Remember, folks: encryption and redundancy (and redundancy).
And redundancy.
And redundancy.
And redundancy.
And testing the redundancy ^Redundancy ^^Reduncancy ^^^Redundancy
Don’t test redundancy here bruh! These servers are public running
And the brain damage…
And the brain damage…
And the brain damage…
Oh hey guys when did you get here?
And the ADHD, and… uh… I’m sorry, what were we listing again?
Deleted? Now: No one’s data.
ai is crippling every industry it touches. sounds intentional imho
On the one hand this really, REALLY sucks for the artist. I wouldn’t wish it on my personal enemies if I had them.
However stories like these are instrumental in teaching the broader public that AI is to be boycotted.
Telling Joe Schmoe that datacenters are a rising problem just doesn’t register. This they could relate too.
that AI is to be boycotted
I don’t think the AI part is the relevant bit here.
I think the message should be that trusting your data to off-site storage where it is subject to third-party moderation should be boycotted. So boycott Google Drive, One Drive, icloud and keep your data on your own computers.
Yes, the important part is that data was lost. How was it lost? Um… magic, probably. W-we don’t need to look at the details.
How was it lost?
Because you put it in the hands of a third party who is not accountable to you, and gave them full control over it. Whether they exercise that control via AI or a human is rather irrelevant here. There are plenty of documented cases of people losing their account in pre-AI times due to human moderation.
It is relevant, because the AI did a stupid.
Telling Joe Schmoe that datacenters are a rising problem just doesn’t register.
The Joe Schmoes have been uniting against the data centers and winning in many cases.
*to
Goddamn such a huge nerd!
<3
I didn’t realize AI was looking at my google drive. I’m just deleted my files, but that’s like a huge chunk of my career they could have potentially stolen.
I do still want backups beyond my flashdrive, maybe an encrypted file?
No one should have anything on google specifically, or on a non-privately owned and properly secured server in general.
There was a guy, during covid lockdowns, whose child developed a severe rash in the diaper area.
because lockdowns, the doctor asked them to send photos of the rash so he can diagnose.
googles auto-moderator labeled it child pornography, immediately deleted their account (which was very much all eggs in one basket. his phone number, email, data, everything was tied to his google account, all of which went away with no ability to recover anything on any of it) and called the authorities.
Police came to his home, talked to him, talked to his doctor, said there was nothing untoward there and went about their business.
Google said it didnt matter what the police said, it was child pornpgraphy.
the doctor sent a letter to google saying it was a legitimate medical necessity.
google said it didnt care, its child pornography.
That their expert photo-lookers said there was no rash in the area that they could tell, so there for the doctor was wrong, the police were wrong, and that man was a pedophile and he would never get anything back in any circumstance.
and for proof of that, they pointed to a video in his google data from 6 months prior that had the mother laying in bed, naked, with the baby on her chest.
Because, according to google, the only reason to be naked in the same room as a child, or to take a medically dictated photograph of a childs rash, is if you are a dirty dirty child molesting pedophile sexually exploiting your child.
Which I imagine makes almost all of our parents and grand parents pedophiles, by googles standards, because I guarantee the overwhelming majority of us have a parent that has a picture of us naked, probably in the bath, that is compltely fucking harmless to any sane, normal human being, unlike the actual pedophiles that google has looking at this shit who gets their rocks off to it and assumes everyone else is just as fucked up as twisted as they are.
Reminds me of a joke: someone is driving on a certain road and listening to the radio; suddenly the announcer warns: beware anyone driving in [that particular road], there’s a madman driving in the wrong direction. To which the driver exclaims: One!? It’s all of them!
Google are that driver in this case. I.e., the real paedophiles. For only a paedophile could consider a picture of a mother with her child child pornography.
or a medically legitimate photo, as requested by the doctor, as verified by the very police they called on him… They have to measure whats pedophilia and whats not by how aroused google employees get when looking at them.
I wonder if that same google employee didnt make copies to take him for his collection.
Encrypting something with your own key before you upload it is a solution for backups, but you do lose the convenience factor of cloud storage. If you are only using Google Drive for backup, that could work.
The alternative is to use a service with built-in end-to-end encryption.
I’m just using it for backups. I’m not really interested in remote services out side of that - they kinda sounds like a scam.
I’m not really interested in remote services out side of that - they kinda sounds like a scam
I don’t think they’re a scam. They’re just more honest: you use x amount of storage, you pay for x amount of storage and you can do with it as you like.
It’s not presented as “free” where you actually pay with your data, a dependency on the service and hidden content restrictions.
Was thinking more paid remote services are almost always something that’d be better done locally.
