If it's in the cloud, it isn't yours anymore.

People around here at Chez Phantom get tired of my ranting about cloud storage and government censorship. They continually say things like: "You're crazy, old man! Nobody would ever censor your cloud storage! That's impossible! And anyway, nobody cares about your damn book!"

Well, about that.

She [Mitu] had been working with WPS, a domestic version of cloud-based word processing software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. In the Chinese literature forum Lkong on June 25, Mitu accused WPS of "spying on and locking my draft," citing the presence of illegal content.

From the MIT report, we get this:

The firm [WPS] has released two statements since the initial complaint, clarifying that the software does not censor locally stored files. But the company remains vague about what it does to files shared online. "All platforms that provide online information services are responsible for reviewing the content that's being spread on their platforms," a July 13 statement says, citing China's Cybersecurity Law and other relevant regulations. Kingsoft did not respond to MIT Technology Review's request for comment.

Commenting beneath WPS's latest statement on Weibo, users want answers. "Can you guarantee you won't view our documents? If you can, I'll keep using it; If you can't, I'll ask for a refund for my membership. I've renewed it for several years but I'm feeling terrified now," one user wrote. 

WPS has not officially confirmed whether it is the act of sharing work that triggers the algorithmic censors. But a comment left by WPS's customer service account on Weibo on July 13 seems to confirm that hypothesis: "Syncing and storing it on cloud won't trigger the reviews. Only creating a sharing link for the document triggers the review mechanism."

Readers will please note that this occurred in China, making it not really much of a surprise. Censorship and heavy-handed stupidity are expected in a totalitarian state. They obviously set up a bot to check for prohibited words and phrases.

Some readers will now say that I must be CRAZY to think that could ever happen here in the Free nations of the West. Others will recall the Freedom Convoy experience here in Canada, the continuing farmer uprising in Holland  and Germany, the efforts of ALL Western governments to censor anything to do with Covid-19 (for your safety, you know) and the proposed Bill C-11 in Canada's parliament right now, and maybe they won't think I'm quite so crazy.

But either way, the one thing we can all be sure of is that Google Docs, Microsoft 365, Apple iCloud, et cetera, all these web applications and cloud storage CAN do this type of thing. It's just at the moment they don't do it, except occasionally by accident.

Ladies and gentlemen, cloud storage is not a backup. It is a convenience. Treat it as such, and remember that if they can scrape your e-mail for advertising keywords, and they absolutely do, they can do it to your documents too. The only difference between here and Communist China is who gives the orders and what they're looking for. All else is the same for practical purposes.