romance readers are somewhat infamously picky about their happy endings, for instance. But there's an expected arc of characters meeting, having obstacles to getting together, and finally overcoming those obstacles. That's the heart of the genre, not sex. I know less about erotica, but it's much more specifically and completely about sex.
Sorry, but to the extent it's possible to be wrong about terminology, as defined by actual usage, you're just dead wrong about this.
See, 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.
Bah, 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.
A 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.
If 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Because 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.
It 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.
I mean. Stallman sets a high bar, but to a significant degree it is possible, if extremely inconvenient, to actually take that thought all the way. Whether that's a reasonable decision for the individual is left as an exercise to the reader, and I would tend to be open to other corrective measures, but you can live a life without FAANG.
Did 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?
> 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.