Hey, You, Get Off of the Cloud

You’re too young to get that, odds are.

This’ll be a shorter post than the one before, maybe. This one has to do with a horror story that landed too close to home.

Google Blocked Me from My Content

I saw a story making the rounds earlier this month, a Wired article about a romance writer who logged into Google Drive and found herself locked out of her account. Everything she’d been working on, all her manuscripts, everything she gets paid for. Gods know if she backed everything up.

Our society is too addicted to free services. We love free social media, but then a Faulknerian idiot man-child buys the company and ruins everything we’ve built there. We love Google Maps, but we don’t want Google to know where we are. We store our documents on Google Drive, because it’s free and convenient, but because it’s free we didn’t sign any fucking contract. We have no legal support for when they start scraping (public) files to train their AI or when they block access to your own files because they decided they violate their TOS.

Hey, I’m not immune. I was writing a particularly spicy story that had my motivation going, but when I logged in to work on it one morning, this is what I was greeted with:

That was the end of the conversation as far as Google was concerned. They didn’t like that I was working on a piece of erotic fiction, so they bricked it up and sent me this notice. I couldn’t open it, I couldn’t download it, like I might have if they’d given me any kind of warning beforehand.

Google knows this is will be an intensely unpopular policy when people finally catch wind of it, so they’re keeping it quiet. They’re probably still feeling a little burned from when they cheerily announced that adult content would be removed from Blogger, then grudgingly had to acquiesce to the popular outrage that ensued.

I can tell myself this is my fault. It’s my fault I trusted Google. If I didn’t write kinky shit and store it on the cloud, then this wouldn’t have happened to me. But I do write kinky shit, in a nation that brags about freedom of expression in contrast with other nations, then aggressively persecutes it domestically.

Creating My Own Problems

Because I’m so public about my writing, because I seek legitimate publication and business practices, I have personal acquaintance with where the borders of liberty are. Blogger tried to boot me for my adult content. Stripe did suspend my account and cast my subscribers to the wind because of what I write. DeviantArt and Patreon threatened to start deleting adult-content accounts, and you hear about that once in a while but not lately. Some of us were selling on Gumroad, which recently partnered with PayPal and Stripe and announced their own censorship policies.

It certainly hasn’t stopped anyone from using these services: only a few of us on the fringe are actively seeking secure alternatives. Karbo successfully made the switch to SubscribeStar. Others just throw in the towel and find something else to fill their days, no one ever hears from them again, and our community is the worse for it.

“When the product is free, you are the product.” Now we have two generations who have no idea what this means, but systematically they’re going to feel the brunt of it. They balk at their data being scraped to train shitty AI, but they don’t actually … you know … look for alternatives. It’s too much work. It’s convenient to stay where they are, no matter how the abuse increases. Sure, it’s bad that X defends Nazis and pays them ad revenue, but where else are you supposed to go. Sure, it’s bad that Amazon shadowbans authors and permits pirates to crank out AI-generated novels under their names, often punishing the author who’s being victimized by this, but come on. That’s where everybody is, you can’t leave.

What happened to curiosity? What happened to critical thought? Gone, went the way of social agreements.

I have these, so I figured out now to unrestrict my file. Google’s concerned with “public” documents, like I mentioned with their AI training. To them, a public document is anything sitting on the home screen of Google Drive, or anything you’ve shared with another user. Shitty definitions of “public,” but Google is increasingly shitty.

I was going to describe the process here, but what would stop Google from reading about it and “fixing” it on their end? Contact me if you want to know, if you have a document locked up by Google. I’ve basically revealed the process, it just requires a little curiosity to make it work … which renders it functionally opaque, I realize.

Alternative Solutions

Another effect of trying to be a high-profile smut writer? It’s nudging me into cybersecurity. People sharing my story over Mastodon has introduced me to a broad pool of people building their own solutions for secure file-sharing and storage, things like Nextcloud. To break away from the Google Suite doesn’t mean returning to Word. Here are several different options with different features, for different tastes.

1. Calmly Online is great for short work and casual writing, with a few frills like wordcount and color contrasts.
2. Ommwriter helps you go distraction-free with music and quelling other computer alerts.
3. Scrivener is the popular for more complex manuscripts, when you have a lot of plates spinning.
4. yWriter7 looks like someone’s labor of love, a retro feel with some power packed into it for novel writing.
5. novelWriter if you’re old-school and like feeling in control at a deeper level.
6. OnlyOffice is a secure office suite, but they’re starting to roll AI functionality in …
7. … so maybe LibreOffice would be a better option, the feel of MS without being MS.

And sometimes security means moving away from American products altogether, since we’re governed by capitalism: France’s CryptPad offers end-to-end encryption and open-source collaboration. And the Swiss Proton Mail is waiting for you, when you want a secure email account, VPN, password manager and … everything else.

The point is, there are options out there. You can find them. You can learn from others’ experiences. But you’ve got to act on them instead of hoping where you are is going to improve on its own, because it won’t. All this corporate shit is on a downward trajectory, censorship in the mainstream is only getting worse. You have to haul yourself out of the easy path and do the research to protect your own security (and you’d better be calling your representatives once a day, every day).