For free remote services, Idk. Maybe. I used to think there should be a public option for most things: email, 5GB storage, radio, social media, etc. Through that lens using free remote services was just settling for the lack of a public option. My experience with lemmy has kinda shifted my views on that. Small lemmy instances are like a person doing a service for their community (which happens to be federated with other communities). When federated the costs are low and these sorts of public-good things really ought be funded by endowments that are easy to build with low costs as the communities slowly grow. I’m not sure how that should work with email or storage or if it’s right to expect individuals to associate with one community or another to obtain them – but,I don’t really trust the government or large corporations to handle the public-good responsibly.
Yeah, I just don’t know what the right answer is for everything, but I like the individual / non-profit federations model for a lot of small cheap things.
Was thinking more paid remote services are almost always something that’d be better done locally.
But offsite storage is something that per definition can’t be done locally …
Just use a zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted service. Which means the company literally can’t ever read your files!
I use Filen for a long time now, and I’m super satisfied.
Stop relying on corporations to back up your art
easy for you to say
Yes I have a hard drive and a physical folder full of art. Very difficult
It’s only a matter of time until something really big fails online isn’t it?
Always has been.
So AI can just delete my pirated videos and music?
Not just your pirated videos and music
It is not limited that way.
This makes as much sense as having my shelves and cabinets judge what socks I put in them and trash it.
GTFO
I mean, you’re not wrong but the problem is that the online storage that you (and most people) think of as “your storage”, is not “your storage” in the same sense as those cabinets and shelves are yours. You’re really just borrowing the storage, and have given the actual owner the right to freely snoop through it and kick you out for anything they find they don’t like.
The only storage that’s actually yours is the one on your computer. That you own. In your house.
Yes. And ban me from using any other doors or drawers in the house.
Something to look forward to with smart houses, I guess.
-Create new RAR file
-Encrypt
-Password: #fuck$google69
-Copy paste dirty chinese cartoons
-Upload
-Sleep well
Also I’m pretty sure deleting/changing the file extension on your files will work too.Just don’t use Google for fucks sake!!
Why would the file extension matter?
In theory google’s AI will treat files accordingly to what the extension say. For example: If it sees image.jpeg it will treat it as such and will see the picture data. But if you rename it to image.txt it will treat it as a text file and all it will see gibberish.
Any real computer would look at the internal data to determine the type of file.
I figured since AI isn’t a real computer (or at least doesn’t act like one) but I just tested it with GPT and indeed it did recognize it. So scratch that idea.
Let’s say I was trying to use this to make my relatives degoogle and added even an url showing Google’s data hoarding and a degoogle alternatives list.
The only thing I got was… “Dad Gave Your Status a ❤️”.
it’s kinda hard to convince older people to get rid of stuff they already depend on, even if it’s as bad as google
My father tested the TikTok spy rumors, proved it, and still passes most of his day doomscrolling on it.
This is why my e-mail isn’t gmail and I never store my shit in somebody else’s cloud.
Way back when they were starting offering free e-mail and later cloud services it was an obvious risk, because putting one of your main points of contact and only copies of data which you can’t get back in the hands of a massive company with whom you don’t even have a proper contract and which, besides, has more lawyers than the year has days, is a needless risk.
Same reason why none of my code that’s important is in GitHub.
As soon as the cloud thing started, I thought “Who thought this was a good idea?” Especially when they were trying to get The Cloud to basically replace a computer’s hard drive.
No thanks, I’ll hang on to my own stuff. I can put my important stuff on a couple of thumb drives, and carry them around.
The only thought I had was that with scalability and redundancy your data could be reasonably safe and reasonably accessible, however over the years shit like this keeps happening.
The only way I would use cloud storage is if I sent it already encrypted data
Using somebody else’s cloud for scalability and redundancy is reducing one risk vector by increasing a different risk vector.
It makes some sense to use a cloud service of a company which is around the same size as your own, with whom you have a proper contract in a jurisdiction where it’s legally enforceable in a timely manner and even then you’re now taking in the risks associated with them going bankrupt.
I avoided that kind of situation exactly because having worked in IT already for almost a decade when this kind of thing came out, I had already some experience with what can happen if one puts oneself at the mercy of a 3rd party entity for whom even your business isn’t worth much (either because you don’t even pay or because you’re a tiny, tiny customer).
That is way more so when we’re talking about having an important point of contact with the outside world like one’s e-mail address under control of such a 3rd party entity (e-mail, like phone numbers in many countries, should be something you can take with you from provider to provider, but we’re not there yet and may never be given that unlike with phone numbers, it would require a transnational regulatory agreement, which almost certainly will NEVER happen). Personally for my e-mail I DO use the mechanism were due to regulations I can move the core element around with me from provider to provider - I have my own Domain Name and subcontract the e-mail support to a 3rd party.
