I was talking with a writer friend earlier today and they told me about an app that aim to be ‘Audible for ao3’ except that they don’t seem to understand how Audible works so allow me to clarify a few things for them.
Audible pays for the rights of every book on their platform, meaning they asked for permission for it!
Audible do not use AI to read those books, but real people.
Audible respect copyright law and protects the works on their platform.
None of those points seems to be concern of the people behind Lore.fm.
It’s text to speech and it’s up to the user of the app, and not the writer, to put the work on the app, by simply copy pasting the url of the story.
As for the protection of the data on their app here are some points of concerns I found in their Privacy Policy that I found on the Apple Store:
“When you sign up for or use our Services, you voluntarily give us certain Personal Data, including:
• Your automatically generated username.
We collect this information as you use the App, Software, and/or Services to operate, but none of it is publicly available to anyone else who utilizes the services:
• User Content. This consists of all text, documents, or other content or information uploaded, entered, or otherwise transmitted by you in connection with your use of the Services and/or Software.”
So they will be keeping the works you upload on them into their database. They do say that the user information will not be accessed or sell to any third party, they should know better than anyone else that not everyone bother with things like asking for permission. If they found it to be trivial than others will too. And users usage information will be seen by third parties for analysis purposes.
“Usage information. This is information about the lore.fm, Software, and/or Services you use and how you use them. We may also obtain data from our third-party partners and service providers to analyze how users use our App, Software, and/or Services. For example, we will know how many users access a specific page on the App and which links they clicked on. We use this aggregated information to better understand and optimize the App.”
So there will be third parties involved (not specified who exactly, which is oh so reassuring!) but they shouldn’t access the content of the stories. Hopefully, but that’s not good enough for me. Especially when they finish off with this gem :
“Information submitted to lore.fm will be transferred to, processed, and stored in the United States. When you use the Software on your computing device, User Content you save will be stored locally on that device and synced with our servers. If you post or transfer any Information to or through our App, Software, and/or Services, you are agreeing to such Information, including Personal Data and User Content, being hosted and accessed in the United States.
Please note that the laws of the United States may be different from the privacy laws applicable to the place where you are resident. lore.fm is committed to protecting the security of your Information and takes reasonable precautions to protect it. However, internet data transmissions, whether wired or wireless, cannot be guaranteed to be 100% secure, and as a result, we cannot ensure the security of Information you transmit to us, including Personal Data and User Consent; accordingly, you acknowledge that you do so at your own risk.”
This, omg, this is making me so mad! Basically if a breach do happen and works are leaked and stolen by, for exemple, other AI mining for material to create stories, they decline all responsibility. Too bad, so sad it’s up to the app user and the original writer is left with no recourse. And the audio files won’t just be on your phone but on their servers, another sign that they store the contents and if there’s text to speech, then them using speech to text later on isn’t out of the realm of possibilities.
So how do I, a writer can protect myself in this situation? Well I can put my work on private and only allow fellow members to use it since apparently locked worked should not be compatible with it. Or I could use a special font so that their AI can’t read my work. However I do not want to do that! I want my work to be accessible to non members and I want to people with reading impediments to not struggle with comic sans!
And I get that for people that struggle with blindness this app could be nice but, the thing is I want people to interact with my works on the website I put my work in. If Lore.fm was just a plug-in and that people wouldn’t leave ao3 to hear it I wouldn’t give a shit about this. But it’s not a plug-in and it means that my work and the works of other writers are going to end up on an app that we do not know and do not trust and we would have no control over what happens to it there.
You can send a mail to opt out to have your work on there, and I did so, I’ll put my mail and their answer bellow. However the fact that they act on blanket consent is distasteful, to put it nicely. The problem is you can’t opt out of something you don’t know exist and if it weren’t for my friend I would have no idea this app was a thing. It’s already on the App Store and Google store and I first heard of it today! It’s still on beta but still, us writer should have been made aware of it! And apparently since they’re not violating ao3 terms of use they can’t stop them either.
Then there’s the podfic community and honestly I feel bad for them the most as this is completely trampling what they do! You have those lovely people showing proper etiquette to the writers of stories they liked by asking them for permission to records their work, they do editing, some even add ambiance music, they work really hard on it and you have Lore.fm that come in and says fuck that, we won’t be doing any of those things. This is not okay.
So yeah, I’m angry, sad and infuriated by this situation. I can’t dictate anyone to not use the app but you really shouldn’t. What I can ask you however if that if you like what I write, don’t put it on that app.
I DO NOT CONSENT TO HAVE MY WORK ON LORE.FM OR ANY SIMILAR APP.
You can see below my email and will post a screenshot of their response when I’ll get it. I intend of documenting all of my interactions with them on this blog. I’m sorry if this isn’t a fun post but sometimes you need to speak out. Especially since some of my work on ao3 were requested for TWST Charity. I absolutely cannot allow those to be misplaced on the internet as they were meant to help raise money for charity.
Edit: some people have raised the concern that they may use phishing so if you wish to opt out use a burner email account. Their email is [email protected]
