11 min read essay privacy

The Door Inside the House

A file containing the single digit 1 was locked for copyright infringement, and the notice said no review could be requested. That is the whole shape of it: something reads everything you keep, it can act on what it reads, and when it acts you lose the work as well as the service. On why productivity platforms have to be able to read your pages, and why the ban and the export were ever welded into one motion.

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In January 2022 a computer scientist at Michigan State University opened her Google Drive and found that one of her files had been put in irons. The file was called output04.txt. Its entire contents were the digit 1.

The notice said the file broke Google's copyright rules. Then, in the flat voice these messages always use, it added that a review could not be requested.

Other people went and checked. A file holding a single 0 was blocked as well. Someone worked through every whole number from minus a thousand to a thousand and turned up a scattering of others that tripped the same wire, among them 500, 174 and 833. Google put its hand up, called it a fault, and said it would let the files go.

I want to be fair about what that was. It was a bug, it lasted days, and the company fixed it. But a bug is a machine doing what it was built to do at the wrong moment, and that is the interesting part. Something was reading every file she kept, and it had the standing to act on what it read. The door marked appeal had been nailed shut before anybody knocked. The digit 1 is funny. The three facts underneath it are not, and they hold on every ordinary day when nothing goes wrong at all.

Five ways to lose the room

Once you start looking, the same shape turns up everywhere, and it gets in through five different doors.

The first is the one that caught the file full of nothing. A machine reads what you keep and forms a view. In 2021 a father in San Francisco photographed his son's groin at a nurse's request, for a video appointment during the pandemic. Google's scanning flagged the pictures, referred him to the police, and shut his account. The police looked at the images, saw immediately that they were medical, and closed the case without charges. Google kept the account closed anyway. That is the detail worth sitting with. He was cleared by the state and stayed convicted by the company, because the two proceedings were never connected in the first place.

The second door is your line of work. Notion's help pages say the company may give extra scrutiny to, suspend, or cut off people whose use touches certain industries, and it names gambling and multi-level marketing. The reasoning is reasonable enough on its face: those areas draw more abuse, and abuse costs everybody else their service.

Which brings me to the story that started me writing, and I should be honest that it is not a clean one. Last October someone posted in the Notion forum on Reddit to say the company had banned them for no reason and kept their data. It went half-viral, the way these always do. Then the details came out. The workspace was running a marketplace for selling airline miles, which airlines generally forbid, and which involves holding a lot of strangers' account details. Notion had grounds. If you came here for a martyr, that isn't one.

I still think the case matters, and for a reason that survives losing the argument about whether the ban was fair. To know what that workspace held, Notion had to look inside it. Having looked and decided, it kept everything else in there too. Both halves of that would have happened just the same if the person had been innocent, and the second half has nothing to do with the first.

The third door is a border. In December 2018 Slack switched off accounts belonging to people it associated with Iran, including a doctoral student in Vancouver and a researcher in Munich, neither of whom was in Iran. Nobody got a warning, so nobody got a chance to pack. Slack later admitted to a run of mistakes, restored the accounts, and narrowed the rule. Notion left Russia in September 2024, closing workspaces whose billing had been Russian, with a month's notice and a window to download first. Figma froze the drone maker DJI in March 2022 after US sanctions, though it said the files would not be deleted and access could return if the listing did. In June 2020 Zoom closed the account of a group of American activists who had held a meeting to mark the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and later confirmed it had done so because Beijing asked.

The fourth door opened this year, and it is the one I would watch. In February, Google began permanently banning people who had connected their paid Gemini subscriptions to a third-party automation tool called OpenClaw. Some of them were paying $249 a month, and some lost Gmail and Workspace along with the thing they had actually plugged in. There was no warning at the point where the connection was made, no appeal afterwards, and for people who had paid a year upfront, no refund. Google's line was that using their credentials inside the other tool broke its terms. What makes it worth noting is that two rivals hit the same problem and chose differently: Anthropic blocked the tool and left the accounts alone, and OpenAI simply allowed it.

The fifth door has nobody behind it. Notion deletes accounts after five years of silence, which it defines as never logging in and never touching a page. It emails you a month before and gives you another month to undo it afterwards, and none of it applies if you pay or belong to an organisation. As policies go this is a kind one, and that is exactly why it belongs here. Take away the villain, the border, the algorithm and the argument, and the mechanism still runs.