I understand that my use is much lighter than some. My stuff is mostly documents, and some graphics and photos, so it’s no big deal. Some people have tons of data and stuff, and/or they travel around and need access to all of it from all over the world. The cloud is handy for them.
That’s not me, but my little bit of data is just as important to me, and I’m not leaving it in the hands of some third party who doesn’t care at all.
What are people who are not tech wizards supposed to use? Most people use gmail or if your old, Yahoo because that’s all they know how to use
… a Flashdrive?
Just because they arent tech wizards doesn’t mean they’re tech cave people
Getting e-mail hosting complete with your own domain name on one of many, many companies available worldwide which sell that (just search for “e-mail hosting”) does not require tech knowledge to the level of “wizardry”.
They even have interfaces similar to Google.
However those things are paid, and they’re definitely not as accessible to non-techies since for example your smartphone won’t just pop-up an “add account with X e-mail hosting” during initial config.
Absolutely, those things aren’t “so stupidly simple that even my dog can use it”, but then again I’m making my point in Lemmy to a crowd which is well above average tech aware, not to my nana on Facebook.
I mean, Google hasn’t offered support with real humans for over 8 years. Facebook has been on that even longer
The only way to get support from google nowadays is to become a famous youtuber with a large audience, and work in lockstep with them.
Not that it changes anything, but why nobody is saying, or asking, what was it flagged for? I find it suspicious the reason for the ban was not given in the story.
The obvious implication is copyrighted" content flagging, considering the account was banned after uploading a manga. Google drive used to be a source for links to Linux ISOs, so it’s unsurprising that they’re cracking down on it in the dumbest and laziest way possible.
copyrighted*
That’s the implications the narrative tries to create by saying the content is “his own”, and yet never spells it out, which is why it seems like a red herring to me.
Like, if it was his own CSAM, it doesn’t make it any better he is the author.
Are you one of those people who thinks all japan is pedo or something
No, why? I came up with an extreme example to illustrate my point: It’s suspicious that they didn’t say the reason for the ban, because if it’s a bad reason they would have said what it is.
I don’t imply any reason, especially the example I have given.
I don’t think so, and I also don’t agree with AI moderation nuking someone’s cloud backups…
But also I wouldn’t find it surprising if it was marked as CSAM when the artist’s cover art can look like this (NSFW). The material inside is probably much more explicit.
It certainly caters to a… specific audience.
EDIT: Link fixed. Thanks for mentioning.
Broken link. No idea which cover art you were referencing, but here’s a couple: Not explicit, but still NSFW
Took a quick peek and it’s uhh, definitely porn. Hot take: doesn’t matter to me. There’s people out there using Gmail to facilitate the torture and murder of real literal children. Why are we focusing on drawings instead of the people doing actual harm?
Oh, I agree. For Google to act like a paragon of justice on this front, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the actual harm they facilitate is a joke. I guess as long as it’s not relevant to training their AI image recognition, it doesn’t call for the same level of moderation.
If Google didn’t give a reason, then it would be poor journalism to speculate. Providing enough context for the reader to come to their own conclusions isn’t a red herring, it is the correct way to report on it.
What journalism? This is the banned author posting on Twitter, they are the primary source, and could have said anything, including that Google didn’t give a reason, if they didn’t.
the artist does draw nasty shit and chances are he uploaded that to his drive, but does that really matter? the issue is still there even with this context, google scans your private files you upload to gdrive and the ai without any human input can just destroy your (or if not your, an average person’s) whole life by permanently banning your google account along with all linked services like gmail or sign in with google stuff
but does that really matter?
No, which is why I started my comment by saying it doesn’t matter.
AI moderation is bad regardless. Now that we have that settled, and have established Google is the bad guy here, I am interested what he was banned for.
That’s always been the deal. Google gives you free email and disk space, but they used everything you have for AI training and targeting advertising.
What kind of nasty are we talking about?
This question was exactly why I came to the comments. However even if he was doing something immoral like drawing child porn (I don’t care about anyone’s personal opinion on this subject so please spare me) unless doing so is illegal where he is (which it should be) he should be turned over to the police for pedophile crimes not having all his stuff deleted. Deleting child porn only makes the problem worse because offenders won’t be facing punishment, they essentially just get the filth wiped off their dirty faces and get back at it
There’s no context that makes it ok to just delete someone else’s stuff but I’m still curious about the content and if this person was just a pedophile
Maybe Google didn’t give a reason.
It is more important than ever to get these fucking services out of your life. Do not rely on a third party for your critical data and infrastructure. Use it if it’s convenient, but ALWAYS have a copy under your own control.
I can’t bring myself to blame the victims of shit like this, we’re up against massive corporate and government pressure to give over our lives to them. It takes genuine effort to protect your shit these days, but it’s more critical than ever and well worth the difficulty; even if you never need it.
