New Nightmare Just Dropped

[Olo]

What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs

[foreverlurk]

Ugh. Always back up your work locally folks, that goes without saying. And it’s probably a good idea to have multiple Google accounts, and not use the one with your real name/normie facade.

I know the article states that she was banned for “spamming” to her alpha/beta readers, but I don’t fully buy it. I’m pretty sure she was flagged by AI long before that. For instance, I can tell you from personal experience that AIs considers depictions of multi-size relationships, even romantic, consensual ones, as inappropriate (because of “power imbalance”, etc.). It’s the same LLMs that are used when parsing and evaluating texts so I wouldn’t be surprised if such a thing could happen to one of us in the future. Google ARE crawling Google Docs to feed their models (opt-out or not), I can guarantee that.

That article reminded me of the LiveJournal purges. LJ was my first ever online blog in 1999, and I’ve never been so involved in a community since. It was mostly about music and programming, but I did shadow drop sizey hints here and there lol. I had even purchased a lifetime membership… the sale to 6A and subsequent sale to that shady Russian company killed LJ, and caused a great exodus second only to the Tumblr purges (this one seems to have recovered?!).

In 2018, Tumblr banned “adult content,” and queer communities warned that losing their spaces online would make things even more difficult for queer youth and others questioning or discovering their sexuality.

I want to add that even though we are not persecuted in the same ways that queer communities are, don’t underestimate the importance having a safe space to discuss SFW and NSFW size stuff online for youth discovering their size kinks. I guess younger members don’t see it because they’ve been lucky enough to grow up in a world already providing those spaces. We should always stay vigilant when things like this happens. Make no mistake, if they come for them they’ll come for us.

[skysayl]

Thanks I hate it.

Thankfully I do keep my docs backed up in not only multiple accounts but inside emails (unconventional but it works), inside personal discord servers, and copied in a local folder. I’ve been trying to migrate to something offline, I haven’t found one I like. Supposedly obsidian is the go-to for a lot of writers but for the life of me I can’t figure out how it works. It’s too big brain for me.

[littlest-lily]

Excuse me WHAT?! Uhh time to find another site to write on I guess, is anywhere safe? Good lord the amount of unpublished/under construction stuff I have right now, this would be such a nightmare. I’d love to back up locally but I’m not even sure how to do that since I don’t have Microsoft Office…

[HHunter1]

From reading the article the people flagged were people sharing their works through Google. Not a good idea with erotica. Your most likely safe if your keeping your works to yourself and just copy pasting to where or to whom you want to share it with.

Note that I said most likely and not guaranteed. Looks like I’ll need to buy an edited chapter USB in the near future.

HH1

[miss-lillipants]

@littlest-lily said:

I’d love to back up locally but I’m not even sure how to do that since I don’t have Microsoft Office…

This article also rattled me when I found out about it. I don’t think there’s a straight alternative/dupe of Google docs that there’s a big consensus on.

If you’re just after a word processor, you’ve got things as simple as Notepad to something more feature-rich as Scrivener (it’s not free, but is a one-off payment and you can install on multiple devices). WordPad would have been my go-to if I didn’t have Word, but I believe it has been discontinued. LibreOffice Writer has also been rated quite well as a free processor that you can download and work on remotely.

It gets more complicated if you’re looking to collaborate and/or keep files saved on the cloud.
This person suggests a few options which could be worth a try. MS Word Online is also free to use and doesn’t require a subscription. For cloud storage alone, Dropbox is pretty reliable, widely used and the free storage tier would probably be adequate if it’s just for documents.

[foreverlurk]

Happened to @Aborigen too! They are cranking up their grip on shared documents, better keep them private for now. Also, it’s probably a good idea to have offline backups, and/or another cloud provider.

[protect-tinies]

“Do not trust Google Drive”? I think it would be most accurate to say “Don’t trust Google…ever.”

[foreverlurk]

@protect-tinies Don’t want to go full tinfoil hat mode but there’s something going, what’s scary is that they are now using machine learning to scan and analyse the documents instead of simple pattern/keyword matching or other Bayesian tricks. I’m sure they are training AI with that content, too, regardless of their so-called “privacy policies”.

So the actual content is being “read” by an AI and categorized. I don’t know if you remember my fun times with Google’s AI (Gemini) lecturing me about the moral implications of shrunken women? The “power imbalance” and “harmful representation”, " etc.

Just imagine how it would react to scanning some of the stories we like, even the most wholesome ones aren’t safe based on my previous interactions with Gemini.

It’s funny how some people in the community are like “nah don’t worry sizey stuff isn’t weird unless you make it so”… well, guess again, normies training these AIs clearly don’t think there’s anything “normal” about it and have trained their AIs to flag it.

[littlest-lily]

Maybe my anxiety-raddled mind is just not seeing something obvious, but can someone help me figure out how to make sure my Google Drive folder is private? When I look at the details of the folder, is says it is… but I also know for a fact that I have shared a couple of docs within this folder with another person… can something still be “private” but shared??

(I definitely plan to back things up and whatnot, just looking at the shortest-term solution at the moment)

[protect-tinies]

@foreverlurk Exactly…I believe Google is pure evil. And so are Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc., because they’re all wannabe dictators whose end goal is to get as much power as possible (by any means possible) and to control everyone forever, appointing themselves as our unelected rulers. If I could avoid giving money to any of them, I would, but it’s pretty much impossible to do that without swearing off computers and phones altogether.

[Olo]

As @Aborigen writes, Hey, You, Get Off of the Cloud.

[foreverlurk]

@littlest-lily said in New Nightmare Just Dropped:

can something still be “private” but shared??

By default I think everything in your drive is private, but reading what @Aborigen wrote on his blog, it seems that anything sitting on the home screen of Google Drive is also somehow considered “public” (!)

So if I understand correctly, if you create folders to store your documents they are private unless you explicitly share them. Unless they’re sitting on the top level of your drive, in which case they could be scanned (going by what Aborigen said)

He also mentions finding a workaround for locked documents, and while he won’t reveal his fix publicly (for fear Google will patch it), you can contact him for help.

[littlest-lily]

@foreverlurk Huh… Except the home page for me is just all of my recent docs so uh… Great

I appreciate the help in any case I’d love to figure out alternatives but just haven’t been able to dedicate time to it lately - not necessarily from a lack of curiosity as was suggested in the article, but from being completely in over my head with IRL issues (while also not wanting to lose all of the work that I’ve put in to my writing if possible…) This is so stressful.

[Olo]

@littlest-lily Could you use temporary storage space on someone else’s machine?