Why they have to hold the keys

It would be easy to read all that as a story about careless companies, and easy is why I distrust it. The better question is why any of it is possible, and the answer is not carelessness. It is a feature, and it is one you asked for.

Notion does not encrypt your pages end to end. Your data is scrambled on their disks and scrambled on the way there, but the keys are theirs, and the company has been straight about why. End to end encryption would break search across your workspace, along with sharing a page with somebody, every integration you have wired up, and the AI. Those are not accessories. For most people they are the reason to use the thing at all.

So a plain trade sits under the whole product category, and almost nobody is told they are making it. You get search that reaches every corner of everything you have ever written, and in exchange the search engine can reach it too. You get a machine that reads your notes and answers questions about them, which means you have a machine that reads your notes. Every one of those five doors is downstream of a capability somebody wanted. The reading is not the betrayal; it is the product.

Two things in one motion

Here is the part I actually want to argue, and it is short.

When a platform decides against you, two quite separate things happen at the same instant. One is a judgement about your conduct, which the company is entitled to make; it is their service, and they can decline to run it for you. The other is a transfer of custody over everything you made, which nobody ever justified, because nobody was ever asked to.

Nothing forces those two into the same motion. No law requires it, and no technical constraint does either. They arrive together because the account is the only handle anyone built, so pulling the handle drags everything hanging off it. A ban could just as easily leave the door open behind you: service withdrawn, work still yours, here is your archive on the way out. That is a product decision, made once, long ago, by everybody, and left unexamined ever since.

The door is inside the house

By now you have thought of the obvious answer, because it is the one in every comment thread under every one of these stories. Export your stuff. Keep a backup. Don't be the person who kept ten years of work in one company's box.

It is good advice and it fails twice.

The first failure is in what comes out. Notion's export hands you your page text and your rows, and quietly leaves behind the parts you built. Relations come out as internal identifiers. Rollups and formulas come out as whatever number they happened to be showing at the moment you pressed the button, frozen, with the logic gone. Filters, sorts and views do not come out at all. What you get is a photograph of a workspace rather than the workspace, and if you have ever spent a weekend wiring a database together, the photograph is not the part you spent the weekend on.

The second failure is about timing. Export lives behind the login. It works every day of your life except the one day you need it, because the event that makes you need it is the same event that takes it away. The fire exit is real, it is well lit, and it is on an interior wall. From outside the building there is no door there at all.

Our own no

We host things too, so let me not pretend otherwise. xNet Cloud runs servers for people who would rather not run their own. Anyone who does that eventually gets an abuse report, a legal demand, or a sanctions list with a customer's name on it, and sometimes the honest answer to a request is no. I am not going to promise we will never refuse anyone, because that promise would be worth nothing and we would break it within the year.

The promise worth making is the other one. Our no cannot take anything from you.

It cannot because of how the thing is built rather than how nice we intend to be. Your master copy is the one on your own disk, and the app works with no server at all. Who you are is a key you hold, which any host will recognise, so we do not issue your identity and cannot revoke it. What syncs is an open, signed, hash-chained log of changes rather than a format only we can read, which means another hub can pick it up and carry on. And there is a small detail I like more than any of the big ones. In the code that decides what our moderation is allowed to do, every action names something about reach: refuse this write, hide that, quarantine it, stop talking to that peer. Not one of them names possession. There is no verb in there for keeping your things, and an appeal that succeeds simply reverses, which is only a meaningful word because nothing was destroyed.

The law is starting to arrive at roughly the same place, slowly and from a different direction. In Europe the Digital Services Act now says a platform must tell you why it suspended you, say whether a machine made the call, and give you somewhere to complain. The Data Act, in force since last September, says you can move your things between cloud providers, and bans the fees for doing it outright from January 2027. Both are worth having. Neither one changes who holds the keys, and a retrieval window is a strange sort of comfort to somebody already standing outside.

Which is the whole thing, really. Every one of these stories gets told as an argument about whether a particular ban was fair, and the arguments are mostly unwinnable, because usually the company had a point and the person had a life. The question underneath never gets asked, so I will ask it plainly. Why is the judgement and the confiscation the same act? Sort that out and the fairness of any given ban stops being the thing your work depends on. A host that cannot take what you made does not need to be trusted not to, and that is a much easier thing to build than good behaviour forever.